Strangers in the Land of Paradise: The Creation of an African American Community, Buffalo, New York, 1900-1940 (review)

In Strangers in the Land of Paradise, Dr. Lillian Williams has produced a superb study of the Black community in Buffalo, New York. Williams uses a diverse set of sources—municipal records, census data, family diaries, correspondence, and personal interviews—to provide a nuanced view of what life was like in an early twentieth century urban Black community. Strangers proves her prediction that “a blending of the earlier perspectives [race-relations and ghetto-formation studies of Black cities] with evolving methodologies and theoretical approaches [such as the new social history and cultural studies approach] could only further enhance our understanding of the migration and settlement of Blacks in cities.” More than a blending, her book is a synthesis of diverse sources on Black life in Buffalo. More than a case study of Buffalo, her conclusions explain the tangled web of social limitation and personal triumph that is Black urban history in the North during the first half of the twentieth century.

It takes a mature social historian to write Black urban history as a dialectical process of socio-economic oppression and individual Black agency. Williams is able to do that in this careful, sometimes dry, urban history because of the diversity of her sources and the sophisticated way she uses them. She balances the story of racial and gender discrimination that surfaces from the sociological data with narratives from primary sources that narrate how “the career of Clara Payne, the daughter of Buffalo city clerk Thomas Payne, is a notable exception to the foregoing observations. The 43 year-old woman worked as a domestic in 1905. Ten years later, when she was 53, Payne worked as a caterer, and by 1925, at the age of 63, she was a social worker. Payne experienced tremendous job mobility even though she had passed the age when most individuals would expect to launch a new career.”(p.88) Williams is unafraid to let the contrasting voices of group limitation and individual transcendence speak in her narrative.

Strangers in the Land of Paradise also offers a provocative analysis of the Black family. The book details the ways that Black families struggled with and adapted to conditions of life in Buffalo. For example, Williams proves that Black families were seldom female-headed in the early twentieth century and even less so during the mid-1920s, when economic opportunities improved to enable more women to marry and stay home with their children. Rather than pathological maladjustment to northern, urban conditions, female-headed households resulted from economic conditions in Buffalo and, by extension, in the rest of twentieth century urban America. At the same time, she acknowledges that the Black family’s tendency to take in boarders and distant relatives introduced, at times, dangerously destabilizing people into families with adolescent girls and boys. But Williams claims that the sophisticated kinship networks of southern families who migrated north actually helped rather than hindered Black migrants adapt to the northern city. Like European immigrants, Williams asserts, these kin networks did, at times, help families secure if not reserve jobs for family members. In contrast to other studies of northern migration during the twentieth century, Williams finds that southern Black family traditions buoyed rather than sabotaged Black urban life in Buffalo.

Williams shows, as well, how African Americans used voluntary institutions to advance their collective interests. Her detailed consideration of Black Buffalo’s Y.W.C.A., the Buffalo Urban League, and the local N.A.A.C.P. reveals the tightrope such African American organizations walked to advance African American interests while placating native-born white male Protestant hegemony. Williams also documents how African American workers in Buffalo employed Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association to advocate their interests as citizens and workers. Her study shows that when it came to social and political strategy, Buffalo ‘s African Americans were...