Review Essay: Paradoxical,Urbane,and Ugly

Thomas J. Sugrue , The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ, 1996); Suzanne E. Smith, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge, MA, 2000); and Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968 (Ithaca, NY, 1995). Also see Dominic J. Capeci Jr.'s Layered Violence: The Detroit Rioters of 1943 (Jackson, MS, 1991) and Race Relations in Wartime Detroit: The Sojourner Truth Housing Controversy of 1942 (Philadelphia, 1984).

The scholarship on these cities is voluminous, but some of the more traditional texts include Gilbert Osofsky's Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, New York, 1890-1930 (New York, 1965); Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago, 1967); Joe Trotter, Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-1945 (Chicago, 1985); and James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989). I am not suggesting that important work on Detroit is lacking, rather that most of this work is in urban and labor history instead of African American history.

Nell Painter's work, in particular, moved scholars past dichotomous approaches to the black community. See Nell Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York, 1976) and The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (Cambridge, MA, 1979), as well as Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York, 1996) and Southern History across the Color Line (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002). Robin D. G. Kelley unequivocally raised the standard for historical investigations of everyday black folk—see Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990) and Race Rebels: Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, NY, 1994).

Elsa Barkley Brown , “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 107-146 and “‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women's History and Feminist Politics,” in Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed, eds., “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: A Reader in Black Women's History (Brooklyn, NY, 1995), 39-56; Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1993) and “Beyond the Sound of Silence: Afro-American Women in History,” Gender and History, 1 (1989): 50-67; Hazel V. Carby, “‘It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime’: The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues,” Radical America 20, no. 4 (June-July 1896): 9-24 and “Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 738-55; Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women,” in Beverly Guy-Sheftall, ed., Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York, distributed by W. W. Norton, 1995), 380-382 and “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension, 1915-1945, in Joe William Trotter Jr., ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington, IN, 1991); and Deborah Gray White, “The Cost of Club Work,” in Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lesbrock, eds., Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism (Urbana, IL and Chicago, 1993).

Angela Y. Davis , Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York, 1998), xix. Sharon Harley and Stephanie Shaw also greatly contributed to the discourse on class and respectability within the black community. See Sharon Harley, “When Your Work Is Not Who You Are: The Development of a Working-Class Consciousness among Afro-American Women,” in Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington, KT, 1991), 42-55; and Stephanie Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era (Chicago, 1996).

Hine , “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women,” 380-382.

Her exploration also builds on questions that Deborah Gray White raises in her work Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York, 1999).

For a cogent discussion, see Michele Mitchell , “Silences Broken, Silences Kept: Gender and Sexuality in African-American History,” Gender and History 11, No. 3 (November 1999): 433-444.