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  • Soulville in Seattle: African Americans, the City, and the Paradox of the American Dream
  • Waldo E. Martin Jr. (bio)
Quintard Taylor. The Forging of A Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. xiii 330 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, appendix, bibliography, and index. $30.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).

Show me the way to get to Soulville   Show me the way to go home Show me the way to get to Soulville     That’s where I belong.

(from “Soulville,” sung by Aretha Franklin, written by Turner et al.)

An eye-catching full-color reproduction of Builders-Family by renowned African American artist Jacob Lawrence graces the paperback edition of Quintard Taylor’s impressive study of Black Seattle. This wonderful cover illustration vividly evokes the work’s central motif: the community’s historical development from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. The highly stylized image of the black family (mother, father, daughter, and son) elegantly attired and proceeding arm-in-arm before an integrated crew at a construction work-site strikingly visualizes Taylor’s focus on the institutions and processes of community building. Throughout, the central emphasis on the political economy of black community development in Seattle drives a cogent structural analysis. The bedrock issue has been how best to achieve economic opportunity for blacks within a system built around the maintenance of white dominance.

In addition to institutional maturation and the struggle for economic and political empowerment, Taylor offers a revealing interpretation of Black Seattle’s spirit. Black investment in the ideology of that city’s “free air” — its racial liberalism — has envisioned Black Seattleites as integral participants in a progressive and multiracial western urban frontier. For them, serious antiblack obstacles notwithstanding, Seattle has represented a race relations reality superior to anywhere else in the United States, especially in the period before World War II. [End Page 643]

A sense of community, as Taylor demonstrates so well, is psychological as well as institutional. It is not just spatial and geographical, social and cultural, or political and economic. But, as Taylor suggests, community combines all of these elements in complicated and unanticipated ways. A vital yet often neglected element is the slippery notion of “the psychological boundaries of community” (p. 135). The “Queen of Soul,” Aretha Franklin, offered insight into that feeling in her rousing 1964 recording of “Soulville,” in which she implores her friend/listener to take her to the place where not only she feels most comfortable, but also where she belongs. This vision and experience of black community life, as Taylor’s study shows, reveals the warmth and sense of belonging attached to home. 1

Indeed this vision of neighborhood as an extension of home concretizes the notion of community as an emotional zone: an affective space. That is, the community as home is a place positively associated with life’s inevitable joys and pains as well as “a psychological haven from a hostile world” (p. 234). As Taylor so aptly illustrates, for most of Black Seattle’s history, the community consisted of two close yet physically separate areas within the Central District: mostly working-class and poor Yesler-Jackson and more middle-class East Madison. The growth and eventual merger of these different areas by the 1950s accomplished spatially what had always been in reality the institutional and emotional case: a singular, if not always harmonious, sense of community.

Through its inclusive vision of community formation, notably its use of cultural history, Taylor’s work showcases an increasingly influential contemporary approach to black urban history. It draws upon the best of the previous paradigms: race relations (1899 to 1960), ghettoization (1960s and 1970s), and proletarianization (1980s). 2 Unlike the static race relations approach, the community-building model is fundamentally historical — like the ghettoization and proletarianization paradigms. By seriously examining the historical significance of the nonindustrial work done by most African Americans until relatively recently, it avoids the constraints of the proletarianization approach. In addition, where appropriate, it revises the persistent emphasis on white/ black relations to encompass intraracial relations as well as interactions among whites (ethnics included) and various peoples of color. It...

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