L.A. city limits : African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the present /

While there is much written about the African American urban experience, few books look at cities west of the Mississippi River or take a multidisciplinary approach. Sides (California State Polytechnic Univ., Pomona) considers African Americans in South Central Los Angeles from the Depression to the present, while Trotter, Lewis, and Hunter gather essays from historians, sociologists, economists, and urban planners who look at urban blacks from the Colonial period to the present using historical, social scientific, and comparative approaches. The contributors examine how the development of slavery in the urban US shaped the later African American experience and focus on the perennial questions of race and gender, the Moynihan thesis, the importance of race relative to class in the 20th-century US, and the interaction between blacks and other subordinate groups, specifically addressing the seeming inability of blacks as a whole to improve their status. African Americans began moving to Los Angeles in large numbers during WW II to capitalize on the favorable economic climate, but segregation plagued people of color. Sides quotes one Oklahoma native who found that better wages and more jobs meant an improved standard of living in Los Angeles, but that uncertainty regarding race relations made the environment more tense. While many blacks improved their economic position with increased home ownership and greater geographic mobility, those who remained in poverty slipped further behind, indicating that both race and class are important determining factors. Sides also learned that in South Central, the African American population is now smaller than the Hispanic, and that the latter feels toward the former as blacks did toward whites 60 years ago. Both books add new perspectives on blacks and cities from several disciplines, and complement earlier books such as Robert Self's American Babylon (2003) and Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., The New African-American Urban History (1996). ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. D. R. Jamieson Ashland University