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2011 37: 992Journal of Urban HistoryJeffrey Helgeson

The State of Blame in American Cities : Race, Wealth, and the Politics of Housing

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Journal of Urban History37(6) 992 –999

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413236 JUHXXX10.1177/0096144211413236Book ReviewJournal of Urban History

The State of Blame in American Cities: Race, Wealth, and the Politics of Housing

Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Making a Way Out of No Way: African American Women and the Second Great Migration. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009, pp. xx, 297, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, $50.00 cloth.

Michelle R. Boyd, Jim Crow Nostalgia: Reconstructing Race in Bronzeville. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, pp. xxxi, 211, notes, bibliography, index, $18.95 paper.

Christopher Robert Reed, Black Chicago’s First Century: Volume 1, 1833-1900. Columbia & London: University of Missouri Press, 2005, pp. xiv, 582, illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index, $49.95 paper.

Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009, pp. 495, illustrations, notes, index, $30.00 cloth.

Paul L. Street, Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007, tables, index, $80.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Reviewed by: Jeffrey Helgeson, Texas State University-San Marcos, USADOI: 10.1177/0096144211413236

Decades from now the housing crisis of the early twenty-first century will be as essential to the history of ongoing racial segregation and inequality in the United States as racially restric-tive covenants, urban renewal, contract purchases, and violence were to the making of the color line in the twentieth century. Subprime loans, credit default swaps, and synthetic collateral-ized debt obligations have entered American political discourse because they symbolize how effectively speculative markets undermined the struggles of millions of Americans to create and protect wealth.

Exactly how historians will explain the relationships between the housing crisis and ongoing racial and class inequality will depend largely on how they view the actors involved. Where the blame is placed matters. As a case in point, U.S. Representative Barney Frank has been under attack. Leading the charge, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh argues that the Massachusetts Democrat “created the problem.” Frank’s “definition of affordable housing was to make sure that people who couldn’t pay the loans back got the loans, the mortgages.” According to Limbaugh, Frank “forced” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “to do this.”1 Self-described “moderate” figures on the right have echoed Limbaugh’s charges. Christie Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, insisted that we “not forget one of the key drivers of the housing bubble—the lowering of lending standards to encourage homeownership, regardless of the borrower’s ability to repay their mort-gage.” She, too, singled Frank out: “he repeatedly prevented additional oversight for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and even pushed for them to make more loans to people who couldn’t afford traditional bank financing.”2

The accusations are misleading at best,3 but Frank has been targeted because he has been the most outspoken advocate for federal efforts to encourage investment in low-income communities.

Review Essays



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Never mind that the vast majority of subprime loans—high interest rate mortgages—were written by private lenders independent of federal efforts to steer investment into poor communities. Never mind the independent mortgage lenders who aggressively marketed high-rate loans to poor and minority communities. Never mind that, as Frank has pointed out, it is patently absurd to think that he could have single-handedly made federal policy on housing issues during President George W. Bush’s administration. “If I could have stopped a Republican bill during the Bush years,” Frank said, “I would have started with the war in Iraq. Then I would have gone to the Patriot Act. Then I would have gone on to the hundreds of millions in tax cuts.” Why do Frank’s critics keep the focus on him? Frank believes they do it to shift blame away from predatory lenders and Wall Street and place it squarely on the backs of disproportionately African American and Latino bor-rowers in foreclosure. “They get to take things out on poor people,” Frank has said. “Let’s be honest: The fact that some of the poor people are black doesn’t hurt them either, from their stand-point. This is an effort, I believe, to appeal to a kind of anger in people.”4

The attacks on Frank and “irresponsible” low-income minority borrowers are more than just salvos in the blame wars of overheated partisan politics. They are part of a much longer history of attacks on the national welfare state and its supposed role in facilitating the dependence and improvidence of racial and ethnic minorities in American cities. The politics of the current hous-ing crisis are informed by longstanding debates over the causes of racial inequality in urban America. Five recent books on race and politics in urban America, focusing for the most part on Chicago, show that the significance of these debates transcends black urban history.

