The edited volume African American Urban History Since World War II showcases new work on black urban history during the second wave of the Great Black Migration (1940–1980). While a large scholarly literature explores the conditions of the first black migration to the North during World War I and the 1920s, much less is known about black urban life at mid-century, despite the fact that, in quantitative terms, the second wave of black migration was substantially larger. The black population share of the average northern and western city increased from only 5 percent in 1940 to nearly 20 percent by 1970 and some cities became majority or near-majority black in this period. As one of the contributors asserts, “apart from the introduction of automobiles, it would be hard to think of anything that more dramatically reshaped America's big cities in the twentieth century than the relocation of the nation's black population” (p. 30).

The essays in this collection cover a wide range of topics, from religion to politics, only some of which will be of direct interest to economic historians. Of most note to this audience are chapters on the residential choices of the nascent black middle class and on the neglected legacy of civil rights activism in the North. As with the rest of the volume, though, readers interested in these particular subjects may be better served by turning to the recent books from which these chapters are excerpted, including James N. Gregory's coverage of the black migration (The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), Thomas J. Sugrue's treatment of activism in the North (Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008), and Andrew Wiese's book on black suburbanization (Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Gregory's chapter, which opens the volume, is a clear and succinct summary of the demographic trends constituting the second wave of the black migration. Over five million African Americans left the South between 1940 to 1980. Migrants followed chains of friends and family established during the early wave of migration to large industrial cities in the North and West. Blacks who left the South were better educated than those who remained and, somewhat surprisingly, were majority female, perhaps because relative opportunities in southern agriculture favored men.

Within a decade of arrival in the North or West, some migrants entered the budding black middle class. Eric S. Brown's chapter summarizes work from a book in progress on the black middle class in Oakland, CA. Using a fruitful mixture of census data, historical archives, and personal interviews, Brown identifies two strands of the black middle class: professional employees, who tended to settle in black, middle-class enclaves, and the “self-employed,” including doctors, lawyers, and insurance agents who served the black community and who instead resided in class-integrated black neighborhoods. The availability of black middle-class neighborhoods in Oakland, including the exclusive Sequoyah Hills, allowed these black professionals to avoid the stark choice between “seeking ‘diversity’ [read: avoiding racial isolation],” on the one hand and searching for “neighborhood stability” and a “reduced exposure to crime” on the other (p. 281, author's parentheses). In order to place this case study in context, though, one should note that, beyond Oakland, there are few other metropolitan areas—notably Washington, DC, Atlanta, GA, and Chicago, IL—that offer an array of solidly middle-class black neighborhoods.

In a related chapter, Wiese argues that, contrary to the popular image of the lily-white suburbs, blacks were also moving to the suburbs in large numbers at mid-century, citing the fact that, over the 1950s, the number of black suburbanites increased from 1.5 to 2.5 million. However, the share of metropolitan blacks who lived outside the central city held steady at only 20 percent from 1940 to 1970 (compared to over 60 percent of metropolitan whites by 1970). Thus, the large increase in the absolute number of black suburbanites is somewhat a byproduct of the rapid black rural-to-urban migration over this period. This caveat aside, though, there are certainly a large enough number of black suburbanites to form the basis of Wiese's study. Wiese identifies two types of black suburbanites: those that treated the suburbs as an extension of rural life, buying empty lots and building their own houses, growing vegetable gardens, etc. and those that had middle-class aspirations modeled on the typical white suburban households.

The pioneering efforts of black suburbanites notwithstanding, American metropolitan areas were highly segregated by race in the 1940s and 1950s. David McAllister's chapter argues that real estate agents played a pivotal role in reinforcing segregation, either by steering black clients away from white areas or by helping to flip certain neighborhoods from majority white to majority black through “block-busting” techniques. While this claim is common in the literature (see, for example, Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), historians rarely attempt to understand how both steering and blockbusting, two seemingly contradictory policies, could both be consistent with a profit motive among realtors. McAllister makes some efforts in this direction, noting that real estate agents used different strategies depending on the nature of the neighborhood. In areas that were solidly white, agents guarded their reputation by selling only to white households, whereas in neighborhoods that were close to the tipping point agents hastened the process in order to maximize turnover (and, thus, commissions). McAllister's position could be strengthened with detailed examples of tactics used by particular real estate agents in Philadelphia. Providing nuanced, historically specific stories would help McAllister—and other contributors to the volume, for that matter—avoid repeating the truisms that can otherwise pervade black urban history.

In twin chapters on urban activism in the North, Heather Ann Thompson and Thomas J. Sugrue shift focus from the individual decisions of black households to the collective action of union organizers and civil rights protest. Thompson's chapter squeezes in an account of two northern movements, the short-lived black power unions in Detroit's automobile factories and the prison uprising at the Attica State Correctional Facility in upstate New York. One broad theme to emerge from these cases is that many of the same northern liberals who supported civil rights in the South were unwilling to acknowledge racial injustices in their own economy or criminal justice system. Sugrue develops a similar argument in more detail in a chapter focusing on efforts to integrate the building trades in Philadelphia. The construction industry was historically insular, with entry tightly regulated by a system of apprenticeships controlled by families and ethnic groups. In the early 1960s a coalition of civil rights groups demanded that city construction projects open to black workers. As in Thompson's cases, politicians in Philadelphia who otherwise spoke out against southern racism were initially resistant to the reality of discrimination at home. So too were the white tradesman and union leaders who perceived black demands as a direct threat to their livelihood and tried to reframe the issue as an “insidious expansion of government power” (p. 237). Sugrue demonstrates convincingly that local activism in Philadelphia precipitated a flurry of federal activity, beginning with Kennedy's 1963 executive order calling for “affirmative action” in government-contracted construction work and continuing through Nixon's endorsement of specific “goals” and “timetables” for hiring minority workers. As the effects of the Philadelphia protests filtered upward to the national level, so too did the feelings of resentment on the part of the white working class, foreshadowing the eventual splintering of the New Deal coalition and the politics of racial resentment exploited by Nixon and other members of the Republican party.