Black Citymakers Book Review

Dominic Akandwanaho
HUID: 40871950
AAAS 16: Sociology of the black community
TF: Khytie Brown

In his book, Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America, Marcus Hunter addresses a critical aspect of scholarship about structural racial discrimination and inequality that had not been previously given much scholarly examination. He attempts to explore the responses and reaction of people in weak positions—the truly disadvantaged, to systemic racial discrimination and social inequality. Specifically, he examines a black community in the Seventh ward of Philadelphia —a community that, according to previous work done by W.E Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro, is faced with many social ills such as poverty and crime. Hunter

Although this effort is ultimately unsuccessful, it points to Hunters view that an act of agency need not be successful to count as a meaningful way of engagement and of shaping the evolution of the city. In fact, this view corroborates and gives credence to his assertion that the truly disadvantaged (whose efforts may therefore not always be successful), can still be seen as citymakers (p.214). He goes on to write about housing reform efforts in the 1930s that lead to a lot of migration out of the neighborhood, a long and successful effort to stop the construction of a highway that would split a neighborhood as well as the successful election of W. Wilson Goode in 1983 as the first black Mayor of the region (p. 185).

Throughout the book, Hunter provides examples of intra-political and intra-racial politics, which serve to remind us that history is not always so straightforward. In chapter 5, he juxtaposes the Du Boisian observation that the Negro vote was a tool of republicans (p. 167-168) to the post-civil rights era. Hunter also examines how the campaigns by the American’s for democratic action and the Philadelphia party create conditions for the election of Mr.