These two urban histories on Newark and Los Angeles are part of a second wave of scholarship describing the impact of race and ethnicity in northern cities during the twentieth century. Earlier books by Thomas Sugrue on Detroit, Nicholas Lemann on Chicago, and Douglas Rae on New Haven described the “urban crisis” that followed the sharp reduction in European immigration in the early 1920s. The heavy black migration from the Jim Crow South, meeting the labor needs of industrial metropolitan areas in the North, confronted whites' historic racism and rejection of African Americans. These volumes take the story up to the post-riot period of the late 1960s. Both try, in different ways, to move beyond the standard black-and-white narrative of black demands confronting white racism to a more complex and multicultural understanding of intergroup relations. Scott Kurashige's book additionally compares two very different stigmatized minorities—Japanese Americans and African Americans. Both books are based on impressive historical scholarship, and I can recommend them as fascinating reads.

The two metropolitan areas might seem at first glance quite dissimilar. Newark, like many East Coast industrial cities, was already fully developed well before much black immigration, and was dominated by working-class Catholic, European immigrants, living in a dense urban environment. Today, Newark is majority black. In contrast, the great periods of development of Los Angeles came much later, beginning in the 1920s, and then more powerfully during and after World War II, when whites and blacks arrived in droves. During the period of this study, Los Angeles was dominated by middle-class, native-born, Protestant, home-owning whites. Those days are over, too. While the city of Los Angeles is just 11 percent black, whites are now a minority. One would think that these sharp differences would make the African American story quite different in the two metropolitan areas. That would be wrong. The narrative histories are remarkably similar, gut-wrenchingly so. Let me begin with the dominant story as I see it, which is not a happy one, and then close with some comments on both authors' agendas for the future.

Both cities were initially regarded very favorably by black migrants from the South. To be sure, these newcomers found a housing stock that was highly racially segregated. The swiftly expanding suburbanization of both metropolitan areas was almost all white, buttressed legally by restrictive covenants and enforced by realtors and occasional outbursts of racial hostility. Yet, at least in Los Angeles, the rate of black home ownership was unusually high. In both cities, World War II subjected African Americans to the conflicting demands for patriotic loyalty in wartime and compliance to a system of largely unchanged segregation and discrimination. For example, in Newark, swimming pools and beaches were segregated, racial intermarriage was rare, and the Red Cross maintained separate stocks of blood plasma by race. In Los Angeles, even after an agreement negotiated by the Fair Employment Practices Commission, the few blacks employed by the local streetcar company continued predominantly to be car cleaners and janitors, and female conductors threatened to strike if blacks were upgraded. Nevertheless, in both cities, blacks rose to the occasion, organizing militant patriotic organizations, in Los Angeles called the “Negro Victory Movement.” At the same time, the demands for full wartime mobilization also provided an opportunity for blacks to organize against discrimination, both locally and nationally. A march on Washington organized by A. Philips Randolph produced the federal legislation creating the FEPC, though the agency's enforcement teeth unsurprisingly proved somewhat anemic.

In the postwar era, racial conflicts continued to be intense, especially around housing and jobs. Heavy black migration from the South continued, but a strong color line restricted blacks from integrating white neighborhoods, and so schools also continued to be quite segregated. In both Newark and Los Angeles, outer suburbs expanded rapidly but were limited almost exclusively to whites. The many newly arriving blacks were increasingly crammed into black ghettoes with tightly enforced boundaries. Overcrowding in older, deteriorating housing stock reinforced longstanding white stereotypes about blacks. The solution of the day was “urban renewal,” which addressed overcrowding minimally and segregation infrequently.

