Uninvited Neighbors: African Americans in Silicon Valley, by Herbert G. Ruffin

In the past due Sixties, African American protests and Black strength demonstrations in California’s Santa Clara County—including what’s now known as Silicon Valley—took many observers unexpectedly. in any case, way back to the Eighteen Nineties, the California structure had legally abolished such a lot different types of racial discrimination, and next criminal reform had without doubt handled the remainder. White americans could also have questioned the place the black activists within the past due sixties have been coming from—because, starting with the writings of Fredrick Jackson Turner, the main influential histories of the yank West easily skipped over African american citizens or, later, portrayed them as a passive and insignificant presence.

Uninvited Neighbors places black humans again into the image and dispels adored myths approximately California’s racial historical past. achieving from the Spanish period to the valley’s emergence as a middle of the high-tech undefined, this can be the 1st finished heritage of the African American adventure within the Santa Clara Valley.

Author Herbert G. Ruffin II’s research offers the black event in a brand new method, with a spotlight on how, regardless of their smaller numbers and vague presence, African americans within the South Bay cast groups that had a nearby and nationwide impression disproportionate to their inhabitants. because the quarter industrialized and spawned suburbs in the course of and after international battle II, its black voters equipped associations equivalent to church buildings, social golf equipment, and civil rights companies and challenged socioeconomic regulations. Ruffin explores the search of the area’s black humans for the postwar American Dream. The publication additionally addresses the scattering of the black neighborhood through the region’s past due but quick city development after 1950, which ended in the production of a number of distinctive black suburban groups clustered in metropolitan San Jose.

Ruffin treats humans of colour as brokers in their personal improvement and survival in a sector that used to be continuously multiracial and the place slavery and Jim Crow didn't predominate, yet the place the white include of racial justice and equality was once frequently insincere. the outcome bargains a brand new view of the intersection of African American background and the heritage of the yankee West.