Abstract
Black Citymakers returns to the neighborhood made famous by W. E. B. Du Bois’ meticulous study, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). Marcus Hunter did not attempt a full “revisit” of DuBois’ research. Instead, he investigated pivotal moments in the neighborhood’s subsequent history: struggles involving banks, housing, urban renewal, and political representation. Hunter discovers how diverse black leaders and residents shaped their own future, at the same time grappling with forces well beyond their control. He asserts that blacks have been active citizens of the neighborhood, city, and state. This is all the more incredible and, he argues, understandable because they have faced daunting challenges of discrimination, poverty, and disenfranchisement.
“The Problem” is the title of The Philadelphia Negro’s second chapter. Like DuBois, Hunter admits that sociologists need to study problems experienced by black people, but emphasizes that they must do so in the context of the diversity of experiences and situations and that they ought to emphasize black people’s agency. It is sad but understandable that Hunter and others need to make this point. Too often, sociologists have presented black urban residents simply as victims of white political leaders and structural conditions beyond their control. Cornel West has admonished the authors of such studies for attempting to demonstrate what should be assumed of all research subjects: their humanity. Humanity includes some agency and some submission to structure. What is most important is what agency and structure particular studies that assume such humanity expose. Many studies of neighborhood change that take agency seriously focus on the decisions (and constraints surrounding those decisions) to stay in or leave a neighborhood; to manage households while workers are either unemployed, receiving low wages, and/or suffering from the carceral state; to react to development threats from more economically and politically powerful outsiders; or to construct identities around the conjuncture of race, class, and neighborhood. For Hunter, agency and structure are found in political orientations and engagements of diverse actors in collective action, action meant to change a neighborhood’s trajectory.
Hunter investigates what he calls “critical junctures” in the neighborhood’s history: moments of intense conflict and collective organization. Concentrating on these moments allows him to expose fractures (among leaders, businesses, and residents) and to cover a variety of crucial social issues. The dominance of finance in today’s economy makes Hunter’s first chapter, on an early twentieth-century crisis in black financial institutions, especially important. It demonstrates how local economic self-sufficiency pursuits—two black-owned and -operated banks—emerged from the dust of the imploded national Freedmen’s Bank. The locally operated banks failed their investors too, so the Seventh Ward residents’ savings disappeared, despite their protests.
Two subsequent chapters cover demands to ameliorate slum conditions and the related alliances and conflicts between poor and middle-class blacks. We read about how the neighborhood’s black residents pushed housing availability and conditions to the forefront of policy agendas and about their successful resistance to a crosstown expressway plan, which would have practically eliminated the neighborhood. To be sure, despite political wins in both cases, results were disappointing: Public housing was sited and distributed by racial formulas, often reproducing racial inequalities. Twenty years of uncertainty during the struggle to stop the expressway caused disinvestment, irrevocably damaging the neighborhood. The final empirical chapter demonstrates how political leadership and demographic shifts from previous years enabled the election of the city’s first black mayor, W. Wilson Goode, in 1983. Hunter details how Goode’s leadership, like the many other political successes covered in the book, came with costs, at least to poor blacks still living in the Seventh Ward. Hunter elegantly captures the complicated, and often tragic, outcomes of political successes. But his primary concern is with the fact that these struggles happened at all, that blacks led them and had conflicts over how to lead them, and that their efforts made a difference to the neighborhood and the city.
One of Hunter’s important innovations is to connect grassroots politics to the cultural, economic, and demographic changes in neighborhoods observed by other urban sociologists. More specifically, Hunter considers how grassroots political leaders’ strategic moves and residents’ responses are rooted in changing neighborhood conditions. Hunter builds, for instance, on studies of the active construction of neighborhoods’ collective memories from the inside by Japonica Brown-Saracino and Fred Wherry and from the outside by Sharon Zukin, and from somewhat inadvertent differences in generational experience by Mario Small. Similarly, Hunter extends investigations of ethnic and racial enclaves such as those by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Karyn Lacy, Mary Pattillo, and Alejandro Portes. Unlike these researchers of community, Hunter focuses precisely on the political action that can emerge from a racial or ethnic enclave.
Another important lesson of Black Citymakers emerges from Hunter’s constant attention to how a neighborhood is nested within larger communities of the city, state, and nation. Throughout the book, Hunter masterfully illustrates political action and structure within a complicated network of different scales, perhaps heeding Neil Brenner’s call for spatial sensitivity through attention to multiple, connected scales. In Hunter’s account of the Seventh Ward, interests, frames, coalitions, and consensus are formed at intra-neighborhood, neighborhood, city, state, and federal levels; none is independent of the other. For instance, while discussing the collapse of a single set of rental housing units, Hunter discusses the experiences of the families who lived there, the neighborhood leaders who took up the cause, city politicians who listened to or ignored them, and city and federal housing policies—as well as how they all react to each other. In Hunter’s book, it almost always seems clear that the context of any political action, whether at the neighborhood or any other level, is the activity happening in nested political communities.
Hunter’s investigation will motivate worthwhile debates in sociology. Black Citymakers may inspire sociologists to articulate just how leaders and residents of a neighborhood are, or are not, pivotal to change in a city or in the nation. Hunter’s suggestion, for instance, that the Seventh Ward mattered significantly to W. Wilson Goode’s election or to the institution of post-WWII public-housing policy is likely to be challenged by explanations relying primarily on city- and national-level changes. Hunter’s selection of cases across the entire twentieth century will also provoke discussion about whether Hunter’s method of narrowing the geographical focus to a single neighborhood allows for reliable conclusions to be reached in a study of such historical breadth.
Because it spans the entire twentieth century, Black Citymakers will provide a unique resource for undergraduates taking courses in urban sociology, particularly those focused on neighborhood change and urban history. Hunter’s book will help students synthesize much of what they learn about the twentieth-century city in segments of an urban sociology course (such as on cultural, demographic, economic, political, racial, and ethnic changes). He creates a living, breathing, memorable narrative illustrating many of the processes that other books make their singular focus. Reading Hunter’s book on black Philadelphians of the Seventh Ward can help sociology students incorporate and debate more finely-grained studies into their understandings of the histories of American cities.