Jeffrey Helgeson. Crucibles of Black Empowerment

Crucibles of Black Empowerment: Chicago’s Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington is an ambitious book both in terms of the long sweep of black Chicago history that it captures and in its theoretical and historiographical claims. Much of the scholarship on black Chicago tends to focus on one historical period or cover one or two policy areas. This book spans almost sixty years of history and examines topics such as employment, housing, and community development. Such a broad historical and policy scope gives the reader a comprehensive picture of the process of sociohistorical development of the “Black Metropolis” as well as the ideological and political continuities and discontinuities of this process over time. In his book Jeffrey Helgeson asks an enduring question: why did black Chicagoans who experienced persistent racial and economic exclusion throughout the twentieth century consistently resort to a liberal rather than a radical politics? His approach to answering this question causes him to criticize the historiography he thinks has been too focused on “a narrow range of radical labor and civil rights struggles and protest politics” and not on the ongoing, everyday liberal politics of black neighborhoods, which he claims represents “the most durable political tradition in African American history” (12). He implores scholars to recognize and not “dismiss” black liberalism because it falls short of what he considers largely unobtainable radical goals in the postwar era. Along these lines Helgeson faults interpretations of black liberal achievements, such as getting black skilled workers jobs or improving black neighborhoods, as either reforming “symptoms” of more structural problems or reaching “middle-class” goals while leaving untouched the structures of Chicago’s political economy.

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