Places in Need: The Changing Geography of Poverty

do’s significance as an Underground Railroad station; men and women who broke barriers in the earlyand mid-twentieth century to become the city’s first black educators, politicians, and professionals; Toledoborn black entertainers and athletes who achieved national fame, such as jazz pianist Art Tatum and Olympic boxer Wilbert ‘‘Sketter’’ McClure; institutions that arose after the Great Black Migrations to anchor the black community’s cultural and economic life, such as clubs, churches, and businesses; black Toledoans who played leading roles in the fight for fairness before and during the civil rights movement of the 1960s; and the black community’s responses to modern racism, postindustrial transformations, and educational disparities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The volume’s last chapter attempts to present a theoretical lens through which readers can interpret these documents. But this effort is, for the most part, a short summary (fewer than six pages) of fundamental sociological concepts, such as urbanization and social stratification, and it seems detached from the earlier chapters. It is therefore likely to be perceived by many readers as too little and too late. Hence, while many of the volume’s documents are interesting and enjoyable to read, there is very little substantive analysis of their contents. Later in this chapter, the editors try to relate their volume to some well-known historical case studies of the urban North’s black communities, for example, Drake and Cayton’s classic Black Metropolis. However, this attempt is, by and large, an abbreviated review (about three pages) of these studies rather than a true comparative examination. In the end, Black Toledo accomplishes an important goal: that of presenting a ‘‘running social history of the black experience in Toledo’’ (p. 292) for scholars and students who wish to undertake further study of that city’s black community, for instance, in graduate and undergraduate research projects. The editors have made an impressive effort to assemble an eclectic body of documents, and their diligence, thoughtfulness, and local knowledge have paid off. Yet the volume falls a bit short of achieving its goal of producing ‘‘a social historical work that provides bigger lessons for readers with interests beyond Toledo’’ (p. 292), due to an underdeveloped theoretical framework and a methodology that, as noted above, leaves salient issues unaddressed. We can hope, though, that the volume will inspire extensive analyses that compare and contrast black communities in other medium-sized cities—for example, Akron, Dayton, and Youngstown, Ohio—with their counterparts in large cities, in order to balance the sociological and historical literatures, which are heavily tilted toward the North’s major urban centers.