“What's black on the inside, white on the outside, and polluted?” asked Mad Magazine in 1977. “Any large American city!” was the answer. In this thorough study, Andrew Wiese complicates that stereotype of simple racial patterns by showing that throughout the twentieth century, African Americans have resided in all manner of American suburbs.

The story begins with the Great Migration of the 1910s through the 1940s, when hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved to working-class suburbs near industrial centers. Often building homes with their own hands, they did without such urban amenities as public sewers and paved streets. After World War II, a growing black middle class bought ranch houses with picture windows, frequently in mostly white suburbs adjacent to older black communities. There they confronted much of the hostility facing blacks who moved to formerly white urban neighborhoods, making their move an assertion of civil rights. Today's larger, majority-black suburbs, such as Prince George's County, Maryland, are just the latest manifestations of a long tradition.

Wiese is particularly successful in combining national and local history. He uses census figures to document national trends, then adds flesh to the statistics with case studies of specific metropolitan areas and vivid stories of individual families. These he draws from local archives and newspapers, oral-history projects, his own interviews, and the biographies of black celebrities, such as baseball player Jackie Robinson, who grew up in Pasadena, California, and later struggled to find an accepting suburb within commuting distance of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. The effect is to remind readers that all history is local, and that the migration of a people begins with a single family. Wiese is also attentive to visual evidence, enriching his text with historical images, his own photographs of houses and neighborhoods, and superb new maps by cartographer Harry D. Johnson.

Wiese clearly admires the African Americans who settled the crabgrass frontier, and he works hard to portray them as captains of their own fate. For example, he documents efforts in the 1940s and 1950s by Atlanta blacks to map “proposed areas for Negro expansion,” staking an advance claim to suburban land by discouraging white developments. Likewise, he hints that some behavior—such as raising chickens in suburban yards—reflected cultural traditions specific to blacks. This is less convincing, given that so many whites did the same. For the most part, as the bulk of his argument suggests, blacks moved to the suburbs for the same reasons as whites. What really set apart the black experience was discrimination, whether in the form of restrictive covenants, unequal enforcement of building codes, denial of credit, crosses burned on lawns, or simple dirty looks. Even in the North and West, whites worked hard to segregate the suburbs. Regrettably, black suburbanites were distinguished by what was done to them as much as by their own choices.

Today the grossest forms of discrimination have ended, yet America's suburbs remain highly segregated. Part of the reason is continued white hostility. Another factor, not mentioned by Wiese, is that houses in predominantly black suburbs often cost a good deal less than those of comparable size and quality in predominantly white suburbs, luring African Americans who prefer, or at least accept, majority-black neighborhoods. (See Sheryll Cashin, The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream. New York: PublicAffairs, 2004.) But as Wiese notes, segregation exacts a price, in the form of higher taxes, poorer services, and fewer stores than are found in white neighborhoods. Blacks' search for the perfect suburb continues in the new century.

The observation that American suburbs have long included blacks might seem an uncontroversial statement of fact. But scholarly and popular accounts of the suburbs have so ignored African Americans, and accounts of black settlement have so focused on inner cities, that this book provides a much needed corrective. Score one for complexity.