African American Urban History: Framing a New Perspective

Abstract

Until the mid-1960s, slavery, emancipation, and black life in the rural South dominated scholarship on the African American experience. A small coterie of black scholars and their white allies combated the prevailing stereotype that blacks had little or no history worthy of recording or recalling. They argued that the black experience was an integral part of the American experience and thus deserved treatment as part of the larger fabric of American society. As John Hope Franklin has recently stated, Their fight to integrate Afro-American history into the mainstream was a part of the fight to gain admission to the mainstream of American life -for the vote, for equal treatment, for equal opportunity, for their rights as Americans.1 Thus, earlyto mid-twentieth-century studies emphasized the undemocratic experiences of blacks in American society, and, at the same time, called attention to the civil rights struggles of African-Americans. While such studies illuminated huge areas of black life in the nation, they did so primarily within the framework of the rural South, where over 80 percent of blacks lived until the early twentieth century.2 Research on black life in northern cities proliferated during the 1960s and 1970s. Fueled by concern over the eruption of violence in segregated communities of the urban North, scholars looked for the roots of the contemporary malaise in historical patterns of southern black migration and segregation in American cities. Such scholars as Allan Spear, Gilbert Osofsky, and Kenneth Kusmer documented the making of black urban ghettoes, stressing the impact of white racial hostility on the various facets of African American life in the modern city. Rejecting the notion that blacks were simply another immigrant group, destined to move up in the larger socioeconomic system, these scholars portrayed the black urban community in essentially racial and geographical terms and set the framework for scholarship through the 1970s. Thus, although southern blacks moved increasingly into new jobs in the