Sklaroff, Lauren Rebecca. Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Martin Summers has clearly plunged headlong into the tangled thicket of gender and masculinity studies more than once and returned from it with a theoretically robust and unscathed introduction to Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930. A social history of the first order, Summers develops narratives of several different groups: The Prince Hall Freemasons and its women’s auxiliary organization, Order of the Eastern Star (EOS), and finally the UNIA. The second half of the book is concerned with cultural shifts in the Harlem Renaissance and in post-WWI Black Campuses. According to Summers, this shift “is about the transition in definitions of manhood—from production to consumption, from character and respectability to the body and personality, from manliness to masculinity—and how that transition played out within the black middle class intergenerationally” (19).

Summers mines collections such as the Marcus Garvey Memorial Collection at Fisk University, a variety of rare collections at Yale and Howard Universities, the New York Public Library and Schomburg Center for Research in Back Culture and the W.E.B. DuBois papers in New Jersey, along with a fair collection of newspapers and additional primary sources. The book’s strength lies in its first three chapters, in which Summers juxtaposes the Prince Hall Freemasons, UNIA Garveyites, and the Women’s auxiliary group, Order of the Eastern Star. Manliness and Its Discontents does a remarkable job of using letters between officiants in African American institutions to suss out ways in which black males “performed a gendered subjectivity” during this period, and Summers does so by using somewhat of a transnational approach, noting how Caribbean immigrants were prominent along with migrations out of the U.S. South.

Summers’ welcome chapter on the OES illustrates how African American members “attempted to introduce domestic efficiency, temperance, and middle-class standards of morality into the lives of working-class and poor blacks.” In his discussion of both men and women, Summers also attempts to locate the fault lines of power where the dominant “hegemonic model of manhood” (and by extension, womanhood), intersected with African Americans’ desire to own and develop their own standards of gender. What emerges is a study in nuance, in which African American men were “not merely screens on which white men projected their anxieties,” nor was their identity simply an expression of resistance.

Whether the book succeeds in the latter chapters is up for debate. Concentration on prominent African Americans in the Harlem Renaissance leaves the book open for critique, whether or not the reader agrees with the premise that the African American culture was shifting away from a model of respectability to one of consumption. Barring the question of sufficient representation, it is clear that Summers argues effectively that at least overlapping shifts were occurring from what Kevin Gaines dubs a “preoccupation with bourgeois status” to something decidedly different. This book would make an excellent addition to a gendered study of African American institutions in the early twentieth century.