In the early 1960s, the civil rights movement gave widespread hope, but the realities of the impermeability of the color line soon hit. In the spirit of the day, the Democratically controlled California state legislature passed fair housing legislation in 1963. As with many liberal reforms in California over the years, a conservative repudiation appeared almost immediately as a ballot initiative. On the same 1964 ballot was Lyndon Johnson, whose support of anti–Jim Crow civil rights accompanied a landslide presidential victory. But California fair housing went down to a resounding defeat, garnering only 35 percent of the vote. Kurashige describes it as a “white revolt” (p. 260). Perhaps it was in the spirit of the later statewide white voter rebellions that sharply reduced property taxes in 1978, and ended busing for school integration in 1979, illegal immigrants' children's access to the public schools in 1994, and affirmative action in 1996. If the white population of California had needed to send a clear message to African Americans that they should stay in “their place,” Proposition 14 certainly fulfilled the need. The author notes that the rhetoric of white resistance began to change in that era, repudiating the blatant discrimination of Jim Crow in favor of promoting a white citizen's color-blind individual freedom to choose buyers, renters, etc., and later, schools and access to higher education. In Newark, the less decorous Italian immigrants expressed themselves more vociferously in the mid-1960s to the same end.

The authors then move on to the great race riots of the 1960s. Kurashige suggests that Proposition 14 had been an important trigger for the Watts riot. Perhaps. But more obvious at the time was the longstanding tension between the black community and the nearly all-white LAPD, run in militaristic fashion by then Chief William Parker, and characterized by opponents as an “occupying force” in the black community. Newark, with a police force over 90 percent white, had its own riot in 1967, with the police chief, similarly confrontational, saying they would meet “force with force” (p. 142). The National Guard, under 2 percent black, was somewhat more restrained.

In the short run, the riots were followed by severe racial polarization in both cities, at least in the mass public. A powerful white backlash appeared in most racially relevant domains of life, ultimately rejecting busing for school desegregation in Los Angeles, no doubt accelerating the exodus of industrial employment from the central cities. They also led to a strong black nationalist movement, more obviously in Newark than LA. The early dreams of integration and close ties between whites and blacks were replaced by a growing suspicion and distance. Los Angeles was perhaps less immediately vulnerable than Newark to the slide of the industrial economy. But blacks later suffered greatly from the decline of the southern California industrial economy and were almost wholly left out of the booming suburbanization.

Both books largely conclude their historical narratives after those riots. But since then, blacks' situations have deteriorated in many ways. Economic globalization has led to the relocation or drying up of industrial jobs and has crippled industrial unions. De facto housing segregation remains the rule rather than the exception. “Black flight” from new immigrants has occurred but mainly to relatively poor suburbs. School dropout rates remain high among black youths. Blacks are far under-represented in California higher education, despite the historic accessibility of its community college and public university systems. In both cities, crime became epidemic in black communities in the 1980s and 1990s. The reasons for this criminality are, of course, complex, but its effects are not: it has filled the prisons with young black males, crippled black families, contributed to deteriorating central cities, frightened whites, further stigmatized blacks, and ultimately given rise to an ever tighter color line. One note of good news on the employment front, at least for black females, is greater access to employment in government and service industries.

Worse for African Americans in the last two or three decades have been heavy flows of working-class immigration—particularly to Los Angeles from Mexico and Central America, and to Newark from Puerto Rico—which have eroded an already precarious economic situation for African Americans. In Los Angeles, Asian Americans, now as numerous in California as are blacks, have shown substantial assimilation in terms of intermarriage, educational and economic success, and to a lesser extent, residential integration. These advances sharply contrast with the stagnation of blacks. Mexican Americans, though largely immigrating as a poorly educated working class (often unskilled), are showing signs of assimilation to the mainstream, at least in the generations more removed from immigration. On the East Coast, Puerto Ricans not handicapped with the stigma of significant African ancestry are showing the same pattern. It is difficult not to see African Americans as being left behind once again, though with some advantages, such as a successful political and professional class. And that is the main message I draw from these books, though it is not either author's central thrust.