The Continuity of Racial Oppression and Intraracial Class TensionsIn 2004, President George W. Bush declared, “America is a stronger country every single time a family moves into a home of their own.”5 The idea provided ideological support for buyers and lenders engaged in risky practices. President Bush’s focus on homeownership also helped diminish the importance among policymakers of broad access to good, low-cost rental housing. And the ideal of an ownership society assumed the existence, or at least the imminent possibility, of a classless and even postracial society. Paul Street’s Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis blows that idea out of the water. He details the persistence of racial inequality in virtually every area of urban life, including “income, employment rates, occupational status, poverty . . . home-lessness, home values, neighborhood economic vitality, business ownership, educational attain-ment, school funding, school quality, disease rates, voting rights, incarceration rates and felony marking, and much much more” (pp. 25-6).

Documenting racial disparities in American cities is relatively easy; the challenge is in the explanation. Even Street acknowledges that “the stubborn evidence of persistent black segregation and racial disparity is a matter of voluminous public and scholarly record” (p. 229). Nonetheless, Street argues that much of American popular and political discourse denies or diminishes the importance of racism in contemporary society. Street documents his personal history of being ignored by the media and the broader public when he reported on ongoing racism as vice president for research and planning for the Chicago Urban League between 2000 and 2005. More broadly, Street points to no less than eleven major foundation studies, magazine articles, and investigative reports that either ignored or diminished the importance of racism as a cause of racial inequality.

Street seeks to correct this tendency by documenting not only inequality in the city, but also the individual and institutional forms of racism that he believes create and sustain inequality. Consider residential segregation, for example. Street explains it as a consequence of discriminatory realtors and mortgage lenders, whites’ fears of blacks, blacks’ fears of prejudice and harassment, the relo-cation of former public housing tenants to largely black neighborhoods, and zoning policies that



994 Journal of Urban History 37(6)

prevent the construction of affordable housing in suburban Chicago. Unequal job opportunities remain a reality not only because black workers face discrimination, but also because white work-ers benefit from nepotism in the skilled trades, reformers continue to have difficulty integrating training and apprenticeship programs, and African American workers face a “spatial mismatch” between their segregated neighborhoods and the job rich suburbs. Opportunities for black Americans, especially black men, are further hindered by disproportionate incarceration rates. Furthermore, “Apartheid schooling” invests less money in the average black student and tracks “ghetto schools” into test-based teaching (p. 248). And the city’s political system is unlikely to provide even the charity and patronage that working-class blacks expected from the political machine in earlier eras because Mayor Richard M. Daley has built a “new” political machine based on pro–growth development plans that favor whites downtown and on the edges of the city. In Daley’s “global metropolis,” according to Street, a new political machine funded by lawyers, bankers, financiers, and international manufacturers has enriched the few while leaving black neighborhoods ever further behind.

Unfortunately, Street’s otherwise useful and extraordinarily thorough book all but erases black actors from urban history. “Content to honor the biblical injunction to ‘let the dead bury the dead,’” Street assures the reader he “has no particular desire to ‘rescue’ past generations of black or white Chicagoans from the condescension of posterity” (p. 70). His interest in history extends only so far as it documents racial oppression’s growth over time and its continuity. But as Eric Foner writes on Reconstruction, “The historian . . . ought to be suspicious of any model that views continuity rather than change as the essence of historical experience.”6 Historians seek to do something more than merely rescuing past generations from “the condescension of posterity.” They seek to explain how change has happened. Limbaugh and Whitman have an explanation—urban housing markets have collapsed, they say, because the federal government (Barney Frank) and irresponsible borrowers (poor African Americans) created a housing bubble. Street’s counter-explanation—that the forces of oppression overwhelm black efforts to improve their lives—can only lead to the old narrative of black victimization. From this perspective, the history of African Americans’ struggles for individual opportunity and collective racial progress hold relatively little significance.

