"Race Work" tells the story of Lincoln and Eleanor Ragsdale, two of the most influential black activists of the post-World War II American West, and in so doing, supplies a missing chapter in the history of the civil rights movement, American race relations, African Americans, and the American West. Matthew C. Whitaker explores the Ragsdales' family history and how their familial traditions of entrepreneurship, professionalism, activism, and "race work" helped form their activist identity and placed them in a position to help desegregate Phoenix. His work, the first sustained account of white supremacy and black resistance in Phoenix, also uses the lives of the Ragsdales to examine themes of domination, resistance, interracial coalition building, race, gender, and place against the backdrop of the civil rights and post-civil rights eras. An absorbing biography, "Race Work" reveals the lives of the Ragsdales as powerful symbols of black leadership during this critical period in American history.