A leitmotif in both volumes is the political mobilization of minorities. The Left in general experienced some significant disadvantages during this era, such as the failed effort to establish a popular front before and during World War II, disrupted by the long power struggle between the Communist Party and other elements of the political Left before the Cold War; then the McCarthyite pogroms of the Left in the 1950s; followed by the deteriorating position of industrial unions. In Los Angeles, in particular, there were many efforts at multiracial coalitions, most by small groups of individuals and in the long run, temporary. The big success story was the Los Angeles coalition between blacks and white liberals (especially Jews) that kept the black Tom Bradley as mayor for two decades. However, in Newark, blacks experienced serious racial conflict with Italian ethnics, early and often.

A second leitmotif developed by Kurashige is the complicated relationship between blacks and Japanese Americans. The latter were largely the products of immigration a century ago and had long achieved a successful, principally agricultural niche in the California economy. Their forced internment during World War II might conceivably have generated closer ties with blacks on the basis of shared discrimination, just as Italian Americans' experience as stigmatized immigrants could have stimulated a sense of communality. But blacks were stigmatized among both groups. Many blacks joined the war effort with a heightened patriotism and stigmatized Japanese Americans as responsible for Pearl Harbor. Many Japanese Americans also chose an ultrapatriotic path, hoping to overcome the stigma of Pearl Harbor by becoming super-Americans. Housing-poor blacks moved into vacated Japanese American neighborhoods during the war, creating resentment among returning Japanese Americans afterwards. None of that left much room for a grievance-based alliance with “Negroes,” the group at the bottom of the barrel.

After the war, Japanese Americans and blacks further diverged. Japanese Americans gradually became a “model minority,” whose advantages could only be defined by contrast to the black not-so-model minority. Moreover, the black postwar agenda of expanded integration was culturally less appealing to Japanese Americans, who preferred to build institutionally within the Japanese American community. Urban renewal and Proposition 14 produced more urgent housing problems for blacks, but were less salient to Japanese Americans. The few activists who saw themselves as Third World revolutionaries never succeeded in developing a mass movement.

Both of these books represent themselves as contributions to a second-generation, multicultural approach to urban politics that has moved beyond the black-white binary. Kevin Mumford rejects the 1969 charge of the Kerner Commission that white racism is responsible for the bifurcation of the U.S. into two societies, one black and one white. He also rejects the black power response to that charge, closely associated with the advocacy of black separatism, as destructive to a broader civil society. Rather, he praises the resiliency of the black community and its desire for recognition and inclusion in a fully deliberative civil society. Mumford sees some signs of progress in the mayoralty of Cory Booker, replacing the old and corrupt black machine, seeking to restructure black civic life in a more mature and responsible form.

The theme of multiculturalism dominates Kurashige's book as well, but in a different way. Here, the dynamics of multiethnic societies are central as Los Angeles seeks to become a “world city” (p. 289). The historically complex entwinement of the Japanese American and African American trajectories is the primary example, but perhaps less satisfyingly so. In the prewar era, there were some similarities between these groups, both of which experienced segregation and discrimination. But there were also important differences, and with the Japanese American internment, the experiences of these groups diverge, and in some ways, come into conflict. While the former came on track to be a model minority, the latter became a stigmatized and ghettoized minority. And the few efforts at establishing common ground met with failure.

In the end, white-black inequality seems to remain the dominant cleavage in American society. As Asians and Latinos increasingly move into the mainstream, and African Americans do so only at higher levels of the occupational ladder, it is hard not to see a society continuing on a path of “black exceptionalism.” Most blacks continue to be unassimilated, in contrast to other minorities of color. The good news from the West Coast would seem to be the impressive gains in comity between the LAPD and the black community under former Chief Bill Bratton; the expansion of charter schools in poverty areas, with a commitment to greater pupil achievement; the expansion of the union movement, largely into Latino service occupations; the development of multiethnic political coalitions, such as in the election of Mayor Villaragoisa; and the fact that rumors of interethnic conflict, such as between black and Latino gangs, seem to be exaggerated. But stay tuned.