"Ruth Brown" by Professor Robbins

One part that I did not like about this book was that the actual moment when Ruth Brown was fired by the library board took up so little space in relation to the build-up it was given. I can’t help wondering why the actual event was sort of an endnote to her larger stream of thought. By the time Robbins should have had a big revealing moment about the firing of Brown, she had already analyzed it a bit and given away all the little interesting tidbits about the story and the people involved. I was disappointed with that problem with the text, but perhaps that is something simply left up to writing style. Still, there was a definite sense of anticlimax about the whole middle of the book.

I have mixed feelings about all the different strains of history and subject matter that Robbins pulled together for this book. I am sure that her intense research led her to include one after another interesting facts, and I do believe that those things are valid and quite captivating. However, I can’t help feeling that there was just too much being covered here, and before meeting Professor Robbins I may have even chalked such inclusion down to a need to pad the page count. However, after meeting Professor Robbins it was easy to see how excited she was-even years after writing the book-to talk about Ruth Brown and the town of Bartlesville. While she definitely had to talk about race as well as communism because they were the main ideological issues that were involved, at times it seemed bizarre to imply over and over how the Phillips company had influence over the town. Why, of course it would have influence, if the company were responsible for a great deal of the existence of the city itself. I felt that there was just too much coverage of this subject and it detracted from the overall problem of race being dealt with through accusations of communism.

While my favorite part of this book was the least defensible as far as whether it should have been included in the book, I still loved the part where she detailed the actually history of discovering Ruth Brown’s story. As a person who loves the idea of the historical hunt, reading the narrative of someone’s own journey into dusty boxes of memoirs and collections was fascinating. I especially loved the details about how she determined the timeline of some things-for instance, she knew that the register which included the words “colored” had to be from a certain date because she actually knew someone in the register.

I was actually surprised that the accusations of communism were a cover for firing Brown based on her liberal views on race. Considering the time period of 1950, I wonder why, pre-civil rights era, it would have been less appealing to Brown’s enemies to use race outright in their argument. As far as I understand, there were Ku Klux Klan groups still active in the south, and racism in general was far from unacceptable. So why would communism have been a better alternative? Perhaps like all ideological catchphrases, communism would have had a very intense period where simply saying its name held a certain seriousness. I think by using communism Brown’s enemies knowingly turned more people off to Brown than they could have otherwise, considering that there were some prominent citizens who were more liberal about race than communism.

How Robbins recreates and details the atmosphere of suspicion surrounding change was really effective, and I thought there were some definite similarities between that atmosphere and immediately after the September 11^th attacks in 2001. The nearly explosive kind of patriotism that I experienced even in a high school setting was probably akin to the Cold War paranoia that was engulfing places as small as Bartlesville, and I cant’ help but notice the pervasive us versus them mentality in both cases. The sacking of Ruth Brown reminds me a lot of the problem we had on this campus a few years back about Professor Barrett, whose personal opinions about the September 11^th attacks nearly got him fired from his unrelated job duties. I think the only difference between those two situations was that while Ruth Brown was a long-time member of the community and Barrett was not, he had powerful help from the liberal community in Madison, while Ruth simply did not have that kind of protection.

Overall this was such a fascinating book that I would love to talk more to Professor Robbins about the whole experience of discovering Ruth Brown and how she found the courage to go completely off the beaten path and write about something no one else had. I am definitely very excited to become a student within a school that Professor Robbins heads, as I am sure she is just as excited about history as she is about libraries.