| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua. America's First Black Town: Brooklyn, Illinois, 1830–1915. Champaign and Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2000. Pp. xiv, 276. $37.50.

Brooklyn, Illinois, has a special place in African-American history. Founded within a stone's throw of East St. Louis in 1829 by free blacks and fugitive slaves, this small enclave evolved first into an unincorporated, biracial village and then, later, into a small, working-class, all-black commuter suburb. Along the way, Brooklyn became the first black-majority municipality in the United States (1873), thus allowing it to stake its claim as America's oldest black town. Confronted with chronic underdevelopment, it also devolved into a run down, problem-plagued community in the decades immediately surrounding 1900—a small-town forerunner to larger cities like Gary and Newark in more recent times. 1

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua's history of Brooklyn, told from an avowedly black nationalist perspective, emphasizes the importance of race, class, proletarianization, and dependency. The story itself is broken down into three parts, with each corresponding to a broad stage in the community's evolution: its formative years before the Civil War; its transition to a village dominated politically by African Americans (1870–1906); and its subsequent political and economic decline (1886–1915). . . .

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