Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer (review)

As African Americans became largely urban during the Great Migration, race relations and the city emerged as a critical motif of the twentieth century. Robert C. Weaver, a relatively understudied black pioneer, occupied the center of this discourse. In his intriguing biography, Wendell E. Pritchett recreates the career of an individual who quietly influenced U.S. racial liberalism and urban policy between the 1930s and late 1960s. An architect of public housing, urban renewal, rent control and fair employment, Weaver also expanded the role of black professionals in federal government. Appointed secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) by President Lyndon B. Johnson, he was the first African American to hold a cabinet position. However, he emerges most vividly as a tragic figure who pursued incremental change through elite institutions, fruitlessly mediating between white intransigence and the democratic demands of black social movements.

Pritchett's book functions as a fascinating meditation on the contradictions of the "Black Bourgeoisie" famously maligned by E. Franklin Frazier. A key member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet," Weaver participated in transforming the scope of the federal government, even as race limited his own career. Committed to racial uplift, he was nevertheless aloof from the black working class, and championed the ability of professionals to achieve reform. This was, among other things, characteristic of his upbringing within the higher rungs of the black middle class, whose members viewed their mobility as the gateway to black citizenship. Notwithstanding his friendship with the radical John P. Davis, Weaver remained distant from contemporary grassroots black freedom struggles. His abiding loyalty to the several presidential administrations he served, further, was rarely requited (Pritchett's description of the humiliating process through which Weaver was selected to lead HUD is particularly revealing.)

At the pinnacle of his success in the Johnson administration, he helped usher the passage of landmark fair housing and urban development acts in 1968. Yet, he was a target of widespread criticism. Although accused of lacking boldness in the face of a deepening postwar urban crisis, Weaver "oversaw the passage of more laws regarding the issues under his purview—housing production and antidiscrimination—than any period before or since," Pritchett notes. (323) Ironically, "the very qualities that enabled Weaver to achieve success," especially his commitment to gradual change, had become liabilities by the late 1960s. (262-263) Just as tragically, he lived to see the dissolution of "an active federal urban effort" in the 1970s, as such policies fell into disrepute. (349)

Well-researched and engaging, Pritchett's biography reveals little about its subject beyond his public life. Still, it is an important work for specialists in African American history and urban studies. From the standpoint of historicizing the role of African Americans in the White House—a lineage that now includes President Barack Obama—Pritchett's work is a vital scholarly step.