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In Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Postwar Detroit, Karen Miller “debunks the myth that racism used to be obvious and straightforward, not the slippery, elusive, and confusing animal it has become today . . . .” In the context of the past few years—from the police violence exposed by #BlackLivesMatter to neo-Nazis marching en masse, and the mainstream media’s more common use of the term white supremacy, racism may hardly seems elusive. And yet, Miller—and several books under review here—analyze, from the ground up, how racial segregation became entangled in putatively progressive legal strategies and reproduced in new forms.
These six books expand the geographic, ideological, and chronological framing of the civil rights movement. While several authors closely focus on civil rights reform and its precursors, others’ analyses encompass rising black political power, the coalitions that advanced or thwarted racial justice, and the transformation of white resistance. Most extend the movement’s chronology into and beyond the 1970s; others trace intersections with environmentalism and feminism. Collectively, these books offer the most sophisticated meditation on the contours of twentieth-century racial liberalism. 1
While urban historians have long established the nexus of zoning laws, real-estate practices, unspoken codes, and explicit economic discrimination that effectively entrench racial segregation, these authors unravel the myths of northern innocence that bolstered their de facto shield. Brett Gadsen’s account of school desegregation in Delaware, Steve Estes’s examination of Charleston’s conflicted southern progressivism, and Karen Miller’s analysis of Jim Crow urbanism in Detroit establish that the de jure and de facto distinctions written into public policy and used to lambast the south as a violent backwater also immunized northern institutions as their own forms of racial segregation took enduring hold.
Miller’s Managing Inequality argues that racial liberalism emerged as a distinctive political ideology in the interwar years, one that drew on models from the Jim Crow South, even as its proponents cast themselves as avatars of urban progress. Miller argues that the stakes of this history are evident in the ways “color blindness” is deployed in contemporary debates over affirmative action and other race-conscious policies. “Color blindness” has transformed from a call for racial equality to the anchor of conservative opposition to affirmative action. Such policies, opponents claim, undermined the spirit of the civil rights movement by reifying race and, thus, inflaming racial tensions. In Detroit, Miller finds, “Northern racial liberalism married the two components that colorblind racism does today: an extension and affirmation of racial inequality alongside a commitment to the language of interracial understanding and race neutrality” (p. 7). But how did these seemingly contradictory impulses take such intractable form?
Miller refutes what she describes as the “unexamined” assumption that the “modern urban state was race neutral at its conception,” only to be “corrupted” by responses to the Great Migration (p. 16). Examining the Detroit News’ coverage of 1908 race riots in Springfield, Illinois, Miller notes that white leaders condemned white rioters. Yet, in a rhetorical move similar to Donald Trump’s insistence that “many sides” provoked violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, the News declared the “undesirable of both classes” blameworthy (pp. 30-31). By quoting black and white sources who agreed with this interpretation, Miller argues, the account of the riot became one about race-neutral civil disorder. White reformers condemned racial violence in general terms, her evidence shows, but prioritized order over justice.
At other times, Detroit policymakers embraced racial management. Among Miller’s most striking discoveries is Detroit officials’ interest in southern urban models. In 1935, Detroit’s mayor considered a plan to use zoning and condemnation to achieve segregation of the kind “effective in the South.” Officials acknowledged that the obvious domination of Jim Crow was neither feasible nor desirable in the north and suggest instead “educating” black northerners to see, according to one city planner, “the value of some adequate plan of segregation” (pp. 9-10). Their approach, Miller shows, set the stage for a city in which “race-neutral language coexists with extreme racial inequalities that appear natural rather than political” (p. 6).
Miller argues the Great Depression did not merely extend forms of racial exclusion to new policies but also ushered in particularly racialized conceptions of poverty. One welfare commissioner justified the shuttering of a maternity hospital that served black families by exhorting critics to “not worry so much about a few Hastings street pickaninnies and start worrying more about the white taxpayers” (p. 130). Miller argues that such language points to a shift during the 1930s in which hard decisions over the distribution of resources were framed in racial terms across the political spectrum. The term white taxpayer came into more prominent usage even as white migrants comprised more than 85 percent of the city’s newcomers during the 1920s and also sought relief (p. 160).
