In April 2012, President Obama designated California's decommissioned military base at Fort Ord a national monument of ‘cultural and historical significance’. Stanford University historian Carole McKibben's study of the neighbouring town of Seaside – where black, Asian, Hispanic and Caucasian families of Fort Ord personnel worked with the federal government to develop an integrated community in an era marked by segregation – reveals a significant counter-narrative in American social and urban history. Nestled between Monterey Bay resort towns and the growing base, Seaside became a majority–minority military community where status was based on rank, not race. While racial divides existed, Seaside's diverse political leadership and shared military culture fostered multi-ethnic coalitions that afforded non-white residents uncommon political efficacy and Seaside unique opportunities for development.

McKibben, historian for the City of Seaside and director of the Seaside History Project, draws from planning documents, city council minutes, census records and unpublished local histories, with over 80 interviews with Seaside residents forming the heart of the study. This textured narrative complicates the picture of the federal presence in the west as a hindrance to racial equality by showing how federal mandates for integration (starting with President Truman's desegregation of the armed forces in 1948) harmonized with civil rights activism to dissolve racial barriers, often defying national trends.

McKibben emphasizes the many ways that the military directly influenced local racial politics, from imparting egalitarian values and practices to bringing relatively privileged personnel of colour to Seaside, creating the largest black population between San Francisco and Los Angeles by the 1950s. African Americans in Seaside generally benefited from the greater economic stability and ‘respectability’ that accrued to military families (high-level enlisted men and officers, in particular). This is one of many ways in which class was formative to Seaside's development; it receives numerous mentions in the text but merits far greater analysis. That said, McKibben's compelling arguments about race and resistance to racism problematize the assertion that social change emanates from big cities to small towns. In Seaside, the current ran the opposite way.

Each chapter highlights the interrelationship between Seaside's urban development and its deep-rooted integrationist ethos except for Chapter 1, in which Progressive-era planners’ vision of a white, middle-class town was dashed by a county supervisor's offer to Washington of a site for a western military base. Left to develop haphazardly as a multiethnic working-class town, Chapter 2 charts Seaside's steady growth from the opening of the military base in 1917 through mobilization for World War II. Seaside's stunning demographic change parallels regional currents, in which soldiers and defence workers from across the US made western communities more populous, more urban, more diverse and more politically charged. Seaside residents’ campaign for incorporation as a city in 1954 illustrates both the presence and the malleability of racial lines. Residents’ common interests and shared identity as military families – and the absence of any one clear ethnic majority – fuelled the remarkable trans-racial coalition building that characterizes Seaside's twentieth-century political landscape.

Seaside, once incorporated, continued to negotiate the problems and possibilities of multiethnic inclusion, especially as the community continued to integrate a wider range of ethnic groups into the community. Resident interviews in Chapter 3 reveal an unusual corner of post-war America where Japanese American youth could find political expression in the Black Power movement and African American youth could aspire to the middle class. These dynamics influenced the approach to Seaside's development in the 1950s and 1960s, as documented in Chapter 4. In addition to annexing portions of Fort Ord and courting the kinds of businesses that would rapidly expand the tax base, Seaside's racially diverse Redevelopment Agency and Planning Commission worked toward the creative allocation of federal resources for infrastructure to increase both the value and liveability of residential properties in a moment when ‘urban renewal’ was nearly synonymous with the displacement of people of colour. Seaside's stable, middle-class features did not prevent the media from making distorted representation of the ‘black town’ as blighted by disorderly soldiers, rising crime rates and the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s. Chapter 5 uncovers the all-but-unreported leadership of middle-class black activists in mounting vigorous counter-measures, from grassroots crime prevention to founding music festivals to nurture community feeling and pride of place in Seaside. Other ethnic groups developed similar organizations and community events to enact the values of orderliness, patriotism and diversity that they brought from Fort Ord. This vision continued to guide Seaside through the uncertainties that came with the closure of the base in 1994. As Seaside returns to its Progressive-era vision of an oceanfront resort town and incorporates a growing Hispanic population without common ties to Fort Ord, it remains a significant example of how federal agencies, local planners and a diverse community of engaged residents defied the powerful forces of segregation, making a small town a strong beachhead for one of the nation's most significant social movements.