Book Review

Case studies of urbanization and community formation have been the mainstay of twentieth-century African American history since the appearance of various "making of a ghetto" studies in the 1960s. Two recent books reveal the continuing attraction and maturation of this genre.	1
Myra B. Young Armstead's "Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August" and Lillian Serece Williams's Strangers in the Land of Paradise are similar in topic and historiographical approach. Both focus on comparatively small black communities in the urban North. Both reject the "ghetto studies" formulation that urban migration was a "disruptive, jarring passage necessarily resulting in [a] web of social pathology." Instead, each highlights black adaptiveness "within a world of constricted options" and emphasizes black agency and the persistence of southern values in the urban North. In addition, both authors acknowledge race, class, and gender as categories in formation, and they conclude that race was "the most salient variable" in shaping the experience of African Americans in these communities.	2
Armstead's book traces the development of black communities in the northeastern resort towns of Saratoga Springs, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island, as a vehicle for illustrating the forces shaping black racial identity over time. Viewing African American history from such places, Armstead writes, illustrates overarching similarities among black communities throughout the United States as well as the "importance of structural and internal factors in shaping the details" of African American life. In Newport and Saratoga Springs, Armstead reveals, African Americans shared with other blacks in creating "race advancement" organizations and practicing a range of "self advancement" strategies that included reliance on kin networks as well as the cultivation and manipulation of relationships with whites. African Americans experienced an increasingly racialized world of work, and black Newporters and Saratogans developed a hierarchy of "class within a caste" that reflected but was distinct from the class structure among whites. At the same time, Armstead illustrates, the seasonal rhythm of urban leisure indelibly shaped black life in those small cities. The summer infusion of white visitors and black outsiders, who came as seasonal workers and tourists, invigorated the local economy, intensified social and political life, and opened a window into a wider African American world.	3
In Armstead's view, resort communities represented a middle ground between southern countryside and northern central city, and black migrants settled in such places partly because the rhythms of resort life offered a yearly "season," which brought them as close to "the American dream" as they might come. The book is a well-written evocation of "the common hopes and loves and labors" of African American men and women in those cities, and it is a solid social history that makes a firm case for both similarity and local distinctiveness among urban black communities before the Great Depression.	4
Williams's analysis of black Buffalo starts from many of the same premises, but the book promises more than it delivers. Like Armstead, Williams demonstrates the efficacy of black kinship networks, the adaptability of black household structures, and the amplification of race consciousness through migration, but her book suffers from a poorly developed central thesis and sometimes tenuous connections between argument and evidence. Deficiencies such as omitted chapter summaries and jumbled paragraphs, especially in the first half, contribute to this shortfall.	. . .