The racially disparate impacts of the New Deal were not merely the product of compromise with southern officials, Miller shows; comparatively liberal northerners also contributed. “While conservatives used African Americans to represent the dangers of a state-sponsored welfare system,” Miller writes, “liberals used representations of African Americans to mark the limits of their willingness to implement change” (p. 145). At the same time that both sides developed their own logic of black exclusion, they offered rhetorical sympathy for black people. Indeed, a key element of racial liberalism, Miller notes, was the simultaneous acknowledgment of black suffering and the erasure of black self-organization and advocacy.
The logic of racial liberalism required consent from black leaders, who contested—and also shaped it—through intraracial debate, negotiation with white authorities, and increasingly militant protest. Black reformers wanted to aid struggling neighbors, preserve the economic footholds they held, and organize their growing communities into a disciplined political constituency. Even as black leaders pressed to make the inclusive promises of New Deal programs a reality, Miller notes that the white press did not cover black protest, and white officials rarely acknowledged when they were its targets. Instead, she shows, they translated black residents’ dissent into a desire to control disorder and prevent crime (p. 265). Northern racial liberalism appears insidious in Miller’s account precisely because it masqueraded as progressivism. But Miller also nods to its more promising contradictions: African Americans seized upon even shallow liberal commitments to advance their rights and win more resources for their neighborhoods.
Stanley Keith Arnold’s Building the Beloved Community and Abigail Perkiss’s Good Neighbors offer complementary views on the ideologies and strategies of more sincere racial liberals in Philadelphia. Arnold documents the decades’ long work of the Fellowship House and the Fellowship Commission, which tackled city-wide issues while keeping a foothold in South Philadelphia. Perkiss analyzes the efforts of the West Mount Airy Neighbors Association (WMAN) to establish a truly integrated community. Each group struggled to carve out model spaces of interracial dialogue and moral commitment that would improve race relations beyond Philadelphia.
Like Miller, Arnold sees the interwar period as critical in establishing new patterns of municipal reform and activism among black communities devastated by the Great Depression. He also delves into the cultural ferment that in 1941 produced Fellowship House, a kind of contemporary settlement house focused on education, research, and advocacy. Arnold argues that it took a conceptual shift to direct attention from southern Jim Crow to local struggles. Fellowship activists made some forays into confrontation but mostly preferred modeling integration through classes, social events, and children’s programming. They also spun off the Fellowship Commission, an umbrella of organizations devoted to interracial work that lobbied with some success for antidiscriminatory policies at the state and federal level (p. 47). Direct action activism and calls for Black Power sidelined Fellowship House’s approach by the mid-1960s, yet its supporters persisted. Where Miller might point to this as an example of how the small scale of racial liberalism endures perennial deferral of racial justice, Arnold finds a more durable strategy for creating an anti-racist climate and the political will for more far-reaching change.
As Fellowship House worked toward racial understanding on a city-wide basis, one of its founders, Marjorie Copeland, perceived integration as an urgent task in her own Philadelphia neighborhood of Mt. Airy. Perkiss illuminates the intersection of the personal and the structural in her intimate study of the rise, fall, and adaptation of racial liberalism in Mt. Airy. This handsome neighborhood of middle-class and affluent Philadelphians attracted white integrationists like Copeland and prominent black Philadelphians. Mt. Airy became home to a “veritable Who’s Who of Philadelphia’s Black elite,” including Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, who served on President Harry Truman’s Commission on Civil Rights; her husband, Judge Raymond Pace Alexander; and Reverend Leon Sullivan, founder of the Opportunities Industrialization Centers, a model for the War on Poverty and a forerunner of community development corporations (p. 68).