Michelle Boyd’s Jim Crow Nostalgia focuses on black political actors and demonstrates how intraracial class tensions can limit the political power of black communities. Boyd participated in the meetings of the Mid-South Planning and Development Commission in Chicago in the late 1990s, when middle-class African Americans were moving into South Side neighborhoods that were largely abandoned in previous decades. The relatively wealthy newcomers clashed with residents who had remained in these neighborhoods about how to revitalize the area. “On the rare occasion that the issue of intraracial class differences is raised,” Boyd reports, middle-class “leaders draw on the invented tradition of racial unity” and “sidestep” issues such as increasing property taxes, rising rents, low-cost housing, or the possibility of increasing access to social services (pp. 150-53).

Drawing on her fieldwork, Boyd blames the “middle class” for what she sees as black Chicago’s “decidedly accommodationist” political culture (p. 3). She goes so far as to argue that black middle-class community leaders have “facilitated segregation;” “tackled individual rather than structural forms of discrimination;” “lubricated neighborhood disinvestment;” and “ultimately left their community open to continued racial subordination” (pp. 17, 21, 28, 32, and 36). Selfish or pow-erless or both, in Boyd’s view, the black middle class has protected its self-interest—in the forms of property values and access to token political and economic gains—at the expense of the black poor. Black elites, essentially, have pursued their class-based interests because they could sell them as shared race-based interests.

Boyd is not interested in the kind of detailed political history necessary to substantiate her argu-ment. She even suggests that some readers “may wish to skip” the first two chapters of the book



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in which she summarizes the history of black Chicago (p. xxx). History matters here because one can easily overstate the shortsightedness and selfishness of “middle-class” actors and oversimplify the reasons that black Chicagoans have not been able to mount a sustained attack on the structures of racial segregation and inequality. Historians are currently seeking to show how African Americans in twentieth-century cities staged a wide range of previously unnoticed political efforts to deal with the daily challenges of life in deeply unequal cities.7 At their best, historians recapture a sense of contingency and political complexity in the lives of ordinary people that call into question both the arguments that blame middle-class blacks for the failure to create a subversive antiracist polit-ical movement and those that blame the black poor for the problems in their communities.

Movement and Place in Black HistoryFor all that has been written about black Chicago, historians have spent relatively little effort in recovering the history of African Americans in the city before the Great Migration. Christopher Robert Reed’s history of black Chicago from the 1830s to 1900, the first volume of a projected two-volume series documenting Black Chicago’s First Century, is a major work of empirical recovery. Reed takes a self-consciously antiquarian approach to black Chicago’s history, arguing that the recovery of the details and the individuals of black history is an end in itself, as well as a means to a more accurate theoretical understanding of black urban history. Reed recounts stories of slaves’ escapes to Chicago during the Civil War and the lives of entrepreneurs, teach-ers, political leaders, veterans, and many more. For Reed, these long-lost stories reveal the kinds of values that served as the base upon which black Chicagoans built nineteenth-century urban communities, including commitments to entrepreneurialism, the value of military service, and black autonomy.

A useful complement to studies of racial oppression and intraracial class divisions, Reed’s book spotlights the historical importance and evolution of black Americans’ commitment to building urban communities. Knowing what we know about the twentieth century’s history of segregation and discrimination in northern cities like Chicago, Reed’s view seems overly sanguine, bordering on the “vindicationist” tradition in African American scholarship.8 Yet the positive vision of community Reed seeks to recapture can be seen as an expression of the core dynamic of black urban history. Historian Ira Berlin has recently argued that “movement [is] the central theme of the African American experience . . . [and] movement elevated the importance of place” because “between . . . massive movements of men and women stand periods of physical—although rarely social—stasis during which black people developed deep attachments to place.” Berlin coins an important, if somewhat awkward phrase, the “contrapuntal narrative,” to describe the tensions in African American history created by “the alternating and often overlapping impact of massive movement and deep rootedness . . . [and that] informed the development of a distinctive African American way of thinking and acting, as black society unraveled and then was reknit.”9 Reed’s optimism notwithstanding, an autonomous Black Metropolis never emerged, although African Americans’ aspirations to create one drove individuals to strive for upward mobility and inspired collective struggles for racial progress.

