This provocatively titled volume is a good example of the trend toward hybridization of fields (or subfields) in contemporary historical scholarship. Victoria Wolcott creatively combines the well-developed research fields of racism and civil rights protest with two more recent areas that have attracted the attention of historians: consumer behavior and the influence of spatial patterns on group activity, especially in cities. Using case studies of conflict over segregated recreation drawn from dozens of cities large and small, located in the North (or, occasionally, the West) as well as the South, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters stresses the local origins of the struggle against segregated recreation. National civil rights leaders play a relatively small role in this study, and actions by the federal government almost none at all. The result is a fascinating study that significantly broadens the traditional understanding of the civil rights movement by focussing on discrimination against African Americans in public swimming pools and bathing beaches, roller-skating rinks, bowling alleys, and amusement parks, rather than on such traditional issues as the struggle to integrate schools and achieve voting rights.

Some might question whether the right to use a bowling alley was as important as the right to vote. Wolcott convincingly demonstrates, however, that the average black citizen saw both as related parts of the same problem – the fight to achieve racial equality. “African Americans,” she notes, “challenged essential racial hierarchies when they occupied the most coveted forms of public space” (7). Conflicts over segregated recreational facilities could sometimes be as violent – and take as many years to resolve – as the campaign to end discrimination in housing or schools. Like the lunch counter sit-ins of the early 1960s, young African Americans were at the forefront of the fight to gain access to recreational space. So too were women, as Wolcott makes clear with numerous examples.

The range of cities surveyed in Wolcott's study is impressive and clearly demonstrates that segregated recreation was a national, not just a southern, problem, as was the movement to eliminate it. But the book's episodic variety of local conflicts also raises questions. The virtual absence of the nation's largest metropolis – and largest black community – from the volume is puzzling. Wolcott mentions Robert Moses's policy of building public housing in the vicinity of Coney Island after World War II, but not his role in limiting the construction of municipal swimming pools in or near black neighborhoods. As Moses's biographer, Robert Caro, explained, “Moses built one pool in Harlem” but “was determined that that was going to be the only pool [in New York] that blacks or Puerto Ricans were going to use. He didn't want them ‘mixing’ with white people in other pools.”Footnote ¹ Caro's prescient observation makes clear the need for an assessment of the citywide consequences of such policies. Except for passing mention of exclusion of black members from a branch of the YMCA and a brief discussion of the 1966 riot at the deteriorating Coney Island amusement park, however, we learn nothing about the racialized aspects of recreational space in New York City, or how African Americans responded to them.

New York is not the only major city missing from the list of communities used to illustrate the book's subject. Of course, the author is not required to survey conditions in every city in the country, but the reader would benefit from knowing what methodology, if any, was used in selecting some communities and excluding others. Part of the answer may be found in Wolcott's opening argument that “to a startling extent it was violence – or the fear of violence – that dictated where and to what extent racial mixing could take place” (7). This study does an outstanding job of analyzing the role of white violence in conflicts over segregated recreation, but it pays much less attention to the equally important question why desegregation occurred without violence in some cities. Wolcott acknowledges at one point that “the challenges to segregation posed by African Americans and sympathetic whites in Cleveland, Philadelphia, and countless other northern and border cities across the nation had become commonplace by the late 1940s” (71–72), but there is no attempt to systematize the data behind this statement to explain why protest was stronger in some locales or why some communities yielded more readily to protest movements than others.

A second methodological issue arises from the types of recreation surveyed. Why scrutinize roller rinks but not dance halls, especially since, as the author acknowledges (66), they had much in common? If segregated dance halls did not lead to racial conflict as often as did roller rinks and swimming pools, some explanation is in order. But to what extent were they, and other forms of entertainment not included in Wolcott's study, segregated? Kevin Mumford's book Interzones (1997), which makes clear that dance halls and speakeasies in some sections of large, cosmopolitan cities of the 1920s and 1930s encouraged interracial mixing, presents quite a different picture of the interaction between whites and blacks in recreational venues.

Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters is an important contribution to urban and African American history in its own right, but its distinctive approach to its subject also points to the need for broader studies of the racial dimension of recreational activities of all kinds, including those that were illegal. Such studies will need to be aware of differences in urban context, especially the ethno-racial composition of communities, and other subregional factors that may have influenced the racial attitudes of whites. The North–South “binary” as an explanatory tool for understanding racial issues may be outdated, but regional variations within the North and South are not.