I first became aware of Ivory Perry’s importance as a historical figure in 1982, when I assembled a photographic exhibit and organized a series of panel discussions about the history of social protest in St. Louis.¹ In the photographs, citizens linked arms during marches and demonstrations. They sat down in front of cars and buses to stop traffic. They chained themselves to the doors of businesses charged with discriminatory hiring practices. Taunting crowds and armed police officers menaced the demonstrators; angry protesters clenched their fists and shouted defiantly at law enforcement officers and onlookers. Men and women stood shoulder to...

Ivory Perry’s story begins in the fertile farm country along the banks of the rivers flowing through central and southern Arkansas—the Ouachita, the Saline, the Arkansas, and the Mississippi. Born on May 5, 1930, in a sharecropper cabin in Desha County near Dumas, Perry got his first lessons about life from labor in the cotton fields during the hard Depression years of the 1930S in rural Arkansas. As soon as he learned to walk, he learned to work. Perry was just two years old when his mother tied an empty twenty-five-pound flour sack for holding cotton around his neck...

The night before his induction physical, Ivory Perry worked behind the desk at the Southern Land Hotel in Warren, Arkansas. Alone for most of the night, distracted only by the few guests who checked in, he reflected on his past and his future. Nervously he drank an entire case of Coca-Colas to keep awake. In the morning he reported to the recruiting station at Pine Bluff; they sent him on to Little Rock. Because of the Cokes he had too much acid in his system to pass the physical, and so he had to spend the next night in a...

Ivory Perry spent his first six months in St. Louis looking for work. Few job opportunities awaited a twenty-four-year-old semiskilled black worker with a dishonorable discharge from the service and no high school diploma. He knew only three people in the city—his cousin Isaac, his sister Kathen, and her husband Fred—and neither the army nor life in Pine Bluff had prepared him for the congested neighborhoods and busy streets of St. Louis.¹

“I learned more about street life than you can get out of any book,” Perry says about his first months in St. Louis. Landlords and realtors...

Ivory Perry rode a bus to Bogalusa, the most violent city in the South in the summer of 1965. Many southern towns experienced conflict over civil rights issues in that year, but in few were the combatants as sharply polarized, or as heavily armed, as in that Louisiana city of 25,000 inhabitants. For six months, attempts by the black Civic and Voters League to secure jobs, voting rights, and desegregated service in stores and restaurants met with fierce resistance from local officials and provoked violent reprisals by the Ku Klux Klan. When law enforcement officers proved themselves unable—or unwilling...

Bogalusa and other southern cities had no monopoly on racial violence during the summer of 1965. In the crowded ghettos of northern and western cities, the accumulated frustrations of poverty and racism erupted into rage. Violent insurrections marked by arson, looting, and rioting swept the country. During the second week in August, a routine arrest for drunk driving escalated into a six-day confrontation between ghetto residents and law enforcement officials in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Some 14,000 National Guardsmen and 1,500 policemen occupied southcentral Los Angeles in an attempt to quell the disturbance, but rioters still destroyed $30...

In the summer of 1968, Ivory Perry returned to his job at Human Development Corporation and resumed his activism in the community. Housing issues provided the core of his concerns, and he spent long hours organizing tenants’ groups and pressuring city officials to enforce the municipal building codes. Racial discrimination and poverty left black people in St. Louis with limited housing options, while inflation and rising utility costs further undermined the ability of the poor to pay for adequate shelter. Perry sensed a genuine crisis brewing over housing issues, and it did not surprise him when a citywide rent strike...

In his capacity as housing coordinator for the Union-Sarah Gateway Center, Ivory Perry came face to face with the worst housing conditions in the ghetto. People generally turned to him for help when landlords refused to make needed repairs that endangered their health. So year in and year out, he visited apartments infested with vermin, houses with sewage backed up so badly that he could hardly stand the stench, and dwellings with collapsing stairs, leaking gas connections, and inadequate water and heat. Many of these buildings violated the municipal housing codes, but enforcement proved difficult. Layers of legal titles hid...

After little more than a year in “retirement,” Ivory Perry gradually resumed his activist role in the community. No single incident or event galvanized him into action, but the accumulated frustrations and grievances that he encountered at HDC made it impossible for him to remain on the sidelines. “Ivory has a need to help his people, because he can see the basic things that are hurting them,” suggests Maurice Williamson in explaining Perry’s return to activism.¹ Those basic things that had always commanded his attention—health care, shelter, and employment—continued to form the core concerns of Perry’s renewed social...

Ivory Perry’s life of social activisim has value and meaning because of the people he has helped and because of the injustices he has helped to correct. His story offers lessons about the difficult choices facing ordinary citizens and it illuminates the moral and material tensions confronting us all. But at the same time, Ivory Perry’s life history also has value and meaning for what it can teach scholars about the historical and sociological significance of social protest.

How can we assess the “historical” significance of an individual like Ivory Perry? He has lived most of his life distant from...

Ivory Perry’s struggle against the domination of materialism, individualism, and privatism in American society connects him to another historical actor whose life led him to a similar task. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was both a traditional and an organic intellectual, devoted his life to instigating revolutionary changes in American society. King initially viewed racism as an aberration in the American character that could be purged through education and reform. But as he confronted the magnitude of the racial problem, King began to feel that a much greater revolution in values would have to take place than he had...

When the first edition ofA Life in the Struggleappeared in late 1988, Ivory Perry gained a kind of visibility and public validation that he had never known before. His friends noticed a new confidence in his voice and a new enthusiasm about his work. He appeared on radio and television talk shows; local newspapers ran feature stories about him. Reporters asked his opinion about the inner city, about the legacy of the civil rights movement, and about the quality of leadership offered to the black community by its elected officials.

Perry used these moments in the spotlight to...