In the history of northern black communities, individual striving and group activism have always overlapped—and they were always informed by the reality that the mobility of black migrants and their descendants in northern cities was severely limited by discrimination and segregation. As his-torian Lisa Krissoff Boehm puts it in her oral history of black female migrants, they “had learned to address problems by moving,” but now “had no new places to go” (pp. 235-36). On the surface, Boehm’s oral history based on forty interviews with African American women who migrated to the industrial North, or who were daughters of migrants, is a history of black women’s “agency.”




She argues that in a world that discriminated against them because they were women, African American, and domestic workers, they “forged purposeful lives for themselves” (p. 3).

These oral histories also shed light on the kind of political culture working-class black women forged in the face of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation. Boehm details the experiences of black female domestic workers who, she argues, are excluded from most historical studies of migration and urban life. Her findings confirm the by now common insight that African Americans sought control over the conditions of their work, higher wages, and opportunities for upward mobility. More significantly, Boehm suggests that working-class black women with long experi-ence and “a clear vision of the discriminatory practices rampant in America” framed their strug-gle for economic progress as part of an effort to achieve something larger than material acquisition (p. 235). “For us, doing okay is not having a big house and a big car,” one woman told Boehm. “It’s paying your bills and being nice to people and sharing and being recognized that God has His place in your life” (p. 121). However idealized such a description might be, the women Boehm interviewed saw economic stability and, yes, homeownership, as part of a vision of the good life that was necessarily intertwined with a broader, ultimately political and spiritual, vision of family and community welfare.

The Politics of the Good lifeHistorian Beryl Satter details a time in Chicago’s history when individual desires for improved lives both afforded real estate speculators opportunities to fleece black homebuyers and helped fuel a collective political struggle. Satter’s Family Properties is that rare book that holds both a powerful personal narrative and an academically innovative and important argument. She tells three overlapping stories that together reveal a complexity of urban politics missing from previ-ous arguments regarding the causes of persistent poverty in black communities. She begins by seeking to come to grips with the meaning of her father’s roles as both slum landlord and a lawyer who advocated for African American victims of predatory lending schemes. She then explains how the previously obscure practice of contract buying actually worked, who benefited from it, and why it was so difficult to attack. And finally, Satter gives black Chicagoans credit for challenging the structures of racism. She has broken new ground by detailing the complex set of actors behind the exploitative real estate market in black Chicago and by spotlighting the loss of black wealth as both a principal cause of racial inequality and urban decline and a key inter-racial political battleground in the postwar era.

Explanations of persistent inequality in urban communities, Satter argues, have not paid enough attention to the destructive effects of real estate speculators. From the 1940s to the end of the 1970s, according to Satter, observers split the blame between “pathological” black residents and “racist” whites fleeing their neighborhoods. In the 1980s and 1990s, blame shifted slightly, falling upon either a “culture of poverty” or “deindustrialization.” All of those previous explanations “point to a lack—of culture, of jobs, of resources, or of courage to fight one’s racist impulses.” But Satter’s story indicates a different explanation. “The reason for the decline of so many black urban neighborhoods into slums was not the absence of resources but rather the riches that could be drawn from the seemingly poor vein of aged and decrepit housing and hard-pressed but hardwork-ing and ambitious African Americans” (p. 6).

