Contemporary Harlem, with its multimillion-dollar townhouses and majority non-black population, may seem to have little connection to the area’s twentieth-century history as a racially segregated yet culturally pre-eminent black Mecca. James Weldon Johnson, celebrating the community’s initial renaissance in the 1920s, was able to imagine a hypothetical moment when its blocks might be wrested away from African Americans but only in the far-distant future.1 However, re-development conflicts from the intervening decades remain vitally relevant to any deeper understanding of Harlem’s community politics today. As Goldstein demonstrates in his compelling study, even oppositional moments in the area’s political history, such as the radical “community control” mobilizations of the 1960s, furnished important (if sometimes unintentional) conditions for the gentrification of black America’s most iconic urban center.

The Roots of Urban Renaissance provides a well-researched reconstruction of the late twentieth-century struggles over the future of Harlem. The book’s most striking contribution is...

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