Dark Agoras

J. T. Roane examines how working-class Black communities in twentieth-century Philadelphia created what he calls dark agoras, two interdependent forms of insurgent assembly. He looks at how these communities carried rural ideas and practices of place into the city and used them to resist spatially and to shape their industrial neighborhoods. Their efforts ranged from everyday reworking of intimate spaces to openly confrontational and liberatory attempts to change the city's social and ecological order. In doing so they pushed back against Progressive and post-Progressive plans for urban order that sought to enclose or displace them.

The concept joins two ideas of collectivity and belonging in working-class Black life. On the surface they seem opposed. One is the city's underground: illicit markets, taverns, pool halls, unlicensed bars, spaces of illicit sex, and street corners associated with disreputable activity. The other is the city's set apart: house meetings, storefronts, temples and masjid, plus the spiritually appropriated architecture of the interwar mass movements, including rural land experiments and urban housing, hotels and recreational facilities. Roane shows these as a continuum of space and experience.

Together, these sites nurtured Black queer urbanism, meaning dissident visions of city life that challenged mainstream urban reform and the ways it produced race, gender and the city itself. Roane traces a significant but underappreciated terrain of geographic struggle that shaped Philadelphia between the Great Migration and Black Power. The book shows readers why Black spatial imaginaries and worldmaking matter for urban place and politics.