Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West by Karla Slocum (review)

Karla Slocum. Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 192 pp.

Karla Slocum begins her Black Towns, Black Futures autobiographically, with the death of her grandfather, Mozell C. Hill. Kinship and ancestry become potent methods and modes of analysis, as the book grows out of her grandfather's own sociological research on Black towns. Based on multi-sited ethnography in Oklahoma between 2004 and 2012, Black Towns, Black Futures is an impressive effort to theorize what Slocum calls the "appeal" of Black towns in the United States, not historically, but in contemporary social life. What attracts residents and non-residents alike to these small rural places (typically inhabited by 100–1,000 residents), especially during a period of increasing urbanization, not just in the United States, but globally?

Via Hill's research, Slocum's own personal ties to Black towns reverberate throughout the text at a deeper level than common discussions of positionality or social location; she notes, "my family ties and newfound family stories play a role in how I think about the towns," describing herself as a "curious seeker for whom memory and personal history play a part in the motivation both to connect with Black towns and to understand what Black towns are" (xi). Slocum's exploration of "this intersection of subjective experience and empirical research" (xi) is a welcome addition to other recent calls to think more deeply about why we as anthropologists pursue the research that we do, and the ethical implications of our decisions in the field (McTighe and Raschig 2019)—in other words, what is appealing about ethnography and why we are drawn to our subjects. This is the first of several ways Slocum helps us to understand the appeal and attraction of Black towns—by theorizing her own experience of being drawn to them.

By chance, I found myself sitting down to read this book in December of 2019, the week after watching the season finale of HBO's Watchmen, a show which begins and situates much of its historical context in the 1921 Greenwood Massacre in Tulsa (albeit in an alternate sci-fi-inflected America, complete with reparations, Black superheroes, and even a Black god). Slocum's grandfather, Mozell C. Hill, was 58 in 1969, so he would have been a young child at the time of the massacre, just like Will Reeves (himself the grandfather of the show's Black protagonist Angela Abar), whom we meet in the first episode of the series trying, with his family, to escape the massacre's unspeakable violence. The appeal of a Black place was understandable then, and it continues to resonate today, against the backdrop of what Slocum calls "the realities of a postracial society not yet achieved" (88). This appeal was even more evident in the summer of 2020, when in the midst of a global pandemic and rising racial unrest in response to police brutality, Donald Trump planned to hold a campaign rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth. After widespread outcry, the rally was rescheduled to June 20. I will not say that Slocum's book is timely, because anti-Black violence has been part of the fabric of the United States since its founding. But Black Towns, Black Futures is necessary now, for the glimpse it provides into the vision and attraction of Black spaces and Black places, at a time when safety and survival seem increasingly precarious.

In the introduction, Slocum introduces the notion of seeking protection from racism in place, rather than policy or anything else. "The people in the place matter," she argues, "but the place…is the essential piece of the story" (1). What is it, she wonders, that makes a particular place appealing? In the case of Black towns, she argues that appeal is tied to the...