Review: <i>Building the Black City: The Transformation of American Life</i>, by William Trotter Jr.

For the past quarter century, I’ve owned a home in a longstanding, integrated community in Oakland, California, but over that time span the number of Black-owned homes on my street has declined from 30 percent to 12 percent. In San Francisco, Chicago, and Somerville, Massachusetts, I lived in largely White districts, and in the latter Black friends felt especially unwelcome and unsafe. When I was younger, I lived on borderlands in St. Louis and Philadelphia, where if I went in one direction, toward the university, the White population swelled, and, in the opposite direction, an impoverished, all-Black neighborhood loomed. My parents emigrated from Europe to New York five years after the Second World War, ending up in the immigrant quarter of Brownsville, Brooklyn—then almost all Jewish. By the time they left in 1955, Jews were exiting and Blacks arriving. My parents would later move to Long Island, where I spent my childhood in a lily-white suburb.It is no wonder that as an historian I’ve been riveted by our nation’s racialized fault lines, those separating where the American dream was flourishing from where it was nowhere to be found. Joe William Trotter’s Building the Black City: The Transformation of American Life is an ambitious attempt to survey the African American side of those fault lines, to acknowledge its pain and desperation as well as its hopes and achievements. The book sweeps across time from the colonial era to the present, from Southern cities where slavery orchestrated the racial order to western cities where large Black populations were established in the mid-twentieth century.Each chapter covers several cities in a specific region and time period, organized around practices of White supremacy; intra-Black social relations and stratifications; the quest to own, occupy and use property and buildings; the necessity to carve out places beyond White control; and the formation of semiautonomous business districts and institutions ranging from churches to voluntary societies to schools. There are excursions into Black people’s attempts to flee their situations, especially in the South, by migrating to Africa, the North, or Canada. We also read of attempts to combat slavery and mob violence, lynching and police brutality, as well as fights for civil and voting rights.The initial chapters on Southern cities explore the construction of a highly stratified society: three tiers of Whites, enslaved Blacks and free people of color who would later morph into Whites, poor Blacks, and middle- and upper-class Blacks. Black populations were large in antebellum cities like Savannah, and entrepreneurial members of those communities bought land and built homes and businesses as best they could, using their considerable skills in the trades of carpentry and masonry. They learned subterfuge as well, forced to operate in a shadow zone of informal markets and circumspect actions. Enslaved household servants often provided employment opportunities for other enslaved peoples when owners were out of town. Led typically by free people of color, neighborhoods such as Charleston’s Clifford’s Alley and New Orleans’s Congo Square provided a setting for a flourishing, if partially underground, African American culture. As Trotter summarizes, “the rise of residential clusters of owner-occupied and rental properties provided the geographical context for the development of African American institutional infrastructure,” autonomous entities from the church to the nightclub (18).In post–Civil War cities like Atlanta, the rebuilding of downtowns initially resulted in mixed-race populations. Prosperity and escalating property values spelled doom, however. Whites coveted the whole pie, resorting to condemning Black urban spaces and pushing their residents elsewhere. This phenomenon led to all-Black sub-districts across the upper South. Smithfield, a suburb of Birmingham “became an almost exclusively African American city within the city” (73), as the segregating Central Business District spawned a Black Business District. In such places, Black people carved out neighborhoods of their own beyond omnipresent White control, albeit in low-lying and often pestilential lands, old and dilapidated housing, and back alleys and courtyards lacking municipal services. All too often, White city leaders not only segregated Black residents but also segregated garbage dumping, gambling, prostitution, and other vices to their neighborhoods.Even districts like Tulsa’s Greenwood Avenue—a prosperous strip of wood-frame and brick-masonry edifices; of religious, fraternal, and mutual benefit organizations; a place where Blacks had gained better access to land, space, and homes than elsewhere in the South—were vulnerable. In 1921, a minor incident involving a White female elevator operator and a young Black man resulted in “the deadliest attack on an African American urban community in the nation’s history” (111). The district was burned and looted. It was rebuilt within a few years.Arriving in the Northeast, the reader goes back in time to colonial and antebellum times, hearing once more how African Americans were limited in their ability to be self-sufficient urban builders and forced, as in the South, to operate outside civil norms and undertake illicit activities. Yet we never reach the Black cities of New York or Philadelphia beyond the mid-nineteenth century. We finally encounter that period in the Midwest, when Trotter turns to the Great Migration from the South to the industrialized North. Incoming Blacks, buoyed by better jobs, expected different social relations than in the South. They found integration daunting. Describing White resistance both through violence and the more widespread legal means like restrictive covenants, Trotter illustrates how, in the 1930s and beyond, federal government agencies colluded in White citizen demands for segregation—both in public housing and racially biased risk assessments (i.e., redlining) for investments.African Americans did not arrive in large numbers to the far West until the onset of the Second World War amid the region’s burgeoning war industries. Despite higher levels of home ownership in the Bay Area, the barriers rose once more, as predominantly Black developments like Parchester Village in Richmond found themselves surrounded by a sea of all-White neighborhoods. Urban renewal was later employed to “clean out” Black neighborhoods in both San Francisco and Oakland, although Trotter exaggerates the size of the urban renewal district in West Oakland and, in San Francisco, as elsewhere in the book, he neglects to discuss who had earlier occupied the neighborhoods to which Blacks were now migrating.Building the Black City provides a finely detailed history of how African Americans built urban communities in the face of toxic White supremacy. In the Southern cities that make up more than half of the book, there is much for the reader to learn about the ways Blacks were forced to slalom around the practices of a reliably hostile White society and, in the process, create some of the nation’s most extraordinary urbanized phenomena in sports, religion, music, the arts, and civic morality.The weaknesses of the book lie in its scope and structure. In a slim volume of 200 pages Trotter tries to cover too much. He might better have limited his history to the South and to the period before World War II. Lengthy discussions about the overall situation of Blacks in America limit the book’s survey of urban development. At the same time, scant attention is given to the Black city’s relationship to the city around it inhabited by Whites (and others) and propelled by complex social, economic, and technological forces. Furthermore, the book’s structure leads to unfortunate repetition, the same drumroll recounting the founding of churches or business districts or other institutions. While providing valuable granular detail on different Black cities, more summaries, comparisons, and geographical and temporal analyses would have helped readers gain a bigger picture of the Black city and understand how it came together and apart.