Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh since World War II by Joe W. Trotter and Jared N. Day

Abstract

In recent years, historians have enriched our view of the civil rights movement to encompass a broader national view of racial segregation, social activism in black communities, and white resistance to racial change during the twentieth century. No longer is the history of the African American freedom struggle a conversation that is regionally confined to the South. Exciting studies by Martha Biondi, Matthew Countryman, Patrick D. Jones, and Robert O. Self, among others, have highlighted how civil rights protests and white opposition rocked the neighborhoods, schools, buses, and streets of cities outside of the South during the second half of the twentieth century. Joe W. Trotter and Jared N. Day's new book is a noteworthy addition to this scholarship, contributing to our understanding not only of Pittsburgh's civil rights history but also of the importance of industrial growth and deindustri-alization, suburbanization, urban housing, and urban "renewal" efforts in the civil rights struggles of northern African Americans, as well as the opportuni-ties and limitations blacks faced as they pressed for both social and economic change. Built on an extensive foundation of archival sources, oral interviews, newspaper articles, and relevant secondary sources, Race and Renaissance is essential reading for historians of race, civil rights, and cities in post–World War II America.