The destructive effects of black Chicagoans’ inability to access conventional mortgage financ-ing is the heart of Satter’s story. African Americans in postwar Chicago, she convincingly demon-strates, had little or no access to conventional forms of mortgage credit. “Their only option was to buy ‘on contract,’ that is, more or less on the installment plan. Under the terms of most installment land contracts, the seller could repossess the house as easily as a used car salesman repossessed a



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delinquent automobile.” The buyer could lose “the down payment, plus all that they’d paid in monthly contract payments and for repairs, insurance, interest, and maintenance” (p. 4). Contract purchases “stripped black migrants of their savings during the very same years when whites of similar class background were getting an immense economic boost through FHA-backed mort-gages.” And the effects were not limited to the contract buyers alone. “Their harsh terms and inflated prices destroyed whole communities” because contract buyers needed to work more hours to make their payments, neglected regular maintenance, “subdivided their apartments, crammed in extra tenants, and, when possible, charged their tenants hefty rents. Indeed the genius of this system was that it forced black contract buyers to be their own exploiters” (p. 5). Contract sales also devastated black Chicago because real estate speculators sold securities, or “paper,” to largely white investors. As a result, the circle of people profiting from contract sales expanded beyond the relatively few highly aggressive and unsavory housing speculators. “The problem was that the pickings were too easy, and the scale of profits too tempting, for many of the city’s promi-nent citizens—attorneys, bankers, realtors, and politicians alike—to pass up” (p. 6).

Satter also details the largely unknown movement among black Chicagoans to end the practice of contract sales. Beginning on the West Side in 1968, the Contract Buyers League (CBL) soon spread to include over two thousand families who bought houses on contract on the West and South Sides and who aligned with an interracial alliance of radical priests, seminary students, rabbis, and lawyers acting in the tradition of Chicago’s most famous community organizer, Saul Alinsky. The movement failed to win many of its immediate objectives—to Satter, this is evidence of the limits of Alinsky-style confrontational neighborhood organizing—but in the process it helped transform individual lives and the relationship between the federal government and the housing market. Theirs was a vibrant movement, their “meetings . . . became packed, emotional celebrations of solidarity” (p. 293). The CBL organized payment strikes that were often painful experiences—about seventy families lost their homes during the strikes—but that also allowed over one hundred families to renegotiate their contracts at a savings of about $14,000 per family. The CBL sued everyone from banks and savings and loans to the Federal Housing Authority. The group lost both of its federal lawsuits, but the research it conducted to document the suits’ claims of discrimina-tion became the basis on which a national grassroots movement arose. That movement won the passage of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act in 1975, which put a stop to banks’ ability to keep their lending practices secret, and the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977, which obligates banks to meet the credit needs of low-income residents. Ultimately, the movement founded upon individual black Chicagoans’ desires for fair access to mortgage credit helped create revolutionary new market regulations and brought about $1.5 trillion in funds to low-income urban communities by 2004. Black Americans who took it on themselves to push for reforms in the housing market, it must be noted, helped create the very laws that Limbaugh and Whitman say Barney Frank used to funnel loans to irresponsible black homebuyers.

ConclusionWhy is it that reform of urban housing markets has been so difficult? Satter explains that in the case of Chicago’s contract sales market, her father, the contract buyers, and an interracial group of activists all knew that lack of access to formal credit markets was a principal cause of the problems of the ghetto. But they could not get anyone with power to pay attention. When they did get the attention of politicians, business leaders, civil rights leaders, and the courts, they either would not or could not do much about it. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton made a similar argument in their 1967 book, Black Power. “It is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords,




merchants, loan sharks, and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.”10

The twenty-first century housing crisis has brought many Americans closer to a “black” experi-ence of the housing market than ever before. Americans dove into mortgages with the sense that they would be able to build equity and sell their houses at a profit. Inspired by this core tenet of the American Dream, they worked hard, took advantage of opportunity where they found it (in low-interest and flexible-rate mortgages), and above all, took risks to build wealth for their fami-lies. But, like generations of African Americans since emancipation, Americans who strived to build places of their own found many often obscure forces working against them. Students of the subprime mortgage crisis, and of American urban history more broadly, could learn a great deal by following the history of African Americans in the city and what that history has to say about how the pressure to strive for homeownership and the evolving structures of race- and class-based exploitation worked together to extract massive amounts of wealth from ordinary Americans.

