Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey
InSuburban ErasureWalter David Greason 'examines the roles of African Americans in transforming the culture, politics, and economics of rural New Jersey in the twentieth century (p. 2). He uses the first half of the book to explore the history of women, churches, and schools. . . .[T]he second half of the book picks up as Greason analyzes larger social trends such as suburbanization and the culture of consumption and their impact on African Americans. . . .[T]the second half brings together newer historio-graphical insights about suburbanization and consumption and makes more nuanced arguments about them. Historians of the African American experience, especially in New Jersey, will find these chapters to be of greater value.(The Journal of American History)This is an ambitious, admirably researched and analyzed history of African American communities, their development, consolidation, and subsequent centrifugal diminution. Greason writes objectively, but one can sense the passion motivating it.(Kalman Goldstein, Fairleigh Dickinson University)Suburban Erasureexplains how racial inequality adapted in the twentieth century in order to shape American society today. It celebrates the voices of unheralded civil rights leaders, while clearly explaining how suburbs reflect earlier patterns of segregation.