| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

America's First Black Town: Brooklyn, Illinois, 1830–1915. By Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. xvi, 276 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-252-02537-7.)

Since the 1990s, the "new urbanism" has revitalized the image of "small-town America" in many planning discussions. While Florida's Seaside and Celebration seem literally Disneyfied and may evoke new segregations by race and class, "neo-traditionalism" also speaks to quests for community and order in inner-city neighborhoods. Some have challenged such nostalgia, noting that Main Street was a Sinclair Lewis dilemma before it became a theme park; hence, the need for cogent historical analysis of small-town experiences remains compelling. This is especially true of black towns, whether southern (such as Zora Neale Hurston's Eatonville) or settlements built by black exodusters in the Midwest and West. There, community and autonomy were nourished but tested in ways that recast neo-traditional issues today. At the same time, such black communities faced continual pressures of race and class: Eatonville and Celebration share their state with the site of the 1923 Rosewood massacre, where white vigilantes ravaged another black town. . . .

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