Walter David Greason. Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey.

Abstract

Walter David Greason's “suburbs” do not fit neatly as a distinctive middle ground between rural and urban America. In this wide-ranging meditation—part historical exegesis, part jeremiad—on the African American experience in what is today metropolitan New Jersey, Greason contributes to the ongoing dialogue about race matters in the North from the close of the Civil War to the present day. Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey focuses on a rural corridor stretching across seven central New Jersey counties. (There is, regrettably, no map included for those who may not have a keen sense of the state's geography.) Drawing on documents in many archives, oral histories, government reports, and the latest scholarship, Greason devotes his attention to the intersection of white supremacist public policy and African Americans' adaptation to felt realities. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, blacks regularly served suburban whites' needs for physical labor or some form of domestic service, but were socially invisible, denied access to quality housing, schooling, and recreational facilities. After 1945, as legal challenges undermined the foundations of white supremacy, whites found other means of assuring their dominance through the construction of school and electoral district boundaries, continued insistence on “home rule,” and effective opposition to affordable (i.e., public) housing.