Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar (ed.), Black Movement: African American Urban History Since the Great Migration

Reviewed By Zariyah Grant

Black Movement: African American Urban History since the Great Migration
Edited by Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar
The University of North Carolina Press
April 2025, 380 pp.

Black Movement: African American Urban History since the Great Migration, edited by Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, is an ambitious collection that asks: What has happened to Black urban communities since the end of the Great Migration? Historians have yet to write this history, and Ogbar enlists an impressive array of scholars to begin this bold endeavour. He challenges conventional frameworks for understanding Black urban history, dismantling assumptions that gentrification is solely racial, emphasizing its class dimensions and the role of Black gentrifiers. He also highlights suburbanization as a defining shift in post-Great Migration Black life. Furthermore, he explores contradictions that emerged with the rise of Black municipal power and the growth of the Black middle class, even as the Black poor faced deepening poverty, displacement, and incarceration. Hovering over this inquiry are the paradoxes of the Civil Rights Movement: its victories enabled the ascent of a Black middle class, while the Black poor continued to bear the brunt of the assault on the welfare state.

Though Black Movement is a study of Black urban life spanning roughly 1970 to 2020, the near absence of sustained engagement with Black queer urban life—including the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS—reflects a persistent silence in Black urban history. Still, Black Movement offers a vital, multifaceted account of this period, illuminating the complex interplay of migration, race, class, and power. These gaps do not diminish the volume's contributions; instead, they underscore the ongoing need to expand our frameworks for understanding African American urban history in all its dimensions.

Part 1 features Jeffrey Ogbar and Tom Adam Davies, who examine the emergence and implications of Black municipal power post-1970s. Davies argues that Black elected officials "made a reality of the rhetoric of Black economic advancement," primarily through affirmative action in city hiring and minority business development (page(30). While these efforts benefited college-educated, middle-class, and wealthy Black folk, the conditions of the Black poor declined under these same policies. Davies stops short of blaming Black municipal governance for this decline but suggests that Black economic advancement was permitted only within the narrow confines of overlapping interests between the Black middle class, white progressives, and white conservatives—supportive of affirmative action but hostile to redistributive policies. For Davies, these politicians' efforts were an art of the possible, shaped by federal policy, economic inequality, and enduring white supremacy. Ogbar beautifully captures these contradictions in his central question about Atlanta—the celebrated epicenter of Black urban success: Black Mecca or Black Dystopia?

Ogbar interrogates the terrain on which Black Atlanta built its success. Maynard Jackson, Atlanta's first Black mayor, presided over a city with the highest concentration of historically Black colleges and a long tradition of Black institution-building. Jackson exploited this terrain, even as he faced opposition from white elites who viewed Black advancement as a zero-sum game. Yet the celebratory image of Black Atlanta is complicated by the reality that Black officials largely ignored Black poverty. While Ogbar does not definitively define Atlanta as either Mecca or Dystopia, he affirms the city's undeniable appeal, evidenced by the significant migration of Black Americans to Atlanta since the Great Migration. Yet in this so-called Black Mecca, asking what becomes of the prayers of the poor feels almost blasphemous—an affront to the dominant narrative of Black triumph. Still, it is a necessary question in reckoning with the costs of symbolic or qualified success, one that both Ogbar and Davies boldly raise but ultimately do not fully pursue. In doing so, they open substantial ground for further inquiry into the enduring struggles of Atlanta's Black poor.

Part 2 shifts from the limits and possibilities of Black political power to the cultural transformations born from these complex conditions. Maurice J. Hobson and Scott Brown show how Black communities responded to urban change through music—whether producing counternarratives to gentrification in Atlanta's hip-hop scene or building musical legacies in Dayton, Ohio, through the everyday labor and support of working-class families.

Hobson argues that OutKast's music directly responded to Atlanta's dramatic shift toward gentrification, urban renewal, and foreign investment in preparation for the 1996 Olympics. Drawing on Black spirituality and science fiction motifs, particularly those of the controversial United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, the duo offered a counternarrative to Atlanta's restructuring and the displacement of the Black working class and poor. Hobson shows how OutKast incorporated these symbolic frameworks into works like Elevators (Me & You); however, the chapter leaves the broader meaning of these motifs underdeveloped, particularly how they translate the narratives of those displaced by Atlanta's Olympic-era urban restructuring.

In contrast, Brown situates the emergence of Black self-contained bands within the historical experience of Dayton's working-class communities. For Brown, the social conditions among the Black working class enabled the rise of these bands in the mainstream music industry. Household income and community resource-sharing provided the support and mentorship necessary for young people to access instruments and music education. For example, Steve Shockley, famed guitarist for Lakeside, received his first guitar after his mother put it on layaway at a local department store. Public gatherings such as school talent shows also played a vital role, serving as spaces for community engagement and informal training grounds for aspiring musicians. Moreover, Black women in Dayton played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in managing and supporting these emerging groups as they transitioned from school venues to adult stages. But these cultural formations were only as stable as their economic foundations.

