On Places of Their Own

There’s a lot to say about this book, and I had never really read about African American suburbanization before. Nearly all works focus on the whiteness of “suburbia.” As another commentator mentions, Wiese is not afraid to pick a fight on this topic: “The truth is, however, historians have done a better job excluding African Americans from the suburbs than even white suburbanites.”

As early as 1920, at the height of the Great Migration, 1/6 of all black Americans lived in suburban areas. By the time of publication, just after 2000, this number had risen to 1/3. That said, by these statistics, the bulk of African Americans do not live in suburbs, and the number who live in rural areas have dropped significantly since 1920, meaning the number who live in urban areas have subsequently gone up. Yet, as Wiese mentions, black suburbanites have hitherto been “a people without history” and almost entirely neglected by professional historians.

Wiese starts his story with the advent of rapid suburbanization in the 1920s, where he draws parallels between black Americans and blue-collar white Americans, both of which sought places outside of the city to live and, at times, work. In the South, the period between 1920 and 1940 saw the development of suburbs designed specifically for African Americans to reside in, while many in the North were more likely to live in industrial suburbs—that is, suburbs designed around specific factories, workplaces, or other form of industry. As suburbanization picked up after the Second World War, white Americans in both the North and the South were more willing to reject black suburbanization—there is a great story that Wiese includes in Chapter 4 about the ways that white residents attempted to stop a black man from building a house in a suburban town near Lake Erie for “relying on used lumber.” In the wake of World War II, used lumber was commonly used for home construction, and new zoning requirements made it increasingly difficult for black people to move to suburban spaces. While the Civil Rights Movement made enormous strides for African Americans in a legal context, they continuously faced social discrimination. Nevertheless, this didn’t stop them from increasingly moving to the suburbs. The pace sped up in the 1980s and 90s, but the many suburbs that these people moved to were frequently segregated from white suburbs, bringing us to the present.

One of Wiese’s big cases here is that we need to stop discussing “different types of suburbs,” one for black people—often run-down, impoverished, and working-class—and one for white people—glitzy, conservative, brand new, best schools in the country, etc. In his view, doing so minimizes our ability to see black suburbanization at play. While Wiese is absolutely right, I do think that it’s important to discuss different types of suburbs. In the Chicago metropolitan area, for instance, Brookfield is not Evanston, and neither is Cicero or Orland Park. Class and racial boundaries remain, preventing many African Americans moving into “well-to-do” suburbs like those on the North Shore (which still tends to be whiter than a polar bear).

Speaking of Chicago, much of my experience with suburbanization is connected to the Chicago metropolitan area and, as the table above shows, Chicago has had some of the most sluggish pace of African American suburbanization in the entire country. When I first picked up this book, I struggled to think of a Chicago suburb that had a large population of black people, until Wiese mentioned Robbins. He’s right on that, and the same is true of other towns like Dolton and, on the outskirts, even Joliet has a sizable African American population. Yet, I know that Fulton County, and increasingly Cobb County, based around Atlanta, both have significant African American populations. I’d be interested in reading more in what has caused such large disparities between these two regions—Northern cities, especially in the Midwest and Rust Belt, seem to be notorious for racial issues.

The shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson occurred in the suburbs of St. Louis, the killing of George Floyd took place in Minneapolis, Tamir Rice was killed in Cleveland, and Breonna Taylor was killed in Louisville (Kentucky, but right on the border with Indiana). While most of these did not take place in suburbs, it is illustrative of the slow pace of black suburbanization in northern cities, with the notable exception of St. Louis, where ~50% of suburbanites were black in 1980.

Anyways, I apologize for the digressions, but this was a fascinating book and it had me thinking about very large contemporary issues that I think—on many different levels—are brought out by some of the topics discussed in this book.