Andrew Wiese. Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century.

Andrew Wiese. Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. 411 pp. $37.50.

After the Civil War (1861-1865), white southerners quickly sought to re-assert over blacks the overwhelming socioeconomic and political power that had characterized relations between the races during the antebellum period. By skillfully manipulating circumstances and systems, whites during Reconstruction enacted measures and strategies aimed at keeping the freedpeople in their "place." African Americans responded by avoiding, resisting, and subverting attempts to reduce them to servitude. A key feature of the struggle to maintain their independence was the freedpeople's persistence in making their own choices about where and how they lived.

William Cohen in his 1991 landmark work At Freedom's Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861-1915, persuasively argued that blacks during Reconstruction linked their right of mobility directly to the freedoms they had won through Confederate defeat. Andrew Wiese advances that discussion in Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. In this fine addition to the University of Chicago's "Historical Studies in America Series," Wiese details the struggles of African Americans who persevered throughout the twentieth century to establish suburban home spaces in a racist society that expended considerable energy in restricting them to the margins.

Wiese's opening three chapters examine the social conditions that defined African American existence from the early decades of the twentieth century up to World War II; the forces behind the Great Migration that started around 1916 with the movement of thousands of southern blacks into the north, Midwest, and west; and their patterns of settlement. These newcomers followed the movement of industry and housing that was undergoing a "decentralization of homes, families, and jobs away from an urban core." The availability of undeveloped land made cheap by its location away from city centers, its undesirability due to the absence of utilities and proximity to industrial activity, and the indifference of local authorities in regulating the use of such problematic areas offered blacks affordable living spaces in which to settle.

African Americans encountered numerous obstacles slowing their movement to the suburbs. The racism that had dictated the rules of settlement in the urban and rural South also constrained life in the industrialized north, and open spaces of the west. When blacks persisted in occupying spaces deemed "white," that racism became pernicious, manifesting itself as arson, psychological and physical harassment, fire-bombings, and other acts of terror. Being restricted to a "racialized space" meant that African American suburbs were physically isolated, vulnerable to natural disasters and industrial pollution, and low on the municipal priority list for improvements like paved streets, public lighting, and sewer systems.

The desire of African Americans to escape the South's suffocating racism was matched by an equally strong intent to find economic opportunities and build better lives in the north, Midwest, and west. Early 20th-century southern black migrants consisted mainly of blue collar workers driven to home ownership. As during Reconstruction, these migrants viewed property ownership as being "indissolubly linked with freedom." Owning a home symbolized "hard work and ambition," provided a means of "upward mobility," established a foundation of economic stability, and was a benchmark of independence and respectability in a society that worked tirelessly to deny African Americans opportunity.

Wiese illustrates the vast differences between African Americans and whites in judging the value of home spaces by carefully explaining how those perceptions developed. African Americans migrating from the South routinely found themselves forced into congested urban areas. Along with the stresses of over-crowding, they struggled against the vice of loose city morals and yearned for the open spaces that had been one of the few pleasant features of southern life. Many refused to endure those societal ills and moved to the suburbs where they could benefit from their proximity to the city without having to suffer its risks and indignities.

Those suburban spaces were not only on the edge of the city, but often on the edge of modern convenience and job opportunities. African Americans supplemented their incomes and diets by keeping gardens and livestock, and foregoing amenities like indoor plumbing. Life was basic, simple, and in many cases hard, but better than what had been previously experienced. The inconveniences and hardships that African Americans endured did not diminish the pride they felt to the value they attached to the private spaces they called "home." White observers, comparing African American living conditions to their own, which had the benefits of utilities, paved streets, city water systems, and the political and financial support of local municipal governments, labeled the rural-looking black suburbs as "slums."

The power of whites to casually declare as "slums" those communities that, for blacks, were safe havens and sources of home-owning pride presents a grim commentary on the sharply imbalanced socioeconomic and political power distributions between the groups. Another area of socioeconomic divergence pertained to the greater frequency of two income households in African American suburban communities. Wiese skillfully demonstrates that the racism that prevented African Americans from settling in "white" areas also exerted similar influences in work spaces, ultimately affecting the interior functioning of black homes.

The image of a stay at-home mother, touted as the domestic American ideal during the 1950s and early 1960s "belied the economic reality for millions of African American families." Exclusionary "racialized" workspaces guaranteed that African American men were confined to the lowest paying, most market vulnerable jobs, and forced black women into the workforce well ahead of their white counterparts. Black women's greater participation in sharing household economic burdens was reflected in their expanded social presence and activism. They were often the leaders in efforts to secure their right to live in safe, quiet neighborhoods of their choice where their children had room to play, property was maintained, and neighbors were congenial.

After effectively explaining the motivations, means, and patterns of African American migration, Wiese transitions into the most compelling portion of his study. He devotes much of the next four chapters to examining the legal strategies African Americans employed in the post-WWII era to gain greater access to decent, affordable suburban housing. This generation of blacks was highly educated and better paid than their WWI era southern blue collar predecessors. They were also more willing to engage the courts in their struggle, and apply the enforcement power of the federal government whose regulatory presence had extended into everyday life during the New Deal. African Americans' bold pursuit of "democracy" in housing developed into a pattern of resistance that equated gaining access to suburban home space with achieving victory over the barriers that had historically frustrated earlier attempts.

In his last two chapters, Wiese examines African American progress toward the close of the twentieth century. Blacks took full advantage of improved social changes and their expanded economic clout to seek and establish greater control over their increasingly upscale living spaces. Concurrent with this upwardly mobile transition were the widening of gaps between wealthy blacks and their poorer counterparts whose "spillover" from economically strained urban areas posed a threat to the African American middle class experience. Wiese focuses upon Prince George's County, Maryland, for this portion of his study, citing its large population of highly educated, wealthy, and politically powerful African American suburbanites. The undeniable impressiveness of this development did not come without problems, and Wiese notes that "by the 1990s" Prince George's County was "home to two black suburban populations divided on the basis of class."

Although he briefly discusses this issue, more analysis of the overall effects of such class division could have highlighted a troubling dilemma overshadowing contemporary African American life. The discrimination, harassment, and brutalities generally committed against blacks throughout American history necessitated the participation of all African Americans in working to alleviate those pressures. The shared experience of marginalization and the common effort to remove those barriers has often masked divisions within the black community itself, leading historians and others to view African Americans as a monolithic constituency. Wiese is to be credited for challenging that illusion, and presenting a wealth of evidence proving that blacks have historically constituted a large portion of America's middle class, and been major participants in the nation's suburban development.

Fred L. Johnson, III

Hope College