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Book Review
To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 19101963. By Shirley Ann Wilson Moore. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xiii + 232 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00.)
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In this brief volume, Shirley W. Moore has prepared a scrupulously researched biography of a community and a people. Using personal interviews, oral history collections, periodicals, public records, and numerous other contextual sources, Moore introduces the reader to the transformation of Richmond, California, a small San Francisco Bay area town, into a thriving industrial city during World War II. "African American migrants to Richmond came looking for the California dream, which promised economic advancement and greater freedom," Moore writes (p. 127). Instead, they found the reality of America's unresolved issues with race. Growing rapidly in size from less than 300 out of a city population of 24,000 in 1940, to nearly 10,000 in a total population of 100,000 in 1945, African Americans carried with them cultural traditions that sustained them through the wartime prosperity and the postwar economic decline. Rather than a response to exclusion, racial solidarity became a strategy that promoted community formation and resistance to discrimination on all levels. |
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