Book Review

Canada and the United States

During the past twenty years, the study of the migration of African Americans from the South to the North at the turn of the twentieth century has shifted from a paradigm emphasizing the general breakdown and social pathology that allegedly accompanied their movement North to one in which blacks actually became actors in the process of creating what the late John W. Blassingame described as "enduring communities." Myra B. Young Armstead's book is a welcome addition to that growing body of literature that includes Joe William Trotter's Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945 (1988), Allen B. Ballard's "One More Day's Journey": The Story of a Family and a People (1984), Earl Lewis's In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (1991), James Borchert's Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850–1970 (1980), and my Strangers in the Land of Paradise: The Creation of an African American Community, Buffalo, New York, 1900–1940 (1999). All of these works emphasize the adaptive nature of black culture and blacks' ability to exercise agency, despite racial proscriptions.

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Armstead's book is a study of the urbanization of African Americans in the small, resort towns of Saratoga Springs, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island, in the early years of the twentieth century. Both towns had small and transient black populations. Scholars of black urban history have tended to ignore such regions, opting instead to focus on the teeming metropolises with their larger black populations. Hence, we know little about black life in resort centers and small towns. Armstead observes that these geographical "pastoral" settings are nevertheless prime examples of the tight urban-rural nexus within which blacks traveled frequently. She further suggests that the move may have been gradual and may have included a stint in small towns before many rural blacks moved to the big cities.

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