In his seminal collection of essays The Souls of Black Folks (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois, preeminent educator, scholar, and founder of the NAACP, traced a genealogy of black life in the United States as a way to demystify for his readers “the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century.” Assembling a collage of narratives that wove poignant personal recollections with a collective history of slavery, racial oppression, civil rights, race leadership, religion, social progress, and black cultural expression, Du Bois solemnly concluded that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” Du Bois’s revelation marked a critical moment when the racial formations of the slave economy, the plantation’s cotton fields and big house, as well as the Black Codes that controlled the mobility of enslaved and freed peoples were transitioning to the racial circumscriptions of Jim Crow America. The emerging “color-line” demarcated new racialized spheres that partitioned the lives of black citizens from those of their white neighbors in rural hamlets, small towns, and major urban centers across the nation. The “strange meaning” and difficult history of these segregated places where black Americans lived and worked—spaces of refuge, spheres of creative expression, and sites of contestation—are chronicled in the essays compiled in the exemplary collection “We Shall Independent Be:” African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States.

Inspired by an entreaty made by novelist Ralph Ellison, who suggested that the unwritten history of the black cultural vernacular could teach black Americans how to be intrepid in the face of unyielding racial oppression, Angel David Nieves and Leslie M. Alexander have assembled “We Shall Independent Be” to study the undocumented places of black American life. These forgotten vernacular landscapes reclaimed by the collection’s authors consist of overgrown burial grounds and hidden monuments, abandoned rural school houses a stone’s throw from old church buildings, and long-lost juke joints next to boarded up theaters along what had once been bustling main streets in segregated black neighborhoods. Other vanished places consist of the swamplands of the South’s low country along with the fledgling segregated suburbs ringing the major urban hubs that became havens for black residents escaping rural impoverishment and violence in the South.

In his introduction, Nieves critiques the shortcomings of earlier scholarship for failing to consider these everyday realms as legitimate sources for research into black history. Perhaps this oversight occurred because such places were neither monumental enough in character to survive rapid social changes nor adequately represented in architectural documentation, photographs, and personal papers stored in the nation’s major archives. Nieves perceptively observes that previous analyses of what the editors define as “black place-making” in the United States, especially those undertaken by researchers in the fields of history and sociology, have been dominated by two paradigms: the rural plantation and the urban ghetto. By enlisting the multidisciplinary talents of the scholars in this volume, Nieves and Alexander have shown that there is indeed a multitude of places through which to record the changing character of black life in the United States. “We Shall Independent Be” visits sites where black citizens toiled daily under the yoke of discrimination and where they strategized the long fight for equal representation in the face of unrelenting racism.

The conceptual core of the collection lies in the postwar discourse on the social production of space formulated in the writings of sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre. The influence of Lefebvre on geographers David Harvey and Edward Soja in the 1970s and 1980s led them to develop accounts of modernization that shifted the interpretive focus from time to space and emphasized the spatialization of social relations—especially the class system—as a framework for the materialization and experience of everyday life. It is this theory that underwrites “We Shall Independent Be” as its essays scrutinize a four-hundred-year period in the United States whereby changing social relations produced very different sorts of “racialized” spaces.

Scholars of American history, most working in an interdisciplinary manner, contribute the majority of the essays. Additional chapters come from the fields of urban studies, architectural history, art history, and geography. The editors loosely divide the volume into themes of “Community,” “Intellectual and Political Space,” “Segregated Spaces,” Schools and Educational Spaces,” “Urban Space and Leisure,” and “Churches and Sacred Spaces,” though essays appearing in one section could be easily placed under other headings. The fruitful results of these investigations offer readers a satisfying entrée into places that have rarely been documented, except perhaps in the novels and stories of Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Weldon Johnson, Toni Morrison, Charles Chestnutt, and others—a topic that Nieves’s contribution to the collection examines in greater detail. The contributors to “We Shall Independent Be” vivify the social spheres where black Americans cultivated a cultural memory and a historical consciousness of their legacy, evolved discourses on black nationalism and other political thought, and conceived of civil rights strategies to achieve social equality. The book reveals those sites that formed the backbone of the black educational system. It shows how segregation instigated black citizens to form an influential black counter-public sphere of religious and civic associations. And it tours the theaters, clubs, and backrooms that nurtured the lasting cultural productions of jazz and the blues.

