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Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West

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Some know Oklahoma's Black towns as historic communities that thrived during the Jim Crow era--this is only part of the story. In this book, Karla Slocum shows that the appeal of these towns is more than their past. Drawing on interviews and observations of town life spanning several years, Slocum reveals that people from diverse backgrounds are still attracted to the communities because of the towns' remarkable history as well as their racial identity and rurality. But that attraction cuts both ways. Tourists visit to see living examples of Black success in America, while informal predatory lenders flock to exploit the rural Black economies. In Black towns, there are developers, return migrants, rodeo spectators, and gentrifiers, too. Giving us a complex window into Black town and rural life, Slocum ultimately makes the case that these communities are places for affirming, building, and dreaming of Black community success even as they contend with the sometimes marginality of Black and rural America.

ISBN-13: 9781469653976

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Publication Date: 11-25-2019

Pages: 192

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

Karla Slocum is Thomas Willis Lambeth Chair of Public Policy and professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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From the Publisher

Slocum gives us a sense of the importance of Black towns, which then becomes an allegory for the importance of one's own history, which then becomes a commentary on what makes all of us human. Black Towns, Black Futures is innovative and methodologically rigorous, while also accessible and highly original. An outstanding book." —Laurence Ralph, Princeton University



Slocum has written a careful, convincing, and insightful argument about how and why it makes sense to think seriously about the state of—and lure of—Black towns in contemporary American society. A wonderful example of what ethnography can do when placed in proper historical context and steeped in the cultural politics of local communities." —John L. Jackson Jr., University of Pennsylvania