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Double Trouble: Black Mayors, Black Communities, and the Call for a Deep Democracy, by J. Phillip Thompson, m. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. 338 pp. $29.95 cloth. ISBN: 0195177339.
I can still remember the joyous conversation I had with my best friend the morning after Wilson Goode and Harold Washington were elected the first African-American mayors in Philadelphia and Chicago respectively. Like many other African Americans, we subscribed to the thinking that the advancement of blacks as a group would come from "black faces in high places." However, while more African Americans were being elected to lead large urban centers, the life opportunities of many poor urban African Americans showed little improvement, in fact they worsened.
In his book Double Trouble, J. Phillip Thompson, III utilizes his skills as an expert in urban politics and his experience as a staff member in former New York Mayor David Dinkins's administration to provide a sharp analysis of African-American mayoralty. Combining years of material gathered from primary and secondary resources, his role as a participant observer, and numerous interviews with activists, mayoral administration representatives, and African-American political officials, Thompson's book is rich with detail. Double Trouble is split into two parts, with chapters 1-4 addressing the contours of black politics, the role of civic organizations, and the challenges of interracial coalitions, while part 2 (chapters 5-8) offers a case study of David Dinkins's tenure as mayor of New York. One of the book's strengths...