Black Suburbs

Abstract

Black suburbanization and black suburbs were not the focus of social science research until the 1960s. The rise of the civil rights movement, the emergence of a growing black middle class, and the enactment of the 1968 Fair Housing Act allowed for much greater movement of blacks into largely segregated white suburbs. Research on black suburbs and black suburbanization has largely traced rates of growth as well as patterns of settlement. In many metropolitan areas, black suburbanization has extended the segregated residential patterns of the core cities. Other research has focused on the creation of political and social identities of the mostly middle-class blacks who initially moved into the suburbs. Research since 2000 has focused on older, inner-ring suburbs where many working-class and poor African Americans have settled. This bibliography highlights works that explore the distinctiveness of black suburbs. Early histories of black suburbs are included, as well as more recent work that places their emergence as part of recent trends in urban and suburban history. Differentiating these suburbs from each other and from other suburbs has played a large role in how scholars understand black suburbanization, as varying across space, place, and time. Since 2000 the role of race, ethnicity, and immigration has also shaped black suburbs by reshaping political coalitions and social understandings. America’s growing economic inequality has been reflected in the transformation of urban-centric social welfare services to the new political, economic, and physical landscape of American suburbs. Recent research suggests that black suburbs are distinctive, and that policy choices and governance varies along with this distinctiveness. As such, this bibliography centers black suburbanization and black suburbs as its core topic. This means that this review will not cover the key works that have established the centrality of race in shaping white suburbanization, such as Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), Lizabeth Cohen’s Consumer Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), and David M. P. Freund’s Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007). While these works are important, black suburbs and suburbanization largely remain secondary to their core focus. This also means that changes in central city black neighborhoods, as well black urban politics, will also not be a focus of the bibliography.