An Integrated Boyhood: Coming of Age in White Cleveland

An Integrated Boyhood: Coming of Age in White Cleveland Author: Phillip Richards The Kent University Press, 2012 Price: $ 26.00 ISBN: 978-1-6063-5100-0 An Integrated Boyhood is the memoir of Yale-educated, English Professor Phillip Richards' adolescent life in Cleveland, Ohio. This memoir, a part of a larger series called "Voices of Diversity," has unquestionably achieved its goal of providing subjectivity to the historical tale of urban change and racial diversity in America. However, this book is much more than a story about one boy's coming-of-age in the 1960s. An Integrated Boyhood is a story of urban decline, deindustrialization, residential segregation, sociopolitical change, Black culture, and personal identity. Richards' memoir method has the exceptional ability of localizing large, structural and historical phenomena. His stories are eloquent and rich with detail. He uses illustrative, graphic, and sobering descriptions of life in urban Cleveland. The recounted stories are so poignant because they place the reader directly in the apex of Cleveland's inner-city decline--a period marked by a simultaneous influx in African-American and European (im)migrant populations, as well as a decline in manufacturing industries and racial segregation. This book then, ostensibly about one boy's life in Cleveland, is a story about racial integration and diversity in America. The opening chapter, titled A Hopeful Beginning, provides a general overview and the backdrop to the complete memoir that lies ahead. As the title implies, this chapter is mainly devoted to explaining how Richards' family arrived in Cleveland, Ohio. The word hopeful is significant because it highlights the ethos carried by newly arrived Black migrants who saw Cleveland, with its booming and newly integrated post-war manufacturing economy, as an opportunity to achieve upward mobility and middle-class ideals. In this chapter, we discover that the Richards family is middle-class by income and occupational standards, but because of their new arrival and recent upward mobility they lack the social and cultural capital of Cleveland's Black bourgeois. Richards discusses his parent's resentment towards both the "ghetto culture" of the urban underclass as well as towards the "pretentions" of Cleveland's Black elite. It is clear that the Richards's find themselves caught betwixt and between Black and white Cleveland--in an internal and outwardly battle to locate comfortably within a city characterized by rapidly changing demographics and an extremely stratified class-system. The impact of these struggles has indelibly shaped the author, Phillip Richards, and thus this text. The subsequent chapters of the book are organized to take us through Richards' childhood, adolescence, and ultimately young adulthood. In Chapter 2, we are provided with more information about Phillip Richards' mother, Juanita, and her cultural habitus. She was a poor, light-skinned woman from North Carolina who'd been exposed to high-culture--through her interactions with intellectual African Americans and European refugees in Greensboro--before coming to Cleveland. In this chapter, we learn of Richards' mother's resentment towards "ghetto" culture--what she characterized by unreasonable conspicuous consumption, drug use, gambling, and perverse sexuality; as well as her fascination with the intellectual, high-culture community of Cleveland Heights--an inner-ring eastern suburb of Cleveland. This resentment, coupled with their unwavering aspirations of upward mobility, led to the Richards family's continual movement throughout the city. However, Richards soberly reminds us that "no Black person, no matter how reclusive, could escape the reality of Cleveland's ghetto culture" (p. 14). The story develops more in Chapter 3 as Richards discusses his father's perspective on their middle-class aspirations which, unlike his mother's, seem more moderate and less idyllic. …