One of the conspicuous moves in recent scholarship in African American studies has been a rejection of Harlem-centric or New York-exceptionalist framings of the black political, cultural and intellectual innovation that characterized the early decades of the twentieth century. Escape from New York: The Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem (2013), a collection of essays edited by Davarian Baldwin and Minkah Makalani, is one of a number of works that have critiqued the long-standing notion of a “Harlem Renaissance” and have demonstrated that “New Negro” political consciousness and cultural ferment were engendered and nurtured across an array of African American and black diasporic sites. If such critiques highlight the need for a broader exploration of the geographical groundings of black politics and culture, they also point to the need for a reappraisal of Harlem's own history. In Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Shannon King makes an important contribution to the task of rewriting the neighbourhood's history in a way that avoids casual assertions of Harlem's pre-eminence or assumptions about its status as the “epicentre” or “capital” of black America. In common with scholars such as Shane White and Jacob Dorman, he looks beyond the intellectual and cultural riches that have been central to the discourse of Harlem exceptionalism, and focusses instead on everyday life and resistance in a community subjected to many of the same dynamics of oppression that beset black neighbourhoods in other northern cities.

King's subject is the development of grassroots community activism in Harlem during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and his overarching claim is that local activism in these years laid much of the groundwork for the mass-based political insurgency among black New Yorkers of the 1930s and 1940s that has been chronicled by historians such as Martha Biondi. At the heart of this impressive study is King's highly productive notion of “community rights,” a black response to white supremacy and segregation that prioritized the pursuit of “racial autonomy” (4). Binding together the myriad struggles waged by African Americans in Harlem during these years was an ethical claim that since Harlem was a predominantly black community, its institutions, economy and spaces must, above all, serve the interests of black people. Distinct from – though sometimes overlapping with – “civil rights,” a set of claims resting on the principle of antidiscrimination, “community rights” involved the assertion of a black community's collective right to dominate the space to which it was confined by racial segregation. As King hints on a number of occasions, within this politics lie the roots of the black power movement's demand for “community control” of schools and other institutions during the 1960s.

Over the course of five central chapters, King explores how the idea of community rights animated a series of interrelated grassroots struggles: to establish a black community in Harlem in the face of white intransigence, to secure employment and equality for black workers within the neighbourhood's businesses through labour activism and attempts to break down the racial exclusivity of unions, to challenge extortionate rents and demand adequate maintenance of housing, to reclaim space for black leisure and cultural autonomy within the neighbourhood as white “slummers” sought exotic thrills uptown during the 1920s, and to resist brutal policing. In each case, King demonstrates persuasively how local activists’ demands were framed in terms of autonomy and control. The demand, for example, that Harlem's white-owned businesses should employ African Americans did not rest simply on antidiscrimination, but rather on the notion that Harlem “belonged to black people” (28).

Through diligent, fine-grained research, King recovers the actions, organizations and alliances through which local black men and women organized rent strikes, fought labour disputes and battled white mobs and racist police for control of the streets. Highly attuned to the intraracial politics of class and gender that contested the meanings of “community rights,” Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? reveals how Harlem's New Negro politics extended far beyond the doings of celebrity figures such as A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey, and often operated independently of them at the grass roots. This excellent, highly original work adds a new dimension to the study of black neighbourhood politics in the early decades of the twentieth century through its exploration of “community rights” thought and activism.

Where the book might have achieved greater clarity is in positioning Harlem's story in relation to those of other black urban communities. King sets himself against “New York exceptionalism” (4), and his attention to the everyday experience of and resistance to white supremacy enhances the corrective to portrayals of interwar Harlem as a whirl of joyful cultural effervescence. But the contention that “these struggles in Harlem constitute the earliest waves of the black freedom movement in the urban North in the twentieth century” (189) appears to imply a priority to Harlem's struggles that the book does not do much to demonstrate. Did Harlem's rent strikes or mobilizations against police brutality precede those elsewhere? More comparative work remains to be done if historians are to discover whether Harlem's status as the largest and most diverse African American neighbourhood did, indeed, make it the epicentre and crucible of this period's black freedom struggles.