Abstract
Scholars of urban black history have had a long-standing interest in the formation of black communities and the lived experiences of the people within them. Their studies have ranged from neighborhoods enmeshed within larger cities to separate and independent black towns, and they have covered periods from the antebellum years to the twenty-first century. Among other contributions, this literature has advanced our understanding of the development of black working-class consciousness, the experiences of southern black migrants as they navigated between rural and urban spaces both within the South and in the industrialized North, and the activism of black radical groups. Yet in their Herculean effort to recover the experiences of everyday people, urban, social, and labor historians often confined middle-class professionals to the margins of history, stressed intra-racial class strife, and missed instances of shared struggle. 1 In recent decades, though, a relatively small but important body of revisionist scholarship has emerged that reconceives the role of social and reform institutions in urban communities as well as the outlook and actions of African American professionals. 2
The studies under review in this essay—Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove’s Chocolate City, Marne L. Campbell’s Making Black Los Angeles, Judith Wellman’s Brooklyn’s Promised Land, and Andrew M. Fearnley and Daniel Matlin’s Race Capital?—contribute to this development. They collectively stress that church groups, social clubs, recreation centers, sports teams, orphanages, and other institutions provided crucial services in black neighborhoods. Additionally, they emphasize the importance of racial advancement centers such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League (NUL), and the black press. These authors also highlight how such institutions created spaces for black professionals (especially women) to get involved in their communities, connect with poor and working-class folk, combat racial injustice, and pursue economic uplift. For instance, Asch and Musgrove’s study of Washington, D.C., shows how social reformers participated in the abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century, formed racial advancement organizations in the early twentieth century, and agitated for housing reform in the interwar era. Campbell maintains that women performed vital services in the major newspaper and key social clubs in black Los Angeles, while Wellman argues that they were centrally important in the school, elderly home, and orphanage in Weeksville, New York. And though Fearnley and Matlin generally address a different set of themes, they nevertheless deal extensively with the experiences of African American intellectuals, screenwriters, and other professionals. In this regard, these studies offer valuable insights in a field that tends to overlook middle-class contributions to social-justice efforts, although they do so with varying degrees of success.
Chocolate City provides the most compelling discussions of community organizations and the actors within them. Yet this study also succeeds admirably in placing reform centers within overlapping intra-racial, interracial, and national frameworks. Asch and Musgrove build from a considerable body of scholarship on Washington, D.C. In particular, their chapters addressing the city’s origins, the emergence of its anti-slavery movement, and the Civil War and Reconstruction eras draw insights from Ken Bowling’s The Creation of Washington D.C., Stanley Harrold’s Subversives, and Kate Masur’s An Example for All the Land. Likewise, Eric Yellin’s Racism in the Nation’s Service and Howard Gillette’s Between Justice and Beauty informed their discussions of racial politics from the Jim Crow era through the close of the twentieth century. 3 Asch and Musgrove skillfully synthesize these and other studies while expanding on them in two critical ways: first, by more explicitly connecting local affairs in D.C. with national-level developments, and second by focusing analytically on the interplay of race and democracy.
Chocolate City opens with a vignette about the 1963 March on Washington that highlights one of their key points. More than any other city, Washington, D.C., illustrates a central paradox of American history. The capital’s numerous monuments, buildings, and plaques celebrate cherished national ideals of freedom and equality, yet at various times its residents owned slaves, conducted slave auctions, practiced segregation, and enacted neighborhood covenants. Asch and Musgrove show how the dynamics of democracy and race operated and evolved throughout the city’s history, from European colonization of the Chesapeake to struggles for justice in the twenty-first century. In between, the authors examine moments of racial discord, bitterness, and injustice as well as instances of remarkable interracial cooperation—including the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement.
