Liberty Road
Black Middle-Class Suburbs and the Battle Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism
Gregory Smithsimon
Liberty Road
Black Middle-Class Suburbs and the Battle Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism
Gregory Smithsimon
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Description
Liberty Road uncovers and exposes the social, political, cultural, and economic contradictions of middle-class African-American suburban life. Gregory Smithsimon explores the ways social conflicts and inequalities play out and through physical places and emphasizes the roles that African-American residents play in understanding and addressing suburban community issues.
Liberty Road uncovers and exposes the social, political, cultural, and economic contradictions of middle-class African-American suburban life. Gregory Smithsimon explores the ways social conflicts and inequalities play out and through physical places and emphasizes the roles that African-American residents play in understanding and addressing suburban community issues.
Gregory Smithsimon chronicles the experiences of middle-class blacks who were the first residents to integrate into Liberty Road, a predominantly white Baltimore suburb. He explores their side of the story, showing us how this racial project unfolded in political ways, constraining black progress under the guise of racial inclusivity.
This deeply-researched and engrossing text invites us to think of the relationship between race, place, and neoliberalism in innovative ways, namely through an examination of African-American suburbanites. In doing so, Smithsimon provides a crucial analysis of the persistent tensions between racial progress and retrenchment.
African American suburbs are different from African American urban communities and middle-class white communities, often in counterintuitive ways. Liberty Road explains the history, present, and future significance of these differences.
Liberty Road locates Black suburbs as an essential and a mitigating force in the American dream. We overlook these spaces in our understanding of cities and our history at our own peril. This is an important and engaging book for urban sociology and history, made so by the author’s skillful weaving of personal stories with archival research to ground the analysis in specific people and places.
By bringing African American agency to the forefront of the discussion, Greg Smithsimon successfully disentangles the complex web of causes related to the growth of African American suburban communities…Liberty Road is informative and articulate, written in language accessible to academics and nonacademics…Practitioners and lay people will find the book useful in providing an understanding of Black suburbs and the role that they continue to play in a highly segregated residential landscape.
A new book examines how Baltimore’s African American middle class overcame color barriers and racial tensions along the Liberty Road corridor over the past five decades as they established themselves in classic suburban neighborhoods. Author Gregory Smithsimon draws upon interviews, archives and census data to show how this area of Baltimore County is now home to approximately 82,000 Black people ... It’s clear that Smithsimon rang the right doorbells and listened attentively to some of the people who experienced the times.
Gregory Smithsimon is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of September 12: Community and Neighborhood Recovery at Ground Zero, The Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York City's Public Spaces, and Cause:…And How It Doesn’t Always Equal Effect.