Notes 1. “Limbaugh Falsely Asserted ‘Banking Queen’ Barney Frank ‘Created Subprime Mortgage Crisis,’”

Media Matters for America, January 8, 2009. Available at: http://mediamatters.org/research/2009010 80014, last accessed May 6, 2010.

2. Christie Whitman, “Wall Street Wasn’t Alone In Causing Financial Crisis,” New Jersey News Room, May 5, 2010. Available at: http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/commentary/christie-whitman-wall-street-wasnt-alone-in-causing-financial-crisis, last accessed May 6, 2010.

3. Frank actually supported legislation to strengthen oversight of federally sponsored private mortgage insurers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Media Matters for America, “Limbaugh Falsely Asserted.” The profit motive, not federal policies, inspired the lion’s share of subprime loans. While federally supported enterprises “got into subprime junk and helped fuel the housing bubble . . . they were trailing the irrational exuberance of the private sector. They lost market share in the years 2002-2007, as the volume of private issue mortgage backed securities exploded.” Dean Baker, “Beat the Press,” The American Prospect, September 25, 2008. Available at: http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press, last accessed May 6, 2010. According to the Federal Reserve, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA)—one of the key tools Frank ostensibly used to force the federal govern-ment to lend money in low-income neighborhoods—actually facilitated responsible lending in low-income communities. Only 19 percent of CRA-regulated loans were supbrime in 2006, for example, compared to 23 percent of nonregulated bank loans, and over 40 percent of independent mortgage company loans. Robert B. Avery, Kenneth P. Brevoort, and Glenn B. Canner, “The 2006 HMDA Data,” Federal Reserve Bulletin, 94 (2007): A89. Available at: www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/bulletin/2007/pdf/hmda06draft.pdf, last accessed September 21, 2010. Janet L. Yellen, “Opening Remarks to the 2008 National Interagency Community Reinvestment Conference” (Paper Delivered by the President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, March 31, 2008). Available at: http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html#16, last accessed May 6, 2010. See also, Robert Gordon, “Did Liberals Cause the Subprime Crisis?” The American Prospect, April 7, 2008. Available at http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis, last accessed May 6, 2010; and Jeffrey Toobin, “Barney’s Great Adventure: The Most Outspoken Man in the House Gets Some Real Power,” The New Yorker, January 12, 2009. Available at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/12/090112fa_fact_toobin?printable=true, last accessed May 6, 2010. Nonetheless, the charges have stuck. Robert Gordon, “Did Liberals Cause the Sub-Prime Crisis?” American Prospect, April 7, 2008. Available at http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=09&year=2008&base_name=market_place_misleads_the_publ, last accessed May 6, 2010.



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4. Glen Johnson, “Frank Says GOP Housing Attacks Racially Motivated,” Breitbart, October 6, 2008. Available at http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D93LAKT01&show_article=1, last accessed May 6, 2010.

5. Zachary Karabell, “End of the ‘Ownership Society,’” Newsweek, October 11, 2008. Available at http://www.newsweek.com/2008/10/10/end-of-the-ownership-society.html, last accessed August 25, 2010.

6. Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge, 1983), 37. 7. Among many others, see: Jeanne Theoharris and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black

Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980 (New York, 2003); Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-1975 (Ann Arbor, 2009); Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston, 2005); and Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2009).

8. This is a term anthropologist St. Clair Drake used to describe Black Metropolis, the study he coau-thored with Horace Cayton in 1945. Drake to Ron [Karenga], June 8, 1979. St. Clair Drake Papers, Box 4, Folder “Letters by Drake,” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. New York Public Library. New York, New York.

9. Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York, 2010), 17-20.10. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York,

1967), 4. Quoted in Street, viii.

BioJeffrey Helgeson is an assistant professor at Texas State University-San Marcos. He is completing a book titled Striving in Black Chicago: Ambition, Accommodation, and Activism from the New Deal to Harold Washington, for the University of Chicago Press. His current research interests focus on the rela-tionships between the black press, black economic nationalism, and electoral politics in twentieth-century American cities.



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