We long for diverse, thriving neighborhoods and churches, yet racial injustices persist. Why? Urban missiologist David Leong reveals the profound ways in which geographic structures and systems sustain the divisions among us and create barriers to reconciliation. For the flourishing of our communities, here is a vision of belonging and hope in our streets, cities, and churches.

While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as "Chocolate City," it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor. In this book, Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.'s shift to a "post-chocolate" cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street's economic and racial developments. In doing so, she offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital. Summers focuses on the continuing significance of blackness in a place like the nation's capital, how blackness contributes to our understanding of contemporary urbanization, and how it laid an important foundation for how Black people have been thought to exist in cities. Summers also analyzes how blackness—as a representation of diversity—is marketed to sell a progressive, "cool," and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban center. Using a mix of participant observation, visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research, Summers shows how blackness has become a prized and lucrative aesthetic that often excludes D.C.'s Black residents.

A revealing work of public history that shows how communities remember their pasts in different ways to fit specific narratives, Race, Place, and Memory charts the ebb and flow of racial violence in Wilmington, North Carolina, from the 1730s to the present day.  Margaret Mulrooney argues that white elites have employed public spaces, memorials, and celebrations to maintain the status quo. The port city has long celebrated its white colonial revolutionary origins, memorialized Decoration Day, and hosted Klan parades. Other events, such as the Azalea Festival, have attempted to present a false picture of racial harmony to attract tourists. And yet, the revolutionary acts of Wilmington’s African American citizens—who also demanded freedom, first from slavery and later from Jim Crow discrimination—have gone unrecognized. As a result, beneath the surface of daily life, collective memories of violence and alienation linger among the city’s black population.  Mulrooney describes her own experiences as a public historian involved in the centennial commemoration of the so-called Wilmington Race Riot of 1898, which perpetuated racial conflicts in the city throughout the twentieth century. She shows how, despite organizers’ best efforts, a white-authored narrative of the riot’s contested origins remains. Mulrooney makes a case for public history projects that recognize the history-making authority of all community members and prompts us to reconsider the memories we inherit.  A volume in the series Cultural Heritage Studies, edited by Paul A. Shackel  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In Place, Race, and Story, author Ned Kaufman has collected his own essays dedicated to the proposition of giving the next generation of preservationists not only a foundational knowledge of the field of study, but more ideas on where they can take it. Through both big-picture essays considering preservation across time, and descriptions of work on specific sites, the essays in this collection trace the themes of place, race, and story in ways that raise questions, stimulate discussion, and offer a different perspective on these common ideas. Including unpublished essays as well as established works by the author, Place, Race, and Story provides a new outline for a progressive preservation movement – the revitalized movement for social progress.

From a nationally recognized expert, a fresh and original argument for bettering affirmative action Race-based affirmative action had been declining as a factor in university admissions even before the recent spate of related cases arrived at the Supreme Court. Since Ward Connerly kickstarted a state-by-state political mobilization against affirmative action in the mid-1990s, the percentage of four-year public colleges that consider racial or ethnic status in admissions has fallen from 60 percent to 35 percent. Only 45 percent of private colleges still explicitly consider race, with elite schools more likely to do so, although they too have retreated. For law professor and civil rights activist Sheryll Cashin, this isn’t entirely bad news, because as she argues, affirmative action as currently practiced does little to help disadvantaged people. The truly disadvantaged—black and brown children trapped in high-poverty environs—are not getting the quality schooling they need in part because backlash and wedge politics undermine any possibility for common-sense public policies. Using place instead of race in diversity programming, she writes, will better amend the structural disadvantages endured by many children of color, while enhancing the possibility that we might one day move past the racial resentment that affirmative action engenders. In Place, Not Race, Cashin reimagines affirmative action and champions place-based policies, arguing that college applicants who have thrived despite exposure to neighborhood or school poverty are deserving of special consideration. Those blessed to have come of age in poverty-free havens are not. Sixty years since the historic decision, we’re undoubtedly far from meeting the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, but Cashin offers a new framework for true inclusion for the millions of children who live separate and unequal lives. Her proposals include making standardized tests optional, replacing merit-based financial aid with need-based financial aid, and recruiting high-achieving students from overlooked places, among other steps that encourage cross-racial alliances and social mobility. A call for action toward the long overdue promise of equality, Place, Not Race persuasively shows how the social costs of racial preferences actually outweigh any of the marginal benefits when effective race-neutral alternatives are available.

In Black Corona, Steven Gregory examines political culture and activism in an African-American neighborhood in New York City. Using historical and ethnographic research, he challenges the view that black urban communities are "socially disorganized." Gregory demonstrates instead how working-class and middle-class African Americans construct and negotiate complex and deeply historical political identities and institutions through struggles over the built environment and neighborhood quality of life. With its emphasis on the lived experiences of African Americans, Black Corona provides a fresh and innovative contribution to the study of the dynamic interplay of race, class, and space in contemporary urban communities. It questions the accuracy of the widely used trope of the dysfunctional "black ghetto," which, the author asserts, has often been deployed to depoliticize issues of racial and economic inequality in the United States. By contrast, Gregory argues that the urban experience of African Americans is more diverse than is generally acknowledged and that it is only by attending to the history and politics of black identity and community life that we can come to appreciate this complexity. This is the first modern ethnography to focus on black working-class and middle-class life and politics. Unlike books that enumerate the ways in which black communities have been rendered powerless by urban political processes and by changing urban economies, Black Corona demonstrates the range of ways in which African Americans continue to organize and struggle for social justice and community empowerment. Although it discusses the experiences of one community, its implications resonate far more widely. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.