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

In the minds of probably most social scientists and the general public, suburbanization is a movement of the post World War II era fueled by the GI Bill and FHA mortgage guarantees. The outcome in the popular image was a boom in white middle-class residential neighborhoods far from the din and congestion of central cities... and their growing African American populations. This image begins to fall apart in the first pages of chapter one of Places of Their Own by historian Andrew Wiese and completely crumbles by the end of chapter three. Although not equal to the numbers of white suburban movers after the Second World War, Wiese documents in these early chapters the extent of the self-conscious search for suburban spaces that began early in the 20th century among African American migrants. Earlier studies of African American migration from the South have documented the magnitude and consequences of this movement for black economic progress in northern and western industrial cities. However, the focus of most of these studies on the transformation of African Americans from a rural proletariat into an urbanized population left unexplored an important part of black southerners' search for a better life. Against this backdrop, Wiese's study fills two large gaps in the literature on suburbanization and African American migration.

Organized by decades, the three chapters of Part I cover the period 1900 to 1940, Part II examines the more familiar decades of 1940 to 1960, while the last two chapters bring the study up to 2000. I was surprised to learn the extent – one in six – to which black migrants during the Great Migration of the 1910s and 1920s chose suburbs over central city living. By 1940, Wiese notes, one-fifth of African Americans in metropolitan areas resided in suburbs. Although the settings varied, including commuter suburbs, industrial satellites and black residential suburbs, the goals of these black suburbanites were remarkably similar in their search for economic security and property.

During this period these were primarily working-class blacks, many of whom sought to recreate some of the features of southern rural living: open space, nature and property on which to build a home and grow the vegetables they knew in the South. Home ownership was a value that could be traced to the postbellum period when property was equated with freedom, independence, and self-sufficiency. The real story is the extent to which these migrants went to realize their dreams. In a period when most of the land outside central cities was unincorporated and therefore unregulated, black migrants used every means at their disposal to first buy land then erect homes. In the end, many cities of the North and West became home not only to black city dwellers, but to thousands of small black suburban communities. Home ownership rates in some exceeded those in neighboring white middle-class communities. In a sense this early period is heroic for the tenacity and sacrifices of black migrants in search of a "place of their own." These early suburban communities laid the "footprints" for much of the later suburbanization of African Americans even after a shift in class composition during the 1950s.

As black migrants exercised agency in their search for a better life, they encountered entrenched racism. Increases in the number of African American migrants were met by increased white opposition. In places like Evanston, Ill., the tools of restrictive covenants and code zoning concentrated blacks in small and often undesirable areas. Use of these discriminatory strategies as well as violence intensified after the war, even as the composition of black suburbanites changed from working to middle class. The pattern of racial residential segregation in the suburbs had been established and was to continue to the present as demonstrated by studies of Massey and Denton in American Apartheid .

Other scholars have emphasized the importance of place in social life. Wiese demonstrates how U.S. history in the twentieth century was...