In the Shadow of the Suburban Dream: Black Struggles on the Urban Fringe

Andrew Wiese. Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xi + 411 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $37.50 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).

Shortly after African American businessman Alonzo Wright settled in his new Hampshire Road home in the 1930s, an exploding firebomb pierced the suburban calm he had sought in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, a leafy suburb atop the escarpment that rises six miles east of Cleveland. At the time, most of the five hundred or so blacks living in Cleveland Heights, an incorporated suburb of about fifty thousand, worked as domestic servants in the homes of affluent whites. Nearly four decades later, when the neighboring suburb of East Cleveland was in the midst of rapid racial transformation through spillover from the burgeoning black population in Cleveland's eastside neighborhoods, only 2 percent of Cleveland Heights' population was black. Nonetheless, even the modest influx of African Americans triggered a series of violent reprisals as some whites attempted to block racial change between the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Fearing the wholesale resegregation of their city, more progressive Cleveland Heights residents formed organizations such as the Heights Citizens for Human Rights and, later, the Heights Community Congress to promote racial tolerance and fair access to housing. In addition to real-estate industry monitoring, housing inspections, community improvement incentives, and local political advocacy, the latter organization persuaded the city council to commit itself to maintaining a racially integrated community, forging Cleveland Heights' modern national image as a socially responsible inner-ring suburb that avoided the worst ravages of white flight. By the end of the century, through the vigilance of civic activists, more than two-fifths of Cleveland Heights' population was African American. Yet despite their successes, the suburb's residents—black and white—had to grapple with sagging public schools and other problems faced by inner-ring suburbs across America in the wake of deindustrialization and white flight. For African Americans, then, living in suburbia often meant living in the shadow of the suburban dream.¹

The black migration to Cleveland Heights represents one pattern of black settlement in suburban America, yet it followed a long history of migration to the urban fringes. In his impressive study of black suburbs, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century, Andrew Wiese unveils a hidden, or at least often overlooked, history, one that builds upon existing studies of urban racial change, black migrations, and suburban expansion yet offers a bold, original interpretation. As Wiese notes, most studies of suburbanization focus only on a cultural landscape marked by affluent whites in nuclear families who lived in single-family detached houses, subscribed to the ideals of domesticity, relied on their automobiles, and shopped in climate-controlled malls. Kenneth T. Jackson's canonical Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985) epitomizes this tendency to view suburbia as a particularistic cultural landscape and neglect the complete physical extent of suburbia, which Wiese describes as a "variegated landscape" (p. 6).

Additionally, scholars have tended to examine either neighborhood racial transition within central cities or the efforts of white suburbanites to confine African Americans within the city limits. Thomas J. Sugrue, for instance, directs his attention in Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996) to the clashes between the "defended neighborhoods" of ethnic workers struggling to become middle-class whites and African Americans struggling to move out of the confines of Detroit's inner-city ghettos in a time of postwar de-industrialization. In contrast, Wiese prefers to view racial contests and tensions in suburbs as inseparable from those within the limits of central cities, encouraging a more metropolitan perspective than is possible in more spatially circumscribed studies.

Likewise, existing studies of black migrations, notably James R. Grossman's Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners...