cover image Jim Crow Nostalgia: Reconstructing Race in Bronzeville

Jim Crow Nostalgia: Reconstructing Race in Bronzeville

Michelle R. Boyd, . . Univ. of Minnesota, $18.95 (211pp) ISBN 978-0-8166-4678-4

Political scientist Boyd's account of the redevelopment of Douglass and Grand Boulevards in Chicago's Bronzeville into a cultural space is a vivid illustration of how, in certain instances, “remaking place depends on remaking race.” The book charts the development of racial nostalgia (“a yearning for and celebration of black life during the period of legalized racial segregation” that overlooks “the more brutal aspects of racial segregation”) in Bronzeville and how, throughout the area's history, the black elite “constructed Jim Crow racial identity as they pursued their political preferences, and in ways that framed those preferences as intrinsic to blackness.” Boyd recounts the interracial and intraracial class conflicts and compromises as poor and middle-class blacks struggled to define and control their community within a more politically and economically powerful white milieu. Boyd's work is heavily statistical but enlivened with the voices of neighborhood residents and organizers, and while she assiduously defines her terminology, this is a book for the academic specialist. Students of contemporary African-American history and sociology, as well as those with a special interest in Chicago politics, will find her work a useful resource. (June)