By the 1970s, unemployment soared with the decline of manufacturing jobs. Most bands that had risen to prominence in the 1970s did not survive into the 1980s. And while many Dayton groups secured initial recording deals with major labels, the infrastructure of Black schools in the city was deteriorating, threatening the very community support systems that had furnished these successful musicians. Brown's account reveals how Black cultural production, like the political leadership of Black mayors, was often constrained by the structural limits of urban governance and economic decline.

Part 3 draws our attention to the suburbanization of Black life in the post-Great Migration era, but the section's strength lies in its methodological innovation. As Black communities become increasingly diasporic, mobile, and complex, traditional frameworks for narrating Black urban experience fall short. Contributors Tatiana M. F. Cruz, Brian Purnell, and Fiona Vernal offer new approaches that reflect the shifting contours of Black life, urging historians to rethink how we approach Black space, identity, politics, and community amid migration, incarceration, and demographic change.

Tatiana M. F. Cruz traces the origins of Boston politician Mel King's Rainbow Coalition politics, focusing on its deployment during his 1983 mayoral campaign. King built his coalition on the historical foundations of Black and Latinx communities and social service workers who crafted grassroots responses to the urban crisis of the 1960s and 1970s. Determined to build a Boston that serves everyone, King registered nearly 51,000 new Black and Latinx voters and lost the Democratic primary by a single vote. In the general election, he was defeated in a landslide, failing to secure white voter support. Still, King declared that while the Rainbow Coalition did not win, it had a lasting legacy. Cruz's work invites us to see multiracial and multiethnic coalition-building not only as a strategy but as the source of new forms of politics.

Brian Purnell offers a vital methodological intervention, proposing overlapping diasporas and a metropolitan-regional lens to understand Black life since the 1970s in the New York Metropolitan Area. He argues that overlapping diasporas—driven by emigration from Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean, as well as Black migration to suburbs and the politics of incarceration—have created new types of Black communities. He asserts that the Black ghetto, long central to our understanding of racialized urban life, has been unmade. Demographic shifts reveal Black communities in unexpected places, such as Staten Island, which saw a 200% increase in its Black population despite its white and conservative reputation. With the shifting borders of Blackness and Purnell's call to move beyond the ghetto as an analytic tool, we are left to ask: if not ghettoization, what now constitutes the structure and geographical bounds of racialized exploitation?

Fiona Vernal's piece complements Purnell's by examining Hartford, Connecticut's transformation into a Caribbean and Black American city. Drawing on community archives and oral histories, Vernal centers the voices of African American, Latinx, and Caribbean migrants, offering a counternarrative to dominant portrayals of these communities as sites of urban pathology.  If Purnell urges us to use diaspora to understand transformations in Black urban life, Vernal emphasizes the affective dimensions of migration. Using the language of unmooring and untethering, she highlights the emotional experiences of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and West Indians as they leave familiar homes and settle in new ones. Her work reminds us that migration is not only a structural transformation—it is also an emotional one.

If Part 3 traced the internal and diasporic movements of Black communities and the political formations that emerged from them, Part 4 turns to the conditions of confinement, surveillance, and infrastructural abandonment that rendered Black communities increasingly vulnerable.  Shannon King, LaShawn Harris, Melanie D. Newport, and J. T. Roane bring the spectacular and subtle forms of state-sanctioned violence and carceral power back into focus, placing them on a continuum with social policy and decisively refuting the racist narrative that Black communities requested, or are responsible for, the very violence inflicted upon them.

Shannon King centers the dual crisis of drugs and policing in 1960s and 1970s New York, challenging Michael J. Fortner's claim that Black New Yorkers broadly supported Rockefeller's punitive drug laws. For King, a politics of safety shaped black attitudes toward these laws—marked by internal tensions over how best to protect communities. Supporting punitive measures did not equate to endorsing the drug laws wholesale, and many Black New Yorkers made that distinction clear in their debates over Black safety.

LaShawn Harris extends this analysis by centering the gendered dimensions of policing, particularly violence against Black women in New York. For Harris, this violence was never incidental but a core mechanism of white supremacy, used to regulate Black women's lives. Harris's excavation of the archive of police assaults on Black women presents violence that initially appears spectacular. But from brutal invasions of homes and attacks on Black women's bodies, Harris reveals how such acts were routine, woven into the fabric of New York's carceral landscape. In response, Black women were, and remain, unrelenting in legal challenges and public disclosures, seeking to transform this violent terrain and reclaim their lives.