In the 1950s, residents confronted the confluence of deteriorating housing, blockbusting, and suburban expansion. And yet, Perkiss argues, in their refusal “to believe the American Dream had been relocated to newly forming suburbs,” Mt. Airy’s integrationists countered the assumption that urban decline and segregation were inevitable (p. 35). Instead, they took a firm hand in the transitions in their neighborhood by forming WMAN to organize on a block-by-block basis, dispatching unscrupulous real-estate agents and bringing white and black neighbors together. Undergirding their efforts was what Perkiss calls “grassroots moral liberalism,” which “blended individual responsibility and persuasion with structural accountability (p. 5). Perkiss here makes a useful intervention. Recent historiography on the black freedom movement and feminism offer a necessary critique of liberalism, and yet liberalism has often served as a static backdrop against which radical left and conservative critiques are defined—not a variegated and adaptive ideology in its own right. While “grassroots moral liberalism” was certainly susceptible to paternalism, it also emerges as a more thoughtful alternative to the ambient version in much scholarship. The distinction is necessary because while many Americans may have subscribed in a general sense to WMAN’s racial liberalism, not all committed to the pursuit of racial integration with the same force and endurance.
Perkiss is attuned to the variety of motivations that brought white and black residents together. For whites, Perkiss finds, interracial living resembled what today might be called a lifestyle: the preference of the culturally urbane, modern, and community-minded (p. 60). But Mt. Airy’s boosters also perceived integration as a political decision, “democracy in action” (p. 56). Black homebuyers may have shared these values. For example, Don Black, an African American leader of WMAN, argued that the neighborhood’s activist networks allowed him to “channel his indignation” at racism he had experienced (p. 75). But they were more likely to be attracted by promises of better-funded education, city services, and other amenities than by “abstract notions of justice and equality” (p. 69).
No forum for WMAN proved more contentious than Mt. Airy’s strong public schools, which shifted to a black majority in the 1960s not only because the population of the neighborhood had changed but also because the Philadelphia Board of Education reassigned black students from overcrowded schools in neighboring communities. WMAN members briefly considered insisting that the district remove the new students. While they ultimately rejected such a plan, the debate raised a bigger question: how could an organization grounded in “grassroots moral liberalism” respond when their beacon of integration either came at a cost to others outside Mt. Airy or collapsed with their inclusion? That question echoed across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. As activists turned inward to model the social justice aims that remained elusive on a national scale, they struggled over whether and how to insulate their achievements.
In this instance, school integration advocates responded with outreach aimed at maintaining white enrollment and an ill-defined racial balance. Such integration relied to a large extent on quelling white parents’ anxieties, especially as the district’s orders meant fewer resources divided among more children. School leaders’ emphasis on stemming white flight meant that black students “fell victim to lower tracking, an inattentive administration, and at times, physical mistreatment” (p. 98). Mt. Airy, Perkiss writes, had always relied on “coordinated collaboration with government agencies and institutions in order to preserve and maintain the character of the neighborhood, racially and economically” but found that position unworkable when it came to public education (p. 101). Mt. Airy wanted both the freedom to run its schools as it saw fit and the resources necessary to maintain their strength, while the district required the flexibility to shift resources and student populations to advance the good of the entire district, not the integration of one neighborhood.
Among those who came to question WMAN’s effectiveness was local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader Cecil B. Moore. Perkiss and Arnold cite Moore as a vociferous and influential critic of the kind of interracial reform their subjects advocated. Moore became a leader of the Philadelphia NAACP in the early 1960s and supported the direct action protests over employment discrimination that led to federal intervention and the crafting of the Philadelphia Plan, an early effort at affirmative action that became a national touchstone. Moore emphasized the significance of black-led mobilization, building and leveraging power, and fostering intraracial solidarity. Moore opposed civil rights activism focused on assuaging whites’ perceptions and fears of integration, and even more so, efforts that failed to deliver better housing and schooling to Philadelphia’s black neighborhoods. Mt. Airy, derided by Moore as an enclave of “warmed over part-time Negroes” represented “a retreat from the realities of black America, a spatial, social, and political dividing line that separated the masses from the disingenuous middle-class. In this way, Moore turned Mt. Airy into a symbol of the collusion between the city’s black elite and the white political establishment” (p. 76).
