RANDAL MAURICE JELKS. African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2006. Pp. xvii, 217. Cloth $60.00, paper $25.00., EMILYE CROSBY. A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi. (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill:

Abstract

These two works represent the latest phase in scholarship on black communities in the twentieth century, both suggesting the continuing engagement of scholars with the problem of race in twentieth-century America. One is a study of a small black community in a medium-sized northern city during the first half of the century, and the other examines black activism in a predominantly black southern county during the second half of the century. Each was a successful dissertation at a leading university, and each is published by a respected university press—arguably the two academic presses that have contributed the most to the large number of historical monographs on American race relations in the last generation. But together the two books reflect some of the more serious shortcomings of scholarship and publishing on race in the past decade or so. Randall Maurice Jelks examines a tiny black community—less than 3,000 people for most of his period—from the perspective of “respectability,” a concern that Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham identified in 1993 as a fundamental preoccupation within turn-of-the-twentieth-century black communities. Focusing on respectability depends heavily on examining the behaviors of African Americans in churches, and Jelks seems most interested in what black congregations in Grand Rapids did. He says from the outset that he is not much interested in the issues raised by Joe W. Trotter on Milwaukee; John Bodnar and others on Pittsburgh; Kenneth Kusmer on Cleveland; Allan Spear, James Grossman, and Arnold Hirsch on Chicago; Gilbert Osofsky on New York; or August Meier, Elliott Rudwick, and Thomas Sugrue on Detroit. One puts this book down without a clear sense of exactly where blacks in Grand Rapids lived in relation to their white neighbors, what they did for living and how their economic lives might have evolved over time, and how the precise nature of race discrimination unfolded in Grand Rapids. Jelks surely has the right to present the book he wants, but he has done so at the expense of connecting what he knows about Grand Rapids to the issues that scholars who went before him have identified as the salient contexts for the northern black experience. What a curious reader might give for a map showing where blacks lived and worshipped or a table or two profiling economic realities. Even if the pursuit of respectability is worthy of being a dominant theme in the history of Grand Rapids, informed readers need to know how respectability shaped blacks' economic opportunities, political rights, and the use of space. This thin effort fails to meet that need, and the underanalyzed content of the commitment to respectability is insufficient to teach us much about black Grand Rapids. Jelks vaguely suggests that the Grand Rapids black community underwent dramatic alterations as a result of the post–World War II migrations, but he does not pursue the specifics, which means he does not connect to the work of Hirsch and Sugrue.