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.

Continuing Patrick Wolfe’s work on settler colonialism This edited collection celebrates Patrick Wolfe’s contribution to the study and critique of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination. The chapters collected here focus on the settler-colonial assimilation of land and people, and on what Wolfe insightfully defined as “preaccumulation”: the ability of settlers to mobilise technologies and resources unavailable to resisting Indigenous communities. Wolfe’s militant and interdisciplinary scholarship is thus emphasised, together with his determination to acknowledge Indigenous perspectives and the efficacy of Indigenous resistances. In case studies of Australia, French Algeria, and the United States, contributors illustrate how seminal his contribution was and is. There are three core reasons why it is especially important to develop the field of thinking inaugurated by Wolfe: first, because the demand for Indigenous sovereignty has been crucial to recent struggles against neoliberal attacks in the settler societies; second, because a critique of settler colonialism and its logic of elimination has supported important struggles against environmental devastation; and third, because the ability to think race in ways that are not disconnected from other struggles is now more needed than ever. Racial capitalism and settler colonialism are as imbricated now as they always have been, and keeping both in mind at the same time highlights the need to establish and nurture solidarities that reach across established divides.

How racism shapes urban spaces and how African Americans create vibrant communities that offer models for more equitable social arrangements.