Moore’s voice represented broader rifts over the place of integration in the movement and the urgency of amassing black political power. And yet, WMAN, like Fellowship House, carried on. To be sure, some liberals sought to paper over the chasm among once-allied groups, while others turned a blind eye, declaring as did some Mt. Airy residents that they simply “weren’t racist.” Yet others sought to adapt grassroots moral liberalism to changing times. Attempting to assess the local climate they once knew so well, WMAN invited residents to “Talk about what you really think about your neighbors and your neighborhood . . . We’re not sure you’ll enjoy it; but we’re not sure you’re supposed to” (p. 124). This shift inverted the earlier vision of race relations work championed by the Fellowship House and by Mt. Airy’s liberals in the 1950s. While previously they had favored enlightened discussion and tolerance based in a shared moral commitment and middle-class sensibility, they now exhorted neighbors to disclose their unvarnished opinions of one another, to make themselves vulnerable, to have their own lives critiqued and their moral positions savaged. But some common values endured: the new dialogue they pursued still depended on civility, persistence, moral commitment to both confrontation and dialogue, and empathy.
Such an approach proved less durable when the changing city and the punishing economic tumult of the 1970s destabilized Mt. Airy’s hard-won and imperfect experiment in integration. As crime rose in Mt. Airy, an increasingly vocal group of residents and business owners argued that the liberal line—which targeted police brutality and structural inequality—was insufficient. This criticism precipitated a crisis in the ranks of WMAN. Crime, writes Perkiss, “brought together the cultural turn toward racial pride and self-help of the 1960s with the long-standing disconnect between Mt. Airy’s white and black residents over the meaning of integrated space” (p. 136). A former WMAN president, Oliver Lancaster, broke off from the group to form a new, black-led organization to address crime, West Mount Airy Action, Inc. Instead of integration, the group sought what Perkiss describes as “an alternative vision of race conscious community control” (p. 137). In the wake of this and other divisions, WMAN retreated from its earlier vision of interracial cooperation. It advanced instead a more amorphous concept of diversity, one that did not attempt to smooth over difference, and yet, also, forfeited the specific challenge of racial integration.
Although contemporary politics are outside the scope of both books, more could be done to link critiques of midcentury liberalism to the strands of multiculturalism offered as bromides, or weak policies that neglect the relationship between race and class, while retreating from an actual redistribution of resources. Consider widespread public opposition to the construction of low-income housing in middle-class districts. At a Houston, Texas school with a multicultural mural reading “All the World Is All of Us,” mostly white, affluent parents in a liberal district defeated the construction of low-income housing because it would bring more poor and minority children into their school—just as decades earlier, Mt. Airy residents were tempted to organize against the influx of poor children. 2 They ultimately decided such a position violated their values. At the same time, Perkiss suggests that the reputation for progressivism Mt. Airy enjoys to this day required a shift from promoting their neighborhood as “a site of interracial living to a model of alternative urbanity, a deracialized compromise toward diversity” (p. 144). What would Miller make of the kind of racial liberalism outlined by Perkiss and Arnold? Examples of the possibilities seized by black activists and their allies to expand their rights? Or evidence of how the commitment to racial tolerance and the willingness to abide deep inequality can become mutually constitutive?
Key to Brett Gadsden’s analysis in Between North and South are what he calls the regional “imaginaries” of de jure and de facto discrimination. In an analysis that parallels Miller’s account of the origins of colorblind racism, Gadsden illuminates the construction of regional difference over nearly half a century of school desegregation efforts. Legally codified distinctions between de jure and de facto discrimination, he writes, “both widened the avenue for reform in the formerly Jim Crow states and extended a collective exemption to school districts in the North and West that also maintained segregated school but on terms widely considered beyond legal reproach” (p. 13). He argues that these distinctions—while delimiting an arena for effective court action in the short-term—ultimately restrained more thoroughgoing attacks on school segregation.
The oft-neglected state of Delaware, he tells us, has much to teach about how the pursuit of desegregated education emerged as a legal strategy and the role the de jure/de facto distinction has played in both undermining and abetting school segregation. Like Arnold and Perkiss, Gadsden also complicates the commitment to school integration at the heart of liberal jurisprudence, seeking to revise “the portrayal of school desegregation proponents as ideological dogmatists” (p. 5).
