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Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power. By DavidT. Civil Rights and Economic Power. By David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. xviii, 304 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03420-6.)
In Black Maverick, David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito reclaim the colorful but largely forgotten life of T. R. M. Howard as a way to assert "the importance of businesspeople and professionals as pioneers in the early civil rights movement" (pp. 76-77). Howard was born to a working-class family in Murray, Kentucky, in 1908 and caught the attention of a white patron who sponsored his medical training in California during the early 1930s. Howard wrote a column for the California Eagle, Los Angeles's premier black newspaper, and he served as president of the California Economic, Commercial, and Political League. Following his residency in St. Louis and a stint as the first African American...