Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 – Family Life

Chapter 2 – Women’s Historiography

Chapter 3 – Leadership

Chapter 4 – Churches and Schools

Chapter 5 – Civil Rights, Beginnings

Chapter 6 – Civil Rights, Endings

Chapter 7 – Resistance and Denial

Chapter 8 – Suburban Regions

Chapter 9 – Consumption

Chapter 10 – Metropolitan Poverty

Chapter 11 – Metropolitan Growth

Conclusion

Bibliography

About the Author

About the Author

Walter David Greason is chief executive officer of the International Center for Metropolitan Growth.

Reviews

Suburban Erasure is an impressive work of cultural history. Greason compliments his obviously extensive knowledge about American history and the Civil Rights movement with statistics from local sources and oral histories. The book’s greatest strength is that the author illustrates the daily struggles and small victories of individuals with detailed stories, and then references those stories throughout the book as evidence to support his larger point.... Walter Greason’s book will no doubt make a significant impact in the fields of American history and African-American studies. I am equally convinced of its importance for urban historians, such as myself, who may have been teaching an over-simplified version of the urban–suburban/black–white narrative to students. The truth is complicated, but the extraordinary commitment of Black rural communities in the flight towards racial equality is a story that begs to be told.
*New Jersey Studies*

In Suburban Erasure Walter David Greason 'examines the roles of African Americans in transforming the culture, politics, and economics of rural New Jersey in the twentieth century (p. 2). He uses the first half of the book to explore the history of women, churches, and schools. . . .[T]he second half of the book picks up as Greason analyzes larger social trends such as suburbanization and the culture of consumption and their impact on African Americans. . . .[T]the second half brings together newer historio-graphical insights about suburbanization and consumption and makes more nuanced arguments about them. Historians of the African American experience, especially in New Jersey, will find these chapters to be of greater value.
*Journal of American History*

Greason's argument resonates with the best recent scholarly literature. . . .Having unearthed sources that are often obscure or fragmentary, Greason's account of black resilience and persistence is impressive.
*American Historical Review*

This is an ambitious, admirably researched and analyzed history of African American communities, their development, consolidation, and subsequent centrifugal diminution. Greason writes objectively, but one can sense the passion motivating it.
*Kalman Goldstein, Fairleigh Dickinson University*