A distinctive strength of Gadsden’s argument is his marriage of compelling legal analysis with attention to grassroots organizing that enabled cases to reach the court. Starting in the late 1930s, early desegregation cases focused on black students’ access to graduate education and rarely pursued full-scale desegregation—instead arguing within the framework of Plessy v. Ferguson that while “separate but equal” may be the law, the reality for black students seeking graduate education was “separate but nonexistent.” The result, Gadsden argues, was that “school desegregation opponents and boosters of historically black education found common cause” in defending and bolstering black institutions against claims of inferiority (pp. 24-25). Even if these early legal forays did not upend “separate but equal,” Gadsden argues, black plaintiffs often saw more funding for their institutions, much like the Depression-era black activists Miller documents used the openings provided by racial liberalism to claim the full entitlements of New Deal citizenship.
In the years before Brown v. Board of Education, legal challenges expanded activist horizons and advanced what Gadsden sees as a shift in black parents and students’ demands from “equalization to desegregation” (p. 61). Gadsden refutes a simplistic critique of legal history as dictated by lawyers and institutions. The legal history of desegregation, he asserts, is deeply engaged in the grassroots: parents, teachers, and students who articulated pressing injustices and provided the narrative cohesion necessary to knit together the various challenges to the legal basis of racial segregation.
Much of this intervention came in the form of black parents’ testimony on their unrelenting efforts to achieve the most basic form of educational equity. Bulah v. Gebhart (1951) originated with Sarah Bulah’s attempts to secure bus transportation for her daughter on the segregated white bus that already passed right by the black school her daughter attended. Parents like Bulah turned Delaware into “one of the central proving grounds for the NAACP’S campaign against segregation.” Propelled all the way to the Supreme Court, Bulah v. Gebhart (and Belton v. Gebhart) was bundled with Brown v. Board of Education (p. 6).
Gadsden is attuned not only to legal strategies but also to the long battle over implementation that followed and the claims of white victimhood that stalled desegregation efforts. For example, parents in the southern Delaware town of Milford rose up against their school board demanding to “[k]eep our schools white” after a small group of black students were admitted with little initial opposition to the all-white school. White parents’ growing outrage resulted in the temporary closure of the school and the permanent removal of the black students. Officials in other towns retreated from desegregation, insisting they could not chance similar upheaval (p. 112).
Gadsden also documents ambivalence toward integration among black educators and parents, divided over how desegregation should proceed and worried that black children would pay its price. Desegregation threatened the very educators who had nurtured black students, while the uncertain future of integrated schooling threatened to expose black children to violence, neglect, and internal segregation in the form of racial tracking. In some cases, redistricting threatened black schools that performed equally as well, or better than, neighboring white schools. Still, Gadsden shows that such ambivalence did not significantly alter the legal momentum for desegregation in the early 1960s.
A decade later, however, perspectives had changed. In Wilmington, advocates for more robust desegregation plans sometimes clashed with black officials for whom the existing system offered a source of political power. As Gadsden notes, “black commentators in Wilmington began to assess the Wilmington Board of Education through the prism of black power and community control.” Their definition of community control referred to the community of interest in the school, not to a narrow geographic concept they associated with the “class-based, ostensibly race-neutral rallying concept of suburban busing opponents cite to oppose court-ordered busing” (p. 181). Even so, the state wasted no opportunity in advancing a “black complicity argument” that Wilmington’s highly segregated school district “had been produced with the consent of black officials” (p. 192).
In the 1970s, NAACP attorneys sought to advance a “metropolitan” approach that moved beyond segregated classrooms to the entrenched housing discrimination that produced them (pp. 173-179). In 1974, they won their suit against the Delaware Board of Education, a victory that offers a revealing counterpoint for students of urban and civil rights history who may be most familiar with the fate of the “metropolitan remedy” attempted in Detroit and its suburbs. In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled against Detroit’s plan in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), arguing that inequality between urban and suburban districts was de facto and not subject to legal recourse. The same year, Wilmington activists were fighting for their own metropolitan remedy. Milliken, Gadsden writes, “declared that school district lines were virtually sacrosanct” and marked a major defeat for cities attempting to address the mutually constitutive relationship between school segregation and economic inequality (p. 195). But in Wilmington’s case, the District Court acknowledged the “broad scope of discriminatory actions in state-sponsored education and housing policies that shaped the racial demographics of the Wilmington metropolitan housing and pupil assignment patterns” (pp. 196-197). While the NAACP and its allies lost the northern campaign to advance metropolitan desegregation, their Delaware victory established “a most expansive expression of Brown . . . to allegedly de facto forms of school segregation outside the context of Jim Crow” (p. 210).