Marne L. Campbell stresses similar themes in Making Black Los Angeles. Her introductory chapter establishes the book as a social history focused on institution building in the black community, which depended on complex interracial and interclass alliances as well as the contributions of black women. Campbell begins with an anecdote about how W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington visited Los Angeles at various times in the 1910s. Du Bois, with his usual poetic brilliance, offered glowing remarks about the black community in the City of Angels. He saw it as a place with far greater interracial cooperation and peace than in the cities of the Northeast. But as Campbell points out throughout her introduction and in many places elsewhere in the book, Du Bois provided an overly positive portrayal of conditions in Los Angeles that reflected the experiences of the black elite but not the black working class. Indeed, Campbell juxtaposes her key assertions against Du Bois’s comments so much that it feels like a straw man argument. Du Bois published his observations of his brief California tour in a four-page essay (including large photographs) in the Crisis, the NAACP’s monthly journal, and he did not intend for readers to regard it in the same light as his definitive, in-depth study of black Philadelphia. 4 Yet Campbell often treats it as such while pointing out that “black working class Angelenos faced many more obstacles to securing economic and social freedoms than their middle class counterparts” (p. 5).
Campbell offers broad outlines of the African American experience in Los Angeles but rarely provides the kind of supporting material that makes Chocolate City so persuasive. In the third chapter, for instance, Campbell writes that “African American women worked tirelessly to advance themselves, their families, and the community being formed in Los Angeles,” but she generally does not explain how (p. 83). Other than the brief discussion of the Women’s Day Nursery Association, which provided meals for black school children, the section titled “Social Networks and Institution Building” includes almost no information about how these institutions operated, the programs they developed, or the benefits they conferred to working-class African Americans. Campbell lists a series of clubs formed in and outside the church, along with the dates in which they were established, but we learn little else about their role in the community. One possible exception to this comes at the end of this section, when Campbell discusses how Los Angeles’s largest black newspaper, the California Eagle, wanted to, but stopped short of calling for a boycott of the film Birth of a Nation. She maintains that the paper nevertheless used its influence to convince the film’s producers to cut some scenes from the film before its release (p. 82). Even here, though, Campbell misses an opportunity to show readers how this played out. Did the Eagle discredit the film through a series of articles, features, and editorials, or was this arranged privately through correspondences between the two camps? The problems in this chapter characterize the others as well, and consequently many of this book’s core assertions lack compelling examples.
Like Making Black Los Angeles, Judith Wellman’s study of Weeksville, New York, promises more than it delivers. The introduction positions Weeksville (just outside Brooklyn) as one of the nation’s few independent free black communities, a place that housed prominent nineteenth-century African American leaders and vital social institutions: including a school, homes for the aged and mentally ill, newspapers, churches, mutual benefits societies, a baseball team, and a cemetery. These institutions provided outlets for black women professionals to get engaged in local affairs, Wellman argues, and through them they played a crucial role in the community (p. 4).
Wellman’s second chapter, “Owned and Occupied by Our Own People,” proposes to show how these institutions played key roles in the Weeksville community, and it ultimately falls short in ways that typify the book as a whole. After a confusing opening passage that lists the directional positions of numerous buildings and the names of a variety of people and streets, Wellman proceeds to state this chapter’s main point: “By 1850 . . . [Weeksville] was an extraordinary thriving hamlet [whose] residents developed churches and a school, owned land, and worked for political equality, asserting their rights as free people of color in a land of slavery” (p. 52). The sections that follow discuss one institution after another, beginning with churches, schools, and a cemetery. In most cases, Wellman does not discuss how these centers promoted racial advancement, or how they bound the people of Weeksville together, or how they provided material, emotional, or psychological support. Readers must infer this on their own.
Wellman states, for instance, that Weeksville’s churches “became the basis of community life” and the “anchor for Weeksville’s community development,” but she does not elaborate much beyond these generalities (pp. 53, 55). The eight-page section on Bethel A.M.E. Church includes seven pages of biographical information on journalists George Hogarth and Junius C. Morel that relate only tangentially to Bethel. The passage on Weeksville’s other church lists the names of its founders, identifies the site of its construction, and discusses the person who helped manage its finances, but none of this explains how churches “anchored the Weeksville community” (p. 64).
