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

by Andrew Wiese

On Melbenan Drive just west of Atlanta, sunlight falls onto a long row of well-kept lawns. Two dozen homes line the street; behind them wooden decks and living-room windows open onto vast woodland properties. Residents returning from their jobs steer SUVs into long driveways and emerge from their automobiles. They walk to the front doors of their houses past sculptured bushes and flowers in bloom.

For most people, this cozy image of suburbia does not immediately evoke images of African Americans. But as this pioneering work demonstrates, the suburbs have provided a home to black residents in increasing numbers for the past hundred years—in the last two decades alone, the numbers have nearly doubled to just under twelve million. Places of Their Own begins a hundred years ago, painting an austere portrait of the conditions that early black residents found in isolated, poor suburbs. Andrew Wiese insists, however, that they moved there by choice, withstanding racism and poverty through efforts to shape the landscape to their own needs. Turning then to the 1950s, Wiese illuminates key differences between black suburbanization in the North and South. He considers how African Americans in the South bargained for separate areas where they could develop their own neighborhoods, while many of their northern counterparts transgressed racial boundaries, settling in historically white communities. Ultimately, Wiese explores how the civil rights movement emboldened black families to purchase homes in the suburbs with increased vigor, and how the passage of civil rights legislation helped pave the way for today's black middle class.

Tracing the precise contours of black migration to the suburbs over the course of the whole last century and across the entire United States, Places of Their Own will be a foundational book for anyone interested in the African American experience or the role of race and class in the making of America's suburbs.
 
Winner of the 2005 John G. Cawelti Book Award from the American Culture 
Association.
Winner of the 2005 Award for Best Book in North American Urban 
History from the Urban History Association.
 

Genres: Race, History, American History, Nonfiction

422 pages, Paperback

First published February 29, 2004

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

The man can throw down a gauntlet:

The truth is, however, historians have done a better job excluding African Americans from the suburbs than even white suburbanites. Scholarly neglect notwithstanding, African Americans lived in and moved to suburbs throughout the twentieth century, and black communities served as a social and spatial basis for expanded suburbanization over time. [5]

A great book both for learning more about most aspects of African American suburbanization across the US (impressive to say the least), as well as the articulation between race and space. A historian that uses Lefebvre and Castells, I loved it.

In the twentieth-century United States, race and class formation were fundamentally spatial processes as well. 25 Though scholars reveal the fluidity and contingency of social identity, as historical distinctions, race and class emerged in the form of devastating material and spatial inequality - differences marked on bodies and inscribed in the land ... The legacy of these inequities, concrete differences among living people, gave life to persistent racial and class identities through time.

In the same vein, he introduces the hierarchy of spaces, which I don't remember having come across before, but it is to be found in Harvey and Smith so I should have done. Still, I think the concept shines in thinking through the articulations of race and space

On the one hand, race and class subordination branded urban and suburban space. Residential locations were not neutral with respect to social resources. Rather, they reflected positions in a sharply drawn hierarchy of metropolitan spaces that had compounding advantages or disadvantages for those who lived in them. Excluded from metropolitan locations with the greatest advantages -- for example, high-income neighbors, a robust tax base, strong public schools, rapidly climbing property values -- and restricted to those with the fewest, African Americans face persistent spatial inequalities.. Racism not only limited black access to employment, credit, and public facilities, but it ensured that most African Americans lived in a racially separate and materially unequal world.

But the wealth of research tied close to theory is supplemented by some really telling narratives, most from primary sources, trying to explore the meaning and the making of the suburbs, but also clearly race. Here is a confession of the kind of real estate agent known as a 'blockbuster'

It's pretty easy to do; I just scare me hell out of them. And that's what we did. We were not only making money, we were having fun doing what we were doing. We all liked selling real estate - if you want to call what we were doing selling real estate. And it got to a point that in order to have fun while we 'were working, we would try to outdo each other with the most outlandish threats that people would believe and chuckle at the end of the day.... I had fun at it. I'd go down the street with a [black] buyer and ask, Which house do you want? He'd pick one, and I'd ring the door bell and say, these people want to buy your house. If the lady said no, I'd say the reason they're so interested is that their cousins, aunts, mother, whatever, it's a family of twelve, are moving in across the street, and they want to be near them. Most of the time, that worked. If that didn't work, you'd say their kid just got out of jail for housebreaking, or rape, or something that would work.[245]

A poem from Langston Hughes I had never read before:

Here I come!
Been saving all my life
To get a nice home
For me and my wife.

White folks flee--
As soon as you see
My problems
And me!

Neighborhood's clean,
But the house is old,
Prices are doubled
When I get sold:
Still I buy.

White folks fly
Soon as you spy
My wife
And I!
- Langston Hughes, "Little Song on Housing" [209]

There is an amazing story about a man by the name of Wheeler who inspired to play his own part in the race struggle by the civil rights movement of the 60s moved into a white suburb. He describes in his won words the white reaction. How they burned a cross on his lawn. He put the fire out and rebuilt the cross, writing on it 'struggling is not segregated' and putting a picture of a back guy and a white guy in Vietnam. The neighborhood begged him to take it down, the police tried to order him to take it down, some kids tried to steal it and he brought it back. He won in the end.

I also liked the way the book looks at the fissures within the black community, a little (though perhaps not enough) on the resentment with which African Americans moving to suburbia has been viewed by other African Americans, while at the same time a moving look at the search for African American community. It doesn't really grapple with this question of connection between inner city and suburb, the pain of one and possibly guilt of another. But that would require more than a book I think. But it does highlight the impact on struggle this has had: 'By emphasizing their rights as citizens and their membership in a particular socioeconomic class, middle-class black suburbanites articulated a vision of racial equality that largely ignored or evaded inequalities based on socioeconomic class.' This is despite the depth of the struggle just to become suburbanites.

It is a rich history stretching way back to suburban beginnings and tracing it all the way through to modern times. In sum, and a good summation too:

In the face of white racism, expressed through extraordinary efforts to limit their freedom to occupy, use, or even move through space, they battled to defend and expand the territory available to them. Against this backdrop, African Americans' spatial struggles took on a central place in the freedom movement, their strategies for economic and political empowerment, and contests over racial and class identities.
At the broadest level, this book argues for the centrality of space in the making of race and class in the twentieth century. Among the most obvious features of black suburbanization was the spatial persistence of race over time and, related to that, the consistent struggle over the meaning and advantages that adhered to the places black people lived.[291]

[Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal and thorough, it addresses intersectionality (though it doesn't use the word) and doesn't neglect gender as I find a lot of urban history texts do that aren't explicitly about gender or sexuality.

[Dan Moulton · Rating 5 out of 5]

If only it was possible to give a book 6 stars!

[Michael Brickey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book introduced and explained a phenomena that many students and scholars of race seem to neglect: African American suburbanization. I had certainly not given it much thought until this book. Wiese does well to explain the role that migration to the north and remaining in the south had in the development of African American suburbs. He builds on Kenneth Jackson's theory of suburbanization as an upper-middle class endeavor, but Wiese also does well to challenge that notion. Many suburbs are, in fact, working-class enclaves. This book is the defining work in 20th century African American suburbanization and anyone seeking to further understand the relationship between class, race, place, and space should read it.