Wendell Pritchett challenges popular and scholarly images of the modern ghetto by highlighting Brownsville's history as a working-class neighborhood. This area of East Brooklyn underwent significant racial change, beginning the twentieth century as a largely white, Jewish neighborhood. Brownsville's black and Latino populations grew rapidly in the postwar years. Between 1940 and 1970, the population switched from eighty-five percent white to ninety-five percent black and Latino. Throughout these decades, however, this remained a home for New York's changing working classes. Brownsville residents, generally from the lower tiers of the city's working class, shared a history of political and economic marginalization. The neighborhood's later residents faced greater obstacles, as a result of racism, public policy, and economic change. Pritchett's fine study chronicles these changes and continuities and emphasizes white and black residents' unending efforts to secure needed resources and power.

The story begins in the late nineteenth century, with Pritchett examining the area's transformation from a working-class suburb to a crowded city neighborhood. Tenements housed the growing population of Jewish immigrants, many of whom worked in the garment industry. Although gaining a reputation as a rough place, Brownsville became a vibrant neighborhood with a rich religious, commercial, and associational life. Political radicalism and socialism thrived in Brownsville. Drawing on his extensive research, Pritchett conveys the complexity of social and cultural life in the neighborhood, as well as the difficulties of everyday life that working-class New Yorkers faced.

The 1940s, Pritchett contends, marked Brownsville's optimistic years. Men and women were involved in a number of organizations to improve the neighborhood, including the Brownsville Neighborhood Council, the Brownsville Boys Club, and the local Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The optimism of these years was generated, in part, by these groups' successes in bringing resources and improvements to the neighborhood. Pritchett also sees optimism in the local activists' approach to race relations. The neighborhood's black population was still small but doubled during the forties. Brownsville organizations, led in these years by white liberals and progressives, sought to improve housing, recreation, and other resources both to retain white working-class residents and to serve newer African-American residents. In contrast to the postwar racial violence in Detroit and Chicago over issues such as public housing, Pritchett reveals a complicated dynamic of interracial efforts and segregation. “Brownsville was not an integrated community, but rather two communities resolved to avoid conflict”(83). Pritchett's work demonstrates for historians the need to continue examining particular neighborhoods and cities before writing a synthesis of postwar urban racial change.

During the 1950s, Brownsville's racial composition changed dramatically. Many white residents, who benefitted disproportionately from postwar economic growth and public policies shaping the metropolitan area, moved to better-off neighborhoods and suburbs. Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers, facing the barriers of racial discrimination and limited economic opportunities, found a home in Brownsville's affordable but declining tenements and its growing stock of public housing. The policies of the city's Housing Authority and urban renewal would reinforce these trends. While many community-wide organizations continued to advocate for white and black residents, the chill of anticommunism, as well as white leaders' blind-spot regarding local racism (especially police brutality), undermined interracial efforts. By the early 1960s, Brownsville was three-fourths black and Latino, pubic housing had become stigmatized as low-income minority housing, and the area was perceived increasingly as crime-ridden. Synagogues and other white organizations had moved out and were being replaced by black churches and service organizations. Here and elsewhere we need to learn more about Brownsville's Puerto Rican residents and their role in local groups, but Pritchett shines in his discussions of white and black organizational life.

The Beth-El Hospital strike of 1962, led by Hospital Workers Local 1199, represented an apex of interracial organizing and the promise of a Northern civil rights movement. While many Brownsville residents continued to work in the garment industry, the low-paid health care and service fields were important sources of employment. Local 1199's strike, resulting in union recognition and wage gains, was also a training ground for future community leaders and spurred local organizing. This momentum carried into the local War on Poverty. The Brownsville Community Council (BCC), pressing for better schools, sanitation, and government services, helped to administer the Community Action Program's anti-poverty initiatives locally. While these efforts had limited impact on the area's poorest residents, the BCC helped to empower local black leaders and served as a crucible for ideas about “community control.”

Pritchett juxtaposes the 1962 hospital strike and the 1968 teacher's strike, underlining as have other historians the disintegration of the city's liberal coalition (especially between black and Jewish activists). While Pritchett's analysis of this episode in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community is the least textured portion of his book, he effectively interprets the contested meanings of “community control” in this conflict. Black Power had an influence, as did educational reformers' calls for decentralization. But Brownsville activists' and parents' concerns were rooted in a long history of frustration; for years they had tried to improve their children's schools. Declining resources and ineffective integration initiatives led them to seek control. “The goal of residents was to secure greater accountability from local government, not to establish a competing infrastructure”(237). Brownsville activists were discouraged and embittered in the aftermath of this conflict.

Brownsville in the 1970s, often invoked as an icon of urban crisis, marked a low point in the neighborhood's history. Poverty and crime, while not new to the area, were now entrenched. Pritchett counters the “urban underclass” thesis by exploring the ongoing work of Brownsville's activists and organizations. The neighborhood began to rebound by the 1990s, due to local organizing (including the East Brooklyn Congregations' Nehemiah Plan) and shifts in both public policy and the economy. Amidst these changes, Pritchett points to the area's consistent character. “Brownsville continued to serve the same function it had for a century; it was a transitory neighborhood for working-class New Yorkers”(243). Working-class and poor people needed cheap housing.

Pritchett's important study of the “changing face of the ghetto” addresses many issues central to recent urban and African-American history. This social history reminds us of the merits of studying relatively small populations and places. Brownsville, Brooklyn pays close attention to the neighborhood's changing working class and to their efforts to make a place in the city. Pritchett shows the inadequacy of static portraits of the “ghetto” (building on the work of Arnold Hirsch, Joe Trotter, and others), by stressing the agency of black and white residents and the impact of public action and policy. At the same time, the continuities of this working-class neighborhood (white and black “ghetto formation”), along with the mounting obstacles of racism and economic inequality, frame the narrative.

Scholars following Pritchett might engage directly the question of class formation, in the context of the city's distinctive industrialization and deindustrialization. How did Brownsville men and women experience work, underemployment, joblessness, and the dynamics of economic change? Pritchett suggests the importance of these experiences by providing glimpses of occupational and employment data. But he focuses on the neighborhood, its institutions, and activism within that space. Joshua Freeman's Working-Class New York (2000), a wonderful complement to Brownsville, Brooklyn, offers guidance for such a project. Scholars pursuing this course and others seeking to understand the twentieth-century city will be indebted deeply to Pritchett for his thoughtful, well-written history of Brownsville.

Eric Fure-Slocum

St. Olaf College