Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West by Karla Slocum

Abstract

Reviewed by: Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West by Karla Slocum Irene Brisson Karla Slocum. Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. ISBN: 9781469653976 Paperback: 192 pages Black towns in Oklahoma are the eponymous subject of Karla Slocum’s Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West, but her objects of analysis are Black-town stories: stories told by new and old residents, historians, politicians, investors, businesspeople, and tour guides; stories of pasts, presents, and futures. This important and nuanced ethnographic work explores the “appeal of a Black place” to a diverse group of people (including descendants of former Black town residents like the author herself) by attending to narrative and meaning-making alongside the maintenance, development, and reuse of physical places in four of Oklahoma’s thirteen remaining Black towns. Though neither a history of Black towns nor an architectural study of Black town buildings and spaces, Black Towns, Black Futures makes a critical contribution for scholars of the built environment of the southern United States and the Americas at large by showing that the complex reality of twenty-first century Black towns is constructed upon centuries of sedimented racial violence, displacement, and resistance. The book begins with the story of “A Black El Dorado” wherein the author’s great-uncle was run out of business by a white competitor in the Jim Crow South and established a successful barbershop in an Oklahoma Black town. His is an example of a history that begins with a traumatic experience and ends with the town as a site of agency and economic success. Calling in the myth of El Dorado where European colonizers dreamed of finding abundant treasures, Slocum foreshadows the complex and contradictory nature of Black towns and their stories, and she gestures to the colonial entanglements of the United States, Black and Indigenous people, as well as land and property in Oklahoma. In this compelling and thorough introduction, Slocum also situates Oklahoma’s Black towns within broader theoretical and historical debates about Black space including practices of marronage and problematic tropes of Black spaces as exceptional. The four core chapters that follow focus on Black-town histories, heritage tourism, internal and external economic activities, and community formation and maintenance. The first chapter examines themes and variations in residents’ stories including origin stories, the rise and decline of small business, and the vitality and demise of Black schools—all of which exceed simple narratives of success or refuge. In the following chapter, the focus turns to intentionally crafted Black-town histories that are shared via heritage tourism. As Slocum writes, “to do the work of identifying a Black-identified place as both remarkable and normal, as typically American, typically Black, and yet unusually Black, is to do political and social work.”1 The third chapter complicates the most common Black-town history of a bygone era of entrepreneurial success by profiling the contemporary small business owners who provide a service to their communities but struggle to compete with large corporations. They and others are drawn to transform Black-town economies with divergent goals; external investors and private prisons are notable for their profiting from the economic frailty and isolation of Black towns. Boundaries between interior and exterior are blurred in the fourth chapter, which considers how reunions and spectacular events like rodeos keep families connected to Black towns as well as the appeal for descendants of residents and unrelated Black Americans to move into Black towns with their complex bundle of potential and nostalgia. [End Page 66] The primary argument of the book, that “the Black-town reality is more than the Black imaginary of itself, but that does not impede the Black ideal of the space,” is summarized in a short final chapter on the enduring and contradictory appeal of these places.2 Slocum’s complication of the image of Black towns that are often either erased from US history stories or rendered as flat and isolated (and past) places of Black freedom contributes to a robust...