This is one of the growing number of volumes in Routledge's expanding African American history range reflecting the political, geographic and cultural scope of the subject. Many of the volumes highlight issues that are relevant to current historiographical trends, such as the Black Panthers, the civil rights movement in the West, music, cinema and literature, and many of these contributions are local and highly detailed studies.

Paul Miller's contribution to this series is focussed on civil rights activity in San Francisco from 1945 to 1975 and, in the main, tends to build upon the work of Albert Broussard's 1993 work, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954. Indeed the book does not shy away from quoting and referencing Broussard throughout and Miller makes no secret of the debt he evidently feels he owes to him. “In many ways,” Miller explains on the penultimate page, “it is a natural follow up to Albert Broussard … and also dovetails with Peter Stein's brilliant documentary The Fillmore” (152). Curiously, the indexing is extremely thin and neither Broussard nor Stein (amongst many others mentioned in the main text) is inserted to allow us to follow up these threads. This does not seem to be an editorial issue as the bibliography outlines every article from each and every newspaper read by the author and there are three pages of small print for the San Francisco Sun-Reporter alone.

Indeed, Miller highlights the weaknesses of his book in the conclusion, which is always helpful for a critic. Miller states that his book “only scratched the surface” of the topic and suggests that black women, the interaction of the many civil rights organizations in this period, and “economic class stratification among African American San Franciscans” need further examination (151). Without at least one of these issues the book ends up sounding curiously old-fashioned as it outlines the story of blacks in a city in which the African American population rose by 800 percent in the decade up to 1950, “the largest percentage increase in any major West Coast city” (26). Including some fascinating oral history the book does give a personal touch to the lives of African Americans over twenty years. Where the book excels is the chapter on segregated housing and broad analysis on the 1970s, which allows the author to escape the chronology and structured narrative and to apply critical judgement. For example, Miller's examination of the gay community buying up property in black areas is particularly worthy of note (145–46).

Miller certainly succeeds in his aim to reveal “the circumstances that everyday African American San Franciscans encountered directly after World War II on through the early 1970s” (2). He reveals many interesting stories of the city's black population and its activists but admits that more class and gender analysis was required.