Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century

by Kevin J. Mumford

Interzones is an innovative account of how the color line was drawn--and how it was crossed--in twentieth-century American cities. Kevin Mumford chronicles the role of vice districts in New York and Chicago as crucibles for the shaping of racial categories and racial inequalities.

Focusing on Chicago's South Side and Levee districts, and Greenwich Village and Harlem in New York at the height of the Progressive era, Mumford traces the connections between the Great Migration, the commercialization of leisure, and the politics of reform and urban renewal. Interzones is the first book to examine in depth the combined effects on American culture of two major the migration north of southern blacks and the emergence of a new public consumer culture.

Mumford writes an important chapter in Progressive-era history from the perspectives of its most marginalized and dispossessed citizens. Recreating the mixed-race underworlds of brothels and dance halls, and charting the history of a black-white sexual subculture, Mumford shows how fluid race relations were in these "interzones." From Jack Johnson and the "white slavery" scare of the 1910's to the growth of a vital gay subculture and the phenomenon of white slumming, he explores in provocative detail the connections between political reforms and public culture, racial prejudice and sexual taboo, the hardening of the color line and the geography of modern inner cities.

The complicated links between race and sex, and reform and reaction, are vividly displayed in Mumford's look at a singular moment in the settling of American culture and society.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Queer, Politics, Research

248 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 1997

Reviews

[V · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read "Interzones" for a graduate seminar, and I genuinely liked it. Mumford takes on an ambitious project through treating black/white sexuality not as a side story, but as central to understanding modern urban America. I was especially drawn to how seriously he takes space: vice districts, dance halls, speakeasies. The archival depth is clear, and the chapter on black/white homosexuality is particularly compelling.

That said, while lesbians do appear in the book, especially within the discussion of black/white homosexuality, the attention feels uneven. Mumford acknowledges that this disparity stems from a lack of documentary evidence, largely because women were often excluded from the commercialized leisure institutions that produced the investigator reports he relies on. While Mumford notes that evidence of black lesbians in Chicago clubs is relatively scarce, they are documented as part of the broader subculture of these vice districts. Still, compared to the sustained focus on male same-sex encounters, women who desired women remain less central to the narrative. For a work positioned within “gay” urban history, that imbalance is noticeable.

Overall, though, I respect what the book accomplishes. It pushes race and sexuality to the center of U.S. history in a way that still feels meaningful. I liked it—I just read it with an awareness of both its strengths and its limits.

[Lauren Levitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting book. For a book that is supposedly about Black/white sex districts, I was surprised by the chapters about anti-miscegenation laws and a Eugene O’Neill play about interracial marriage. As for as histories go, this book is fairly theoretical, which does not in itself bother me, but sometimes I felt like Mumford overstated his claims about the historical significance of interracial sex, or maybe did not properly explain/provide adequate evidence for them. The greatest weakness of this book, however, is that it does not do justice to Black sex workers. On one hand he claims that the moral reform movement failed Black sex workers by not attempting to “rescue” them, while in other places he begrudgingly recognizes the limited agency of Black sex workers. Altogether, I recommend this book, but I would read it alongside Cynthia Blair’s I’ve Got to Make My Livin’, which makes similar claims about the importance of Black culture to sexual modernism, but provides painstaking evidence to support it’s more conservative claims and is less judgmental of Black sex workers.

[Ash Hunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

great concept that fell a bit flat. portions of the book are fantastic, but the messiness of the rest is it makes it tough to dig through for gems.

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is really interesting, although, at times difficult to read. It examines interracial sexual relationships in the Progressive Era, and looks at how these marginalized interchanges impact mainstream racial and gender norms.