Of particular note are essays that examine late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century buildings, neighborhoods, and landscapes. This research offers the most original insights into the ways in which blacks (freed and enslaved) carved out an existence in the new nation’s northern urban settlements and southern agricultural regions. Researching Manhattan’s little-known Seneca Village, for example, Alexander documents how the city’s white political establishment made early use of eminent domain to displace black property owners in order to build Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision for Central Park. A sinister consequence of this forced removal was that the city’s mayor also disenfranchised Seneca Village’s homeowners while enriching himself and fellow landowners who possessed parcels adjacent to the future park. Alexander’s careful study of newspaper reports, tax records, and maps gives life to the settlement of free men and women established in the early part of the nineteenth century on land outside of New York City proper. In his fascinating essay “Claiming the Courtroom: Space, Race, and Law, 1808–1856,” historian Scott Hancock shows how the early chambers of the lower courts served as an important forum where black Bostonians performed their rights of citizenship, thereby making themselves and their claims to equality and fair treatment under the law visible to all. In the burgeoning republic, the public sphere, and hence public space, had to be created, Hancock asserts, and as a result it was under continual redefinition. Hancock perceptively argues that eventually these public performances would be ousted by representations of buffoonery and minstrelsy circulating in popular culture, boosting a local and national trend to curtail the civil rights of black citizens in the North. An illuminating study by Mary Kate Nelson unravels the rationales and consequences of the importation of enslaved Africans to the coastal regions of Georgia beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. Because they possessed knowledge of rice production and could withstand the hot coastal climate better than their European captors, Africans made ideal workers for the vast low country plantations. However, this keen understanding of the swampland’s ecology and its geopolitical significance, Nelson writes, allowed some to escape through the otherwise inhospitable marshes to find either sanctuary in maroon colonies or safe havens offered by America’s enemies, the British and Spanish, in nearby Florida.

All the places visited in the twenty-two chapters of “We Shall Independent Be” are located in the eastern and upper mid-western half of the United States. Geographically, therefore, the primary axis of study is calibrated to the North and the South. Like the paradigms of” the ghetto” and “the plantation,” these regions represent established categories of cultural differences that the book could further challenge. What could be learned from places like Allensworth, California, and Boley, Oklahoma—towns and communities established by former slaves and buffalo soldiers who joined the westward expansion of the nation’s boundaries? The edifices of the civic associations and shop fronts lining Central Avenue in Los Angeles and the disappearing shipyards and working-class neighborhoods of Oakland, Richmond, and San Francisco also have rich and compelling histories to tell. An analysis of this other half of the United States would better reveal how black vernacular place-making cultivated for centuries in the eastern half of the country was adapted and transformed in these new western contexts. It would also pose productive questions about how African American experiences converged with and diverged from those of Asian immigrants and American Indians.

In the late 1980s, feminist scholars Rosalyn Deutsche, Doreen Massey, and others challenged Soja and Harvey. While they agreed with Soja and Harvey that space is indeed socially produced, these writers argued that by positioning economic systems and class formation as foundational to the social production of space, Soja and Harvey failed to adequately recognize how social identities (gendered, sexualized, and racialized) are formed through cultural productions. Feminists asserted that a critical aesthetics could also serve as a method of analyzing socio-cultural space. This question of aesthetics should be considered when studying the history of black place-making in the United States, too. While the probing essay by Mary S. Hoffschwelle on the Rosenwald Foundation’s financing of black school construction, captures, along with a few of the other essays, the character of the buildings it studies, none of the contributions to this book foregrounds a rigorous visual or aesthetic analysis of these places or their contexts. This is where the scholarship of “We Shall Independent Be” might link to the research of art and architectural historians, as well as the work of artists, architects, and designers. More could be said, for example, about the physical character of these various buildings, public squares, rooms, and locales. A closer reading would yield a more nuanced understanding of the qualities of light, the palette of the materials and plant matter used, and the textures, colors, and smells of the particular places. Were black architects, builders, and work crews enlisted to build these places? Who might have chosen particular styles or details? Since historians wrote the majority of the essays in this collection, aesthetics and visual analysis may not necessarily be within their methodological purview. The study of these sites by art and architectural historians would greatly enrich the body of research and discourse on black vernacular place-making. More significantly for these fields, such research might challenge prevailing theories on aesthetics and visual cultural analysis.

“We Shall Independent Be” is an important and engaging collection that will prove useful to all those interested in the history of African American place-making and the broader history of the spatial dimensions of American modernity. Its minor shortcomings should only serve as an impetus to inspire further research on the rich topics, valiant people, and fascinating places explored throughout its pages.