The discussion of baseball also lacks substance. In the introductory chapter and the beginning of Chapter 2, Wellman identifies Weeksville’s black baseball team as one of several key community institutions. Yet for all that, the passage that actually deals with the Weeksville Unknowns spans the length of a short paragraph and says almost nothing about how it served as a source of community pride, or how it drew Weeksville residents together, or how it provided an important leisure outlet (p. 74). Wellman consequently misses an opportunity to deepen her analysis of the black community. For example, Rob Ruck’s Sandlot Seasons examines black sporting life in Pittsburgh and shows how it served as a source of psychological comfort and social cohesion that bridged regional and class divisions among black Pittsburghers. 5
Wellman’s examination of women’s activism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promises to expand upon the argument made in the introduction that the black women of Weeksville played a critical role in the community’s social institutions and helped lay foundations for Progressive reform. Unfortunately, the major passages that follow—on education, an orphanage, and an elderly home—do little to show how. Her discussion of education deals overwhelmingly with the actions of Weeksville’s men, beginning with their participation in a public hearing about whether a white woman could teach in Colored School No. 2. Wellman follows this with a lengthy biography of T. McCants Stewart, a black man who served on Brooklyn’s school board (pp. 147-164). Similarly, the orphanage section lists demographic information for the women who worked there while providing copious details on the orphanage’s construction and financial troubles. Only at the end, though, in about three paragraphs, does Wellman consider the actual programs these women sponsored for the children and the role the orphanage played in the community (p. 172).
Methodologically and topically, Race Capital? moves in different directions than the other three works under review. In the introductory chapter of this edited collection of essays, co-editors Andrew M. Fearnley and Daniel Matlin establish Harlem’s importance “as both a setting and symbol,” and this symbology represents a central concern of this volume. The introduction and many of the subsequent essays consider how the image of Harlem first formed, how it changed over time, and who benefited from it.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, Harlem’s black population grew rapidly—from 50,000 in 1914 to 165,000 in 1930—and attracted blacks from across the United States as well as the Caribbean and Africa (pp. 3-4). Concurrently, Harlem’s intellectual, artistic, and political life flourished, in part thanks to the promotional efforts of leading black thinkers such as Alain Locke. In an essay in the Survey Graphic, the Howard professor positioned Harlem as the center of the New Negro movement and “the greatest Negro community the world has known” (pp. 2-3).
Harlem boasted noteworthy attributes that in some ways merited this moniker. The neighborhood attracted leading black musicians, writers, poets, and intellectuals, and it also served as an important center of black political activism. The Univeral Negro Improvement Association, NAACP, and NUL established their headquarters in Harlem, and the black press flourished there as well.
In later years, as Harlem’s fortunes and population declined, it retained its image as a symbolic center and barometer of black life—albeit with a more somber tone. Writers such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin lamented its deterioration and saw it as reflective of black ghettoization across America. If Harlem could recede into stagnation and poverty, they reasoned, then surely black America had fallen upon hard times. “The word ‘capital’ no longer denoted power and possibility so much as ‘hypertypicality,’” Fearnley and Matlin write (p. 5).
Harlem’s stature has declined within academic circles as well, the editors maintain. They argue that scholars have increasingly questioned the Harlem-centrism of black urban studies and have instead called attention to important cultural, social, and political developments in other black urban centers. Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, among others, have received book-length treatments. This academic development roughly coincided with the “transnational turn” in the humanities that placed increased emphasis on multi-polar conceptions of history that transcended boundaries. As transnational scholars de-emphasized the importance of place and the distinctiveness of individual communities, Harlem appeared not as a center, but as one of many centers of the black experience (pp. 6-7). Fearnley and Matlin see this as the point of intervention for Race Capital?
The essays in this book push back against transnational currents by re-affirming the importance of place and establishing Harlem’s distinctiveness. The editors organize them into two major thematic groups. “Mythologies” includes chapters that grapple with the idea of Harlem in popular and academic imaginings: how people wrote about, discussed, envisioned, and mythologized it. From Locke’s promotional writings and a cartoonist’s publications in major black newspapers, to a screenwriter’s effort to gain support for a movie script, the chapters in this section explore the origins, production, and dissemination of Harlem’s symbology.
The second major section includes six chapters that move from image to substance by examining and affirming Harlem’s distinctiveness and importance as the international center of black intellectual, cultural, and political life. A third, much shorter section—“Black No More?”—considers demographic changes over recent decades that have led some to wonder whether we may soon see the end of black Harlem. Its two chapters collectively examine how Hispanic in-migration, the departure of middle-class African Americans, and urban gentrification have profoundly altered Harlem’s character, and they explore how the image of Harlem has changed in light of these developments.
This work is analytically sophisticated and offers a compelling reappraisal of the importance of place in understanding the human experience. The essays consider intriguing and novel questions, but in one important sense, this book conforms to a long-standing pattern in Harlem studies. Race Capital? focuses overwhelmingly on the writings and actions of black elites while providing very limited coverage of the poor and working-class folk who constituted the majority of Harlem’s population.
