2004 Award Committee: Michele Tracy Berger, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, chair; Katherine Tegtmeyer Pak, St. Olaf College; and Narendra Subramanian, McGill University.

Recipient: Robert O. Self, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Book: American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton University Press)

Citation: Robert Self's American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland challenges our understanding of how racial segregation in housing and employment fit into the story of American racial politics. Self convincingly argues that the familiar twin tropes of "white flight" and the retreat of industrial sectors into the suburbs are incomplete explanations in understanding the ideological underpinnings of postwar metropolitan development. In a richly detailed narrative that examines politics within and between the municipalities of California's East Bay metropolitan region, he presents an alternative political, economic and social history.

The allure of life in an "industrial garden" attracted Americans of many ethnic backgrounds to Oakland, California in the economic upswing immediately after WWII; African Americans seemed on the cusp of realizing economic security along with recent European immigrants, Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans, and white Americans who came in search of the California dream. Real estate agents, developers, town political elites, and federal housing officials, however, gave segregation a new form by the way they approached marketing, granted housing loans and used the power of municipal government. Businesses and many union leaders collaborated to maintain racial barriers in employment.

Self details the rise of a distinctly white political identity based on low taxes; its effects at local, regional, state and federal levels; and African-American efforts to counter it with successive political strategies of moral campaigns, boycotts, state legislation, anti-colonial liberation movements, and local electoral politics.

His work deepens our understanding of the civil rights movements of the 1960s, with its depiction of how community leaders, local politicians, and unions struggled against the de facto apartheid of peripheral industrial regions in the North. Moreover, he helps to bury the myth that the Civil Rights movement was solely a Southern manifestation. He reinterprets the national narrative of civil rights through his focus on Oakland. Self concentrates on the well-known Black Panthers organization but also sheds light on other important collectives that have received less attention than they deserve including the Oakland Black Caucus and the East Bay Democratic Club and their advancement of racial equality.

This work speaks substantively across many disciplines and fields including political science, African-American history, urban history, labor history, urban studies and economics. It forces new scholarly conversations on liberalism and the American welfare state, the representation of the 1960s in the national imagination, a revaluation of the governing dualisms in interpreting civil rights versus black power and the importance of local, regional and national frameworks to interpret the legacy of the post-1945 urban and suburban transformations.