New Books In African American Studies

I used to live in Washington DC, not far from a place I learned to call the “U Street Corridor.” I really had no idea why it was a “corridor” (most places in DC are just “streets”) or why a lot of folks seemed to make a big deal out if it. Don’t get me wrong. It was nice. There are coffee shops, jazz clubs, and the place is full of beautiful late Victorian architecture. But I confess I really didn’t understand what the “U Street Corridor” was. Having read Blair Ruble‘s terrific Washington’s U Street: A Biography (Johns Hopkins UP/Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010), I can confidently say that now I get it. U Street was arguably the first urban area in the post-bellum United States in which African Americans formed a vital, sophisticated, wealthy, and identifiably modern “negro” (as they would have said) culture. Today we take it for granted that African Americans make a vital contribution to the cultural life (though not only that) of the United States. At the end of the Civil War, that wasn’t so. The vast ma