Melanie D. Newport explores how carceral innovations in Chicago restructured punishment. As the War on Drugs intensified, policymakers dismantled progressive bail reforms, pushing for harsher pretrial measures. With the rise of crack cocaine and the ensuing jail overcrowding, Chicago officials turned to electronic monitoring as a "sophisticated" solution. Newport's most powerful insight comes through a gendered lens: electronic monitoring shifted the burden of incarceration onto families. Confined to their homes, monitored individuals became dependent on relatives—often women—for care and surveillance. For Newport, these innovations destroyed the border between home and jail and contributed to the normalization of surveillance central to the "New Jim Crow."

J. T. Roane turns to a brazen act of state violence: the 1985 bombing of the MOVE organization by Philadelphia police. Yet Roane's intervention lies in excavating what he calls the "scorched archive" of municipal documents concerning house fires (260). He reveals how narratives of individual culpability—blaming fires on smoking or children playing with matches—obscured infrastructural neglect and predatory landlord schemes that made Black neighborhoods vulnerable to flames. This obfuscation unfolded under Philadelphia's first Black mayor, Wilson Goode, whose administration sought to attract real estate investment while displacing working-class Black communities. Roane's work shows how state violence is not only spectacular, as in the MOVE bombing, but also slow, bureaucratic, and infrastructural, woven into the everyday conditions and built environments of Black urban life.

Black Movement has no formal conclusion; instead, Part 5 serves as a closing gesture, focusing on three cities in flux: Los Angeles, Camden, and Atlanta. It paints a conflicted image—marked by the ascent of the Black middle class and the simultaneous struggles and decline of the Black poor, capturing a tension between optimism and foreboding.

During his 2017 visit to Los Angeles, Stefan M. Bradley found the city was equally beautiful and segregated. He argues that LA's stark racial disparities were not only evident but historically intentional. Bradley traces the city's evolution—from a destination for Black southerners seeking jobs in the airline and dock industries during the 1940s to 1970s, to the social confinement of Black youth to gang life, the rise of the Black middle and entertainment class in the 1980s, the 1992 LA Rebellion, and the collapse of Black homeownership in LA during the 2008 housing crisis. Despite the complex interplay of progress and regression, Bradley concludes that unless Black newcomers to LA belong to the professional or entertainment class, they will need "angels" to thrive.

Chanelle Rose and Benjamin H. Saracco paint an even more dismal picture of Camden, New Jersey. In 1989, Mayor Melvin Randy Primas, the Black People's Unity Movement (BPUM), and the New Jersey Department of Corrections proposed building a new prison in Camden. Many North Camden residents opposed the project, recognizing that it would exacerbate the marginalization of the neighborhood already burdened by a drug and housing crisis. The co-authors argue that since the 1980s, Camden's African American leadership has often excluded poor and working-class Black and Brown residents from its vision of urban revitalization. Rather than addressing structural inequalities, leaders frequently ceded power to the Democratic Party's political machine, pursued neoliberal policies, and relinquished local authority to the state.          

Finally, Jeffrey Ogbar returns to Atlanta—the Black Mecca—and the powerful narratives that sustain its image. Atlanta has attracted more Black migrants than any other city since the end of the Great Migration. Black people are in every class stratum, and the city has had fifty consecutive years of Black mayors. It boasts recordings from artists like Toni Braxton, is home to Black celebrity residents like Mariah Carey, and hosts the studio of Black billionaire Tyler Perry. Simultaneously, Atlanta faces the lowest rate of social mobility and the most significant wealth inequality among African Americans in major U.S. cities. High levels of crime plagued its housing projects, and by 2011, the city tore down most of the projects, though about 85% of that population remained in the city. Ogbar ends by musing that while Atlanta is no utopia, its standing as a veritable Black Mecca in one of the nation's most anti-Black states is striking. He concludes that Atlanta's achievements will continue to inspire Black movement and transform the U.S. in remarkable ways.

Ogbar's conclusion is one of optimism, while his collaborators appear skeptical—but the question remains: which Black folk can be a part of a more hopeful vision? The trajectory of the Black middle class and elite is relatively straightforward throughout the volume. But while the physical and social movements of Black people have come to signify a journey toward freedom and opportunity, this collection makes evident that although Black people continue to move, the place of the Black working class and poor in the United States remains brutal and uncertain. This ambiguity underscores the need to more fully account for the diverse experiences shaping Black life in the post–Great Migration era. Nonetheless, Black Movement: African American History Since the Great Migration is not an obstacle to that pursuit, but a generative and inspiring contribution to it.

Zariyah Grant is a doctoral candidate in History and the collaborative specialization program at the Women and Gender Studies Institute. Her research encompasses various areas, including gender, slavery, and racial capitalism in the Atlantic World. Additionally, she studies 20th-century U.S. history, the cultural, social, and political history of Black urban deviance, and the Black radical tradition across the African diaspora.