Jayne MacManus says:

Richmond, California became a World War II boomtown. And almost as quickly as it burst at the seams with shipyard productivity, population surges, and overflowing housing, schools, and day care needs, the boomtown deflated. To a San Francisco-centric mindset, Richmond is no more than a sprawling urban ghetto. But it’s a community that deserves more than quick dismissal. As Shirley Ann Wilson Moore writes, “This book examines the history of the African American community in Richmond during the critical transitional years of the first half of the twentieth century. It places the activities of black working-class men and women, regarded by some as unlettered peasants who were spatially and intellectually isolated from larger social currents, at the center of the nation’s most profound, transformative events.”Published dissertations generally have an awful density about them — a frustrating compression of stats, dates, and repetitious topic statements. Moore’s book is somehow magically void of this while maintaining its scholarly value and dignity. Richly supported by oral histories, the book is unique for telling a community story of California, the American WW2 home front, and the African American experience all at once.Moore’s work is an insightful and appropriately succinct package encompassing the exodus of thousands of African Americans from the Jim Crow south to establishment of community, church life, self-sufficiency, war work, blues clubs, prosperity and stability in Richmond — if not for all, at least for some instead of none. These Richmondites were urban pioneers who laid the basis for the Civil Rights Movement in following generations.
Rating: 4 / 5