Abstract
Lance Freeman’s A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America provides a rich historical account of the creation and perpetuation of the black American ghetto focusing on ghettos outside of the eleven states that originally constituted the Confederate States of America. The temporal scale of this book ranges from 1880 to present day, drawing deeply form primary sources including census data, newspapers, court rulings, and biographical vignettes. The book walks chronologically through the history of the black ghetto, beginning with their establishment as blacks migrate to the urban north during reconstruction to places of gentrification and displacement in the present. Through time, historical patterns emerge in urban planning policy such as redlining, segregation, and racially restrictive covenants which both concentrated black institutions and fostered a black sense of place while simultaneously being used as an instrument of oppression. Freeman’s work is illustrative of the ghettos capacity to be both self-generative and destructive.
A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America challenges the generalization of the ghetto as a hell and takes great care in examining the positive aspects of these spaces as cultural, economic, and political havens. This book builds on Robert Weavers seminal work, The Negro Ghetto, published in 1948, which focuses on the historical establishment of black ghettos due to northern migration. Weaver does this through a sociological study, using quantitative data to support his arguments, much like Freeman. Freeman’s work also builds on the historical work of Kenneth Clark and Monique Taylor, who published The Dark Ghetto in 1965 and Harlem: Between Heaven and Hell in 2002, respectively. These texts primarily focus on the black ghetto as a hell, capturing the historical moments that they were conceived in. Freeman advances his work by detailing an exhaustive history of black ghettos in northern states, surveying their positive and negative influences all while underscoring their importance as black-generated and black-identifying spaces. He does acknowledge the fact that his book is chronologically arranged around historical eras that do not fit as neatly together as his work alludes to, but that is a liberty he took while arranging the themes of the chapters.
Freeman positions the ghetto as both a haven and a hell, two enduring through lines in his book. These juxtaposed themes are held in tension while applying historical, political, and cultural context that unfold over the course of 130 years of American history. First, Freeman establishes the ghetto as a haven, a place “for economic mobility, political enfranchisement, and cultural expression” (p. 10). Ghettos began as spaces of segregation and stigmatization during the Great Migration but soon evolved into what Freeman calls Black Enclaves. The New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance epitomized the high period of the ghetto as a haven where, in the fires of black enclaves, a sense of “racial pride and self-reliance” was forged (p. 70). It was here that ghettos were a springboard for upward mobility, and black art and music proved the humanity of the black urban dweller. The Great Depression was a historical moment that ended the New Negro era and put great economic strain on an already marginalized community and with that faded the dream of a black metropolis. The ebb and flow of the history allows the reader to better understand the ghetto as both a place of cultural refuge and one of marginalization over time, a true benefit of Freeman’s temporal scope.
The theme of the ghetto as a hell emerges, which is illustrated by the compounding disadvantages of ghetto life including crime, unemployment, changing family composition, and mass incarceration. It is important to note that Freeman does not romanticize the ghetto as a spatial ideal and that he is forthright about the living conditions experienced by a large majority of ghetto dwellers. Freeman contextualizes this by reporting on the living conditions of historically black majority neighborhoods like the Hill District in Pittsburgh where “6,000 of 11,500 units were substandard, lacking facilities such as a bathroom and hot and cold running water” (p. 114). This is further epitomized by cycles of displacement and disenfranchisement, which he elucidates in chapter 7 when discussing the impact of predatory lending practices and the collapse of the subprime lending market. The ghetto has previously been established as a haven but is incapable of escaping “the ravages of racism in America” (p. 215), which, time and again, makes the reality of the ghetto more akin to a hell.
Moreover, another emergent theme through this work is that of the importance of black-affirming spaces. Freeman punctuates the ghetto as a physically and spatially vital place for blackness, one that is now contested by the threat of gentrification. Freeman’s conclusion reads like a call to action, recognizing that the mechanization of gentrification is at work and that it is incumbent on the black community to respond. He mourns the loss of spatial black identity and remarks that “Just as black agency was responsible for creating the role of a haven in the first place, it will ultimately be up to the race to decide if the ghetto will continue to be a haven for blacks in the twenty first century and beyond” (p. 254). This sentiment speaks to the enduring struggle that took place over 130 years to claim the ghetto as a black haven and recognizes that the accumulated disinvestment in the ghetto, in the modern context, has led to much of the black community leaving for better opportunities.
His work resonates with the concept of a Black Spatial Imaginary, which was first introduced by George Lipsitz in his 2007 piece titled The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape. The Black Spatial Imaginary provides a lens to contemplate the movements and spatial location of black communities by engaging with past, present, and future places for blackness. Freeman, while not explicitly engaging with the racialization of space outside of the ghetto, speaks to the importance of the ghetto in establishing the humanity of blacks and providing a space to create a culture uniquely theirs. This is particularly relevant in planning as development pressures continue to displace vulnerable and minority communities. Seattle’s own Africa Town, located in the rapidly gentrifying Central District, is emblematic of this movement. As Freeman alludes to in his closing chapter, the built form of the Central District is changing dramatically, but its survival as a black-affirming neighborhood in Seattle depends on the willingness of the black community to reinvest.
