Focusing on post–Civil Rights era Detroit, Todd Shaw's book addresses how urban social movement activists can effectively achieve their political and economic goals. Now Is the Time! provides a multilayered configuration of core variables outlined as utility, timing, and context. These in turn interact with six subvariables: disruptive coalitions and adaptive tactics; activist cycles and strategic advantages, collective identity and framing; and group resources and networks. For Shaw, the “strongest determinants of effective activism” are a combination of “active alliances, advantages, and tactics” (p. 49). Together they constitute the Effective Black Activism Model (EBAM), which is applied to Detroit's affordable housing policy debates mainly during the later administrations of Mayor Coleman Young. The book's main thesis centers on the capacity of black grassroots activists to recognize the optimal “tactic, time and place, for activism to be effective in demanding political accountability to the needs of the poor” (pp. 1–2).

In Chapter 1, Shaw situates his book within the pertinent scholarship on race and ethnic politics, urban politics, and social movements by first addressing the work of scholars such as Bayard Rustin (“From Protest to Politics,” Commentary [February 1965]: 25–31) and Rugus Browning, Dale Rogers Marshall, and David Tabb (Protest Is Not Enough, 1984). This work emphasized the importance of local community power bases through electoral mobilization and coalition building with the War on Poverty and post–Civil Rights liberal Democrats, respectively. More than protest or even the election of minority group representatives, minority participation in these dominant white-led governing coalitions was thought to provide for optimal governmental responsiveness to community needs.

Shaw then takes up the criticisms of Robert C. Smith (We Have No Leaders, 1996) and Adolph Reed, Jr. (Stirrings in the Jug, 1996), who largely reject what they view as the “hyper-institutionalization” and “demobilizing effects” of such insider black politics. Shaw consciously identifies with the “fusionist” framework of James Jennings (The Politics of Black Empowerment, 1992), which views insurgent electoral politics and grassroots protest strategies as complementary. Concerning Detroit, Shaw contends specifically with Thomas Sugrue (The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, [1996] 2005), whose work is largely regarded as definitive on Detroit politics. Shaw's major criticism of Sugrue's work is reflected in the title of Chapter 2 of Now Is the Time!—“Where Are the People?”—which is an implicit critique of Sugrue's failure to recognize the agency of black Detroit's affordable housing activists.

In this chapter, Shaw links black political insurgency around housing issues in the 1930s (New Deal) and 1960s (Civil Rights–War on Poverty) liberal regimes. A major oversight of his work is the retrenched conservative administrations and Jim Crow housing policies in the 1940s and 1950s, which did not provide the optimal conditions identified through the EBAM. Karen R. Miller (“We Cannot Wait for Understanding to Come to Us,” in Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodward, eds., Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, 2005) argues that this intervening period witnessed a series of events, namely, the 1940–41 Northwestern High School riots and confrontations over (integrated) education policy, which demonstrated how the city's later Civil Rights movement was an extension of “the political networks and organizational style that [local] groups used and continued to develop” (Miller, p. 236). In this, black Detroiters stood alone with few white liberal allies. Miller takes seriously this period and the tactics of violence as stimulative of “mobilizations for African American equality” (p. 237) in a conservative milieu, where the EBAM imagines accommodation in the city's housing issues, liberal interracial coalitions, and conventional political tactics.

When applied to the actual activities of pro–affordable-housing groups in Detroit that challenged Mayor Young's attempts to eliminate it, the EBAM model enriches scholarly understanding of African American urban politics and local social movement activism by identifying the tactics, alliances, “vulnerabilities of the regime, the temperament of the times, and the specific area of combat” (p. 19) that actors should employ for maximum effectiveness.

Part II demonstrates how the EBAM applies to three “activist cycle” campaigns of black solidarity and black-led biracial coalitions in Detroit in opposition to the Young administration's urban deconcentration in the Parkside-Jeffries and Brewster-Douglass public housing blocs. When challenged, Young strove to discredit (and divide) oppositional efforts among black Detroiters by prioritizing responsiveness to bourgeois over poor, working–class, and homeless individuals and interests. Young manipulated ostensibly “homogeneous” racial solidarity–based opposition, Shaw suggests, in order to hide his failures in service delivery in affordable public housing, to the detriment of the black poor and homeless. Here, class trumped race. This book demonstrates the resulting intracommunal tensions between black urban regimes and constituents and the ways in which the latter mobilize against unresponsive or even hostile black elected officials, such as those in the last three Young administrations (1981–93).

In Detroit, the most successful oppositional group, the biracial Save Our Spirits (SOS), was able to garner support among city council members in order to undermine Young's allocation of power vis-à-vis Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs), through Proposition N(eighborhoods). But SOS was unsuccessful later in defeating Young at the polls where the larger black electorate was mobilized. SOS was undermined by Young's ability to set the terms of policy debates and to invoke 1960s-style suspicions of black–white liberal alliances. Here race trumped multiracial grassroots efforts. In a city with decades of racial tensions (e.g., the 1943 and 1967 “riots”), residents of “the blackest” districts of the city were the least inclined to engage in protest politics, and Shaw reports that “Young was most respected by the segment of black Detroit most likely to embrace the black protest tradition” (p. 100) since black community control was a desired outcome of the protests. Aside from the SOS activist cycle, the Brewster-Douglass (1987–90) and Parkside-Jeffries (1989–93) public housing campaigns are also important. Black women were key participants and leaders in these struggles, and Shaw very carefully illustrates that urban space is often reflective of larger issues of women's empowerment in society.

Shaw concludes that the Parkside-Jeffries campaign was more successful in its challenge because it smarted from the Brewster-Douglass defeat and the Parkside-Jeffries activists, despite major obstacles placed before them, had more advantages in relation to context, timing, and utility (p. 158). Given Shaw's interest in maximizing black activism, it is ironic that his model nevertheless illustrates that the most effective outcomes, specifically in Detroit, were those in which white-sponsored interest-group coalitions, led occasionally by blacks, formed alliances with receptive city council members, who otherwise would not have supported primarily black grassroots challenges to Young. Comparing HOPE VI Section 8 housing in Detroit with Atlanta, Newark, and Washington, DC, between 1990 and 2000, Shaw found little responsiveness from black urban regimes to tenants' preferences. Yet those activists who employed the elements which Shaw identifies in the EBAM, fared better than those who did not. To this extent, through activating the EBAM, Shaw demonstrates how it is possible to “overcome the constraints of black urban regimes, confines of electoral arenas, construction of black politics and costs of mobilization” (p. 21; original emphasis).

Methodologically, the book uses a combination of multivariate statistical tests—utilizing the 1989 Detroit Area Study; simple cross-tabulations; content analysis of Detroit newspapers across 18 years; CDBG allocations data across five years; US Census housing data, surveys, and budgets; and field interviews with a small but important ethnographic sample of grassroots leadership narratives, including interviews with Coleman Young—that personalize its narrative. While the EBAM model confirms the hypothesized empirical relationship between accountability (independent variable) and grassroots activism (dependent variable), the model is later disassembled in order to more thoroughly assess the trajectories and calculus concerning when local activists or the poor in black urban regimes (place) opt to test system vulnerability (timing) and do so more or less effectively (tactic). Now Is The Time! in the end calls for a “deeper democracy” where political elites, regardless of the cultural capital earned in a city's racial politics on the way to governing, can be held accountable. The book provides a road map to these ends and will prove a useful read to students of urban politics, race and ethnic politics, black politics, and social movements.