Introduction
Chapter 1. A Tarnished Golden Age: Race and Recreation Before World
War II
Chapter 2. The Fifth Freedom: Racial Liberalism, Nonviolence, and
Recreation Riots in the 1940s
Chapter 3. "A Northern City with a Southern Exposure": Challenging
Recreational Segregation in the 1950s
Chapter 4. Violence in the City of Good Neighbors: Delinquency and
Consumer Rights in the Postwar City
Chapter 5. Building a National Movement: Students Confront
Recreational Segregation
Chapter 6. "Riotland": Race and the Decline of Urban Amusements
Conclusion
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters tells the story of the battle for access to leisure space in cities across the United States. This detailed and eloquent history shows how African Americans fought to enter segregated amusement areas not only in pursuit of happiness but in connection to a wider movement for racial equality.
Victoria W. Wolcott is Professor of History at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and the author of Remaking Respectability: African-American Women in Interwar Detroit.
"History professor Wolcott recounts a staggering litany of large
and small-scale protests and riots at recreational facilities
across the United States from the 1930s through the 1960s. Wolcott
aims to make the case that the struggle to desegregate recreational
facilities is an often overlooked but essential facet of the
American Civil Rights narrative. . . . Together the stories reveal
a national pattern of White violence against protestors and
illuminate the shameful tactics employed by recreation facility
owners to subvert the growing demand for desegregation."—Publishers
Weekly
"The expansion of civil rights in recreational spaces is essential
to understanding the civil rights movement of America, but it is
not only a narrative of violence against African Americans either
to sustain segregation or to admit integration. Wolcott's work adds
a much-needed chapter to both civil rights and leisure histories,
while it carefully avoids incorporating the very black cultural
institutions before World War II that were central to African
American participation in modernist identities and part of postwar
integrationist advocacy."—American Historical Review
"Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters is a significant contribution to
the growing corpus that attempts to rethink the traditional
contours of the civil rights movement. Uncovering the neglected
struggle over public amusements, Wolcott deepens our understanding
of the relationship between civil rights, urban history, and
popular culture in twentieth-century America."—Journal of American
Culture
"Drawing on an array of sources, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters
makes an important contribution to the history of the civil rights
movement by significantly expanding our understanding of the
hardships black Americans faced to desegregate public recreational
spaces, including amusement parks, swimming pools, and skating
rinks."—Journal of Southern History
"Victoria Wolcott's well-written and deeply researched new book
adds another crucial layer to the civil rights narrative. She goes
beyond the familiar marches and leaders to focus on movie theaters,
skating rinks, dance halls, city parks, amusement parks, and
swimming pools as places of struggle. In doing so, she brings in a
new cast of characters—children, teenagers, mothers—and shows how
the battles over access to urban leisure predate Brown and extend
well past the March on Washington. No one has identified and
chronicled the conflicts in these places with the care and
precision that Wolcott has."—Bryant Simon, author of Boardwalk of
Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America
"In this powerful story, Victoria Wolcott demonstrates why
recreation is central to understanding the history of the civil
rights movement in America. Her book also asks us to push the
existing frontiers of our historical memory—why violence against
African Americans in order to sustain segregation has been
forgotten, while violence that sometimes accompanied integration is
remembered. With Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters, we reexamine
more closely both the ideals and nightmares of America in the
twentieth century."—Alison Isenberg, Princeton
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