African Americans in Suburbia

For African Americans and other minority groups, where to live is an issue with multiple considerations. Although the 1968 Fair Housing Act explicitly outlawed redlining (discriminatory practices in real estate), there are still reports of real estate agents purposefully steering minorities into specific and often racially segregated neighborhoods. Race, followed by economic class, is still very much a part of suburban community identity.

The literature on suburbanization in the United States is interesting in its narrow scope and focus. Since the 1960s, there has been an active research agenda on the development of suburbs, but much of this has addressed Caucasian populations. With a few exceptions, historians have focused on suburbs of elite and middle-class whites, and they have defined suburbs according to the standards of these communities. Sociologist Kenneth Jackson, for example, argues that the United States' distinctive landscape can be summarized as follows: “Affluent and middle-class Americans live in suburban areas that are far from their workplace, in homes that they own, and in the center of yards that by urban standards elsewhere are enormous” (Jackson 1987, p. 6). For Jackson, homeownership, low population density, and commuting from dormitory neighborhoods are essential to the definition of suburbia. Middle-class suburbia is not merely a physical landscape, however. As sociologist Robert Fishman explains, “suburbia… expresses values so deeply embedded in bourgeois culture that it might also be called the bourgeois utopia” (Fishman 1987, p. 4). At the root of the physical pattern of middle-class suburbia, then, is a cultural landscape, a set of ideas including an idealization of family life, leisure, feminine domesticity, and union with nature that are deeply rooted in Anglo American culture. Given this characterization of American suburbs as middle-class in essence, it is not surprising that workingclass black suburbs have received little attention. But failure to consider them results in an incomplete picture of U.S. suburbanization in the early twentieth century.