Like Perkiss and Gadsden, Steve Estes follows the intricacies of desegregation in Charleston, South Carolina into the late twentieth century. As in Delaware, early campaigns against segregation concluded with more funding for black schools rather than true transformation. In the late 1960s, the process began in earnest, but segregation persisted through tracking of black students, social segregation, and even in the case of the putatively integrated Wando High School, segregated buses—known as “American Bandstand” and the “Soul Train”—for the transport of school band members (p. 86). When attempts to prove that earlier school consolidation had produced discriminatory boundaries failed in court, the city resorted to smaller scale interventions, including the establishment of magnet schools, but these short-lived experiments, Estes argues, ended with a city segregated by both race and class (p. 103-104).
Like Perkiss, Estes argues that civil rights law did little to acknowledge how class inequality and the pursuit of private education deepened racial segregation. The influence of private schools was not confined to the so-called “segregation academies” of the south: just as middle-class whites and blacks transferred their children to Mount Airy’s private Friends Academy, Estes notes that black parents of means also joined the migration to the Charleston suburbs, leaving behind more homogenously low-income districts in their wake (p. 89).
While conservatism thrived in these growing suburbs, Estes contests the argument that white suburbanization enjoyed an uncontested boost in national influence, uncovering “a fascinating history of urban and liberal southern politicians this era, a strain of politics that led to the election of left of center black and white officials across the South . . .” (p. 36). He examines how civil rights and black power established a set of new expectations for white Democratic leaders, such as Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. Derisively dubbed “Little Black Joe,” Riley was seen as a “race traitor” by white Charlestonians for his support of affirmative action (pp. 35, 56). Riley, who campaigned on a racially inclusive platform, did not back down, weakening racial barriers through appointments as he sought to reknit the fabric of a city dispersed by suburbanization.
Estes, like Perkiss, notes that rising crime rates captivated local and national politics in Charleston in the 1980s, placing pressure on left-leaning coalitions. Estes examines these currents in depth through the storied career of Charleston’s first black (and Jewish) police chief, Reuben Greenberg. Inspired by civil rights and black power activists and educated at San Francisco State and Berkeley in the 1960s, Greenberg aimed to transform policing. By the time he took the helm of Charleston’s department in the 1980s, the workforce had diversified and implemented measures to make police more accountable to residents. Yet complaints of violence against minorities were common.
Greenberg’s integrity—“he even ticketed himself for parking and traffic violations”—earned him widespread admiration, and violent crime did decline during his time (pp. 71-72). At the same time, he drew on a wealth of conservative thinkers who emphasized personal choice and accountability over social structure, even helping devise a policy permitting doctors to test pregnant women seeking care at public hospitals for drug use and to inform police. Poor, black women arrested under this rule sued the city; Ferguson v. City of Charleston went to the Supreme Court, where the plaintiffs won. “The intent was color-blind,” Estes writes, “but the effect was not. Class became a proxy for race, and then medical need became a proxy for class” (p. 78). Greenberg’s commitment to racial-diversity, coupled with aggressive policing and surveillance of the poor, is a counterpoint to Mt. Airy’s black liberals who sought to address crime through a combination of vigilance and attention to the stark social and economic conditions facing Philadelphia’s youth (Perkiss, pp. 137-141).
