Abstract
Black Toledo: A Documentary History of the African American Experience in Toledo, Ohio, edited by Abdul Alkalimat and Rubin Patterson, presents a wide-ranging collection of documents that the editors—African American Studies professors at the University of Toledo—believe offers insights into the past and present conditions of Toledo’s black community. The focus on Toledo is most welcome. Much of the literature on northern black communities rests on studies of the large black populations of New York, Chicago, and a few other major cities. Yet, black communities in medium-sized cities such as Toledo also merit investigation because there are reasons for believing that they have been shaped by unique historical processes. For example, due partly to their smaller populations, black communities of these cities may have experienced less intensive racial discrimination, since whites tend to perceive smaller black populations as less threatening, economically and socially, than larger ones.
The first chapter previews the volume’s contents. The editors assert that their selection of topics and materials is motivated by theoretical considerations related to “periodization, perspective, and policy” (p. 2). But their selection rationale is somewhat unclear, for there is no detailed explanation of the criteria that guided their decision-making. One is left to assume that the selection of topics and materials is based mainly on the editors’ subjective judgments about what should be included in a documentary history of Toledo’s black community. To be sure, the selections are reasonable and cover standard sociological concerns about urban black communities, including “ghettoization and proletarianization” (p. 2). Yet some readers will wonder why the volume does not substantively address certain topics that have loomed large in recent research on these communities, notably, violent crime, male joblessness, and family-structure patterns.
The first chapter also offers relatively little background information to help readers appreciate how the wider spatial, demographic, and economic contexts of Toledo’s black community have changed over time. A few population statistics are presented. However, more comprehensive data, including city and regional maps, would give readers a better understanding of historical trends that have affected Toledo and its milieu with regard to racial and ethnic diversity, residential stability, industrial and occupational composition, and socioeconomic characteristics, among other basic community features. Such data would, moreover, facilitate readers’ interpretations of the materials presented in the next four chapters.
These chapters, organized around four eras of unequal length, are: “Origin (1787–1900),” “Formation of Community Life (1900–1950),” “Community Development and Struggle (1950–2000),” and “Survival during Deindustrialization (2000–2016).” Divided further into subtopics, the chapters present broad arrays of carefully cited documents describing people, institutions, events, and circumstances that, the editors claim, have profoundly influenced Toledo’s black community. Among the documents are academic journals; archival materials from local historical societies and public libraries; biographical sketches; encyclopedia entries; government and legal memoranda; master’s and PhD theses; local newspaper and magazine articles, editorials, and obituaries; oral history interviews; and University of Toledo correspondence. In each chapter, the editors offer brief introductions and commentaries on the topics and subtopics that are covered.
These far-reaching sources yield fascinating details about Toledo’s black community, most notably about Ohio’s oppressive nineteenth-century Black Codes and Toledo’s significance as an Underground Railroad station; men and women who broke barriers in the early- and mid-twentieth century to become the city’s first black educators, politicians, and professionals; Toledo-born black entertainers and athletes who achieved national fame, such as jazz pianist Art Tatum and Olympic boxer Wilbert “Sketter” McClure; institutions that arose after the Great Black Migrations to anchor the black community’s cultural and economic life, such as clubs, churches, and businesses; black Toledoans who played leading roles in the fight for fairness before and during the civil rights movement of the 1960s; and the black community’s responses to modern racism, postindustrial transformations, and educational disparities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The volume’s last chapter attempts to present a theoretical lens through which readers can interpret these documents. But this effort is, for the most part, a short summary (fewer than six pages) of fundamental sociological concepts, such as urbanization and social stratification, and it seems detached from the earlier chapters. It is therefore likely to be perceived by many readers as too little and too late. Hence, while many of the volume’s documents are interesting and enjoyable to read, there is very little substantive analysis of their contents. Later in this chapter, the editors try to relate their volume to some well-known historical case studies of the urban North’s black communities, for example, Drake and Cayton’s classic Black Metropolis. However, this attempt is, by and large, an abbreviated review (about three pages) of these studies rather than a true comparative examination.
In the end, Black Toledo accomplishes an important goal: that of presenting a “running social history of the black experience in Toledo” (p. 292) for scholars and students who wish to undertake further study of that city’s black community, for instance, in graduate and undergraduate research projects. The editors have made an impressive effort to assemble an eclectic body of documents, and their diligence, thoughtfulness, and local knowledge have paid off. Yet the volume falls a bit short of achieving its goal of producing “a social historical work that provides bigger lessons for readers with interests beyond Toledo” (p. 292), due to an underdeveloped theoretical framework and a methodology that, as noted above, leaves salient issues unaddressed. We can hope, though, that the volume will inspire extensive analyses that compare and contrast black communities in other medium-sized cities—for example, Akron, Dayton, and Youngstown, Ohio—with their counterparts in large cities, in order to balance the sociological and historical literatures, which are heavily tilted toward the North’s major urban centers.