Stephen Robertson, Shane White, Stephen Garton, and Graham White called attention to this feature of Harlem historiography in a 2010 essay that skillfully reconstructed working-class life there through the use of probation reports. These records reveal surprising amounts of information about the spending habits, employment experiences, and leisure pursuits of people on probation and indicate also the strains economic setbacks (from injuries and layoffs) placed on families. The authors adopted a social-history approach to Harlem that illuminated how black folk built and relied upon intricate social webs to survive the economic pressures of the Depression and keep their families together—topics generally not covered in Race Capital? 6
Fearnley and Matlin’s uneven treatment of the black community may limit its utility for readers desiring a more comprehensive understanding of Harlem. For the most part, Race Capital? is an intellectual history that generally eschews the questions and topics that concern social and labor historians. Moreover, the dense, jargon-laden prose in the three chapters authored by Fearnley and Matlin makes this volume less accessible for readers outside the academy and further narrows its market.
By contrast, Asch and Musgrove provide an engaging and highly accessible survey of the black community in D.C. that will interest both academic and popular audiences. This work advances our understanding of the complex interplay of race, class, and gender in an urban setting, yet it feels bigger than a conventional community study—both because of the cast of prominent figures operating in Washington and because Asch and Musgrove persistently connect topics to national-level developments. Perhaps most impressively, despite the sweeping chronological and topical scope of this book, the authors provide a richly textured portrait of individual black experiences in Washington that they skillfully pair with macro-level data.
Their discussion of federal jobs illustrates this. Under successive Republican presidents, African American professionals in the nation’s capital found a viable occupational outlet through federal employment. Yet their economic and career prospects could turn suddenly upon the outcome of an election. When Woodrow Wilson took office, he blended Progressive idealism with segregationist fervor and brought into his administration a number of southern Democrats who fired hundreds of black federal employees.
From this broad overview, Asch and Musgrove narrow down to the individual level to show how Wilson’s racial priorities affected government employees such as Rosebud Murraye and John Aubrey Davis. Murraye worked as a printer’s assistant in the Bureau of Engraving. One day, soon after Wilson’s inauguration, she reported to work and discovered that “colored” and “white” seating areas had been set up in the employee dining area along with segregated bathrooms and locker rooms (p. 221). The new Bureau head had Jim Crowed Murraye’s once integrated workplace. Yet she did not take this idly. Murraye and a few other African American women expressed their opposition to the new policies by sitting with whites in the dining area and by lodging a complaint with the Washington, D.C., branch of the NAACP, which had formed around 1912 and grew to become one of the NAACP’s largest affiliates.
Asch and Musgrove’s discussions of John Aubrey Davis and his son similarly demonstrate the interplay of race and democracy. The elder Davis had worked in the Government Printing Office for thirty years, climbing steadily up the ranks and building a middle-class life for his family. But his fortunes plummeted when Wilson entered the White House. As the president and his administration officials worked quickly to replace black federal employees and to institute segregation throughout the federal system, Davis soon discovered that he had been demoted to the position at which he started thirty years earlier—placing his family on precarious financial footing. The experience left him feeling disillusioned, frustrated, and bitter, and in the proceeding years he “nurtured a sense of outrage in his children and took them along to NAACP rallies” (pp. 226, 261). Davis’s son, John, carried this activist spirit with him to high school and college, and in 1933 he organized systematic boycotts of white-owned businesses in the city’s black neighborhoods that refused to hire black workers. These efforts inspired the creation of the New Negro Alliance, which grew to about a thousand members, including such luminaries as Mary McLeod Bethune and Mary Church Terrell (pp. 262-263). As the Alliance organized boycotts, it also fought legal battles against court injunctions, one of which made its way to the Supreme Court. In its New Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Grocery decision, the Court ruled in favor of the Alliance and upheld the right to use pickets and boycotts as forms of protest (p. 263).
Chocolate City offers a compelling account of an African American community in an important city while managing to cover myriad features of urban life with both depth and breadth. Readers interested in a variety of subjects—from interracial coalition building, American political discourse, and intra-racial class dynamics, to working-class culture, institutional development, and the activism of black professionals—will find value in this book.