If Charleston complicates the rightward swing in the south, it hardly tells a tale of progressive survival. Progressive strands and unexpected coalitions were hardly sufficient to stall—and in some cases contributed to—conservative victories. As black Democrats sought headway against entrenched white Democrats, they found a temporary ally in state Republicans. But if their alliance produced the redistricting black leaders sought, Estes notes, it was also a “key accelerant” in the Republican rise. ‘In the process of getting a couple more members of the Black Caucus,” Estes quotes an NAACP activist, “they actually set the stage for the Republican Party to become pretty much invincible in South Carolina” (p. 146).
David and Richard Stradling frame Where the River Burned with the mayoralty of Carl Stokes, Cleveland’s first black mayor, and the long exploitation of Cleveland’s waterways by private interests, local government, and federal officials. They offer a history of environmentalism, rising black electoral power, and urban crisis, anchored by memorable images of Cleveland’s environmental degradation. Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire at least ten times before the 1969 conflagration that made it a potent symbol for environmentalists. Stradling and Stradling position the “urban crisis” as an environmental crisis and Stokes as a candidate who sought to establish that link by stressing shared responsibility: “Urban problems will leak to the suburbs, Stokes promised—pollution and crime and even the rats . . . all boundaries, even municipal lines, are porous” (p. 66). Stradling and Stradling offer Cleveland’s twinned history of environmental and urban crisis to the collective critique of liberalism emerging from these books, taking liberalism to task because it “encouraged activist government at the local and federal level but did nothing to address the inequities of investment across the metropolis that ensured the creation of concentrated poverty and central city decay” (p. xi).
The authors admire Stokes’s ability to “see the city more completely than any of his predecessors” but acknowledge that these attributes made him neither popular nor effective (p. 32). Stokes himself, like Newark’s first black mayor, Kenneth Gibson, tried to contain voters’ outsized expectations by warning them that he was “not Superman” (p. 27). Among the most striking chapters is an account of the Stokes’ plan to build a swimming pool area at the East 55th St. Marina, within Lake Erie yet separated from its notorious pollutants and raw effluent. Relying in part on federal funds, the city erected a vinyl barrier around a section of the lake—and then bleached the water. After the opening, a thunderstorm upended the pontoons and contaminated the newly reopened beach; bleach seeping into surrounding waters led to a fish kill. The fiasco illustrated the authors’ critique of liberal approaches to environmental catastrophe: at every turn, officials resisted heavier regulations that would have exerted a cost on business. Instead, short-sighted pragmatism produced jerry-rigged, unsustainable, and costly solutions.
By the end of his term, Stokes increasingly saw environmentalism at odds with attempts to improve the urban environment. In 1970, during Earth Day celebrations, Stokes emphasized Black Power critiques of white privilege encoded in environmentalism: “I am fearful that the priorities of air and water pollution may be at the expense of what the priorities of the country ought to be: proper housing, adequate food, and shelter” (p. 173). To explain this about-face, Stradling and Stradling point to the perception that the federal government’s retreat from antipoverty funding had made advocacy for the poor or the environment a zero-sum game, one without winners: Echoing Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 poem “Whitey on the Moon,” former Cleveland Mayor Ralph Locher observed, “This age could well be known as the one in which America is shooting rockets to the moon, while we stand ankle deep in sewage” (p. 133).
For two decades, civil rights scholarship has shifted from metanarratives to local struggle, seeking roots earlier in the twentieth century, and turning to the north and west.
Historians must not only account for the toll of racial discrimination in the past but the ways in which it adapted. How did racial liberalism both enable and deflect the pursuit of racial justice? For Miller and Stradling and Stradling, liberalism is like a weak antibiotic, providing short-term relief from explicit racism and a catalyst for protest and reform, yet it ultimately breeds more subtle and resistant strains. Arnold, Perkiss and Gadsden present a more positive view, albeit one premised not on liberalism’s immediate benefits but rather its capacity for vigilance and for endurance. For Estes, liberalism’s inability to fully reckon with class leads to its inadvertent co-optation by rising conservatism, and yet he insists that it is the job of the historian to tally as well the many small successes of a racial liberalism, the very structure of which prevented it from fulfilling its promises. Heroism abounds in these books, yet justice is hardly a graceful arc. Rather it is a twisted vine, pulling against itself, always rooted in a past shaped most influentially by racial liberalism.