Abstract
C. Wright Mills observed that the sociological imagination is activated at the intersection of a person’s biography with history. Mary Barr’s Friends Disappear: The Battle for Racial Equality in Evanston is an exemplar of that imagination. The research combines multiple topics of race, class, and education embedded in personal and community contexts with appropriate multimethods to match. It is a historical case study of community conflict centered on race and class relations; yet embedded in this is a study of the evolution and dissolution of the author’s adolescent friendship network shaped by this structural context. The methods include extensive and detailed archival analysis, heroic efforts over many years to track down subjects for in-depth interviews and life histories, and the author’s auto-ethnography and self-reflective remembrances of things past. The organization of the book is beautifully crafted with chapter-by-chapter and even within-chapter interweaving of the multimethod archival data of public events with private and personal reflections.
At one level it is an accounting of specific persons’ lives as they are shaped from youth to adulthood in the historical context of a community’s race and class relations. At a more profound structural level it is an analysis of the institutional structure of opportunities and constraints, of privilege and barriers that reproduce early inequalities, leading some into successful adult careers while others suffer diminished opportunities and even death. The thirteen middle school friends of mixed race, class, and gender are poignantly seen in the book’s cover photo sitting on the front stoop of a large Victorian house, a photo that supplies the central trope and title of the book. The larger nested context is both national and local, and the vertical linkage is not simply a posited set of vague and reified “forces” such as “the civil rights movement” but grounded and direct, as evidenced by Martin Luther King’s being invited to deliver a speech (an early version of “I Have A Dream”) to a synagogue in the community or Roy Wilkins chiding the community at another forum for its belated employment of blacks in banks.
Barr sets the scene by tracing the community’s early history and the fact that it was, from its origin, concurrent with the founding of Northwestern University in the mid-nineteenth century, home to a black population that by the mid-twentieth century was 16 percent of the city’s 80,000 inhabitants. They were ghettoized on the west side ofthe city with their own segregated institutions—black churches, a black hospital, a black YMCA, local stores and shops, and a local elementary school. Significantly, the four middle schools and the single high school of the city, given their larger catchment areas, were racially “desegregated” if not internally integrated.
Barr traces in exquisite detail the drama of actors and events that unfolded as the self-complacent and self-delusional myth of the community’s “successful” race relations became challenged in marches, demonstrations, and calls for institutional change in segregated schools and neighborhood housing in the 1960s. Barr details how this myth of success masked the reality of neighborhood segregation by race. The myth of successful integration in the middle schools and high school was clearly belied by differing opportunities and capacity to access resources such as the educational tracking system, extracurricular clubs, and sport teams. Many of the black working-class kids were helping to support their families with part-time after-school jobs.
Two early chapters focus on schools and another on housing; these draw on detailed archives of newspaper accounts, minutes of meetings, and other documents from the local historical society and municipal library. Barr traces the dynamics of community conflict that erupted first over school desegregation and second over neighborhood segregation and open housing issues. A decade after Brown v. Board of Education the community developed a nationally heralded plan of “enlightened” voluntary school integration. A superintendent newly hired to implement the plan extended the mandate to include racially integrated teaching and administrative staff as well as adding a more Afrocentric curriculum. Opposition from many white residents led the school board not to renew his contract, which set the stage for a classic community conflict. Black residents mobilized in support of the white superintendent. They organized and staged protests and marches, joined by more progressive white liberals in the community. The myth of Evanston being a community with good race relations was shattered.
In equally exquisite detail, Barr documents a second conflict over race relations that centered on proposals for open housing ordinances in light of national civil rights legislation in the 1960s to counter the racially restrictive practices of realtors in the community. This was a direct challenge to the root of neighborhood segregation. Again, mobilization, organization, protests, and marches occurred to support these ordinances and included national civil rights organizations and their local branches. Counter-mobilization included white homeowners’ associations, realtors, selected members of the city council, and the mayor.
A third conflict Barr details was a sit-in protest staged by black high school students desiring curriculum change and greater voice and opportunity, expressed in a list of demands. In format and content it mirrored black student protest and takeover of the administration building across town at Northwestern University.
The above are highly detailed accounts of the public nature of race relations at the time and a locally grounded contribution to racially based community conflict. One can hear the voices of the people involved through numerous direct quotes and accounts uncovered by the author’s diligence in the archives. The drama and the dynamics of the unfolding conflicts are captured in her well-paced, organized writing. More theoretical and conceptual development and linkage to the voluminous literatures on school desegregation and racial integration in housing would have strengthened the argument by placing the case in context.
And what of the kids in the photograph? Through a dogged process over several years, Barr locates them and gets their remembrances of that adolescent period and their ensuing life histories. Using such techniques as the book cover photo (and others scattered throughout the book) as a stimulus for recall and analysis of their “cognitive maps” of the community, she traces the factors that brought them together for what seems a “magical” moment in their lives in which they were unconscious of the structural forces of class and race that were shaping their friendships and their fates. For example, they didn’t think about the fact that the white kids rarely if ever visited the black kids in their homes, located in the racially segregated neighborhoods, or the fact that many of the black kids could not participate in extra-curricular activities due to part-time work or childcare duties. As one black respondent reminisced about those times, it wasn’t about race: it was about friendship. Was this a liminal period of opportunity for interracial contact historically and personally (civil rights consciousness and early adolescence)—a remembrance of innocence past, viewed differently now through the sociological imagination?
Clearly the thirteen friends of mixed race, class, and gender in the photo are a selective sampling frame whose fates satisfy the author’s curiosity and equally clearly allow the author to document instances of white privilege and black barriers and their varying outcomes. The whites had family and institutional safety nets and second and third chances that the black kids often lacked, though dedicated teachers were recalled by many. Most of the white kids went on to college and two received PhDs, while three of the black kids were high-school dropouts and only one went on to college. The author subtly teases out nuances of these elements of structural and overt racism and class differences that were at times invisible to the actors themselves as they made life choices that led to accumulating advantage and disadvantage. The author’s writing draws the reader empathetically into identification with and concern about the fates of the named kids.
Undoubtedly there were a variety of other trajectories and experiences of kids in the context of this community that shaped othernetworks and other social circles in different ways. The author acknowledges these omissions—only one white boy, no middle-class black boys, and no working-class white boys were among the subjects, and black girls are missing entirely from the analysis. But, overall what is included is a powerful and poignant application of the sociological imagination to the structural history and personal biography of a community’s race relations.
The book can serve as a text as well as a research monograph, and the writing is readily accessible to students. It can serve policymakers as a statement highlighting the subtlety of problems of class and the color line yet to be solved.