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107). His parents graduated from college and became professionals and homeowners, but the American dream did not work out for them as it did for many white Americans. Several factors converged to pull Black residents into a pernicious undertow.

In detailing his family history, Jackson conveys meaningful insights, broadly applicable, into the problems facing African Americans in pursuit of middle-class status. His ancestors were strivers: after the Civil War, they established themselves as landowners and acquired education and professional standing. Five generations lived in Baltimore and joined the African Episcopal Church, whose members, Jackson notes, are “readers and people of reason” (p.

While elucidating how racism specifically manifests in Maryland and Baltimore, the author provides racialized histories of several major Baltimore institutions. His interest in Baltimore’s physical city and landscape offers another lens for understanding the city. Dispersed throughout are ruminations on other topics that deviate somewhat from the narrative yet are valuable in their own right. The book’s title cannot fully encapsulate the range of interrelated and intertwined topics covered in the six essays, which are partly personal and family remembrances and partly Black history and social geography of Baltimore, particularly the Homeland neighborhood where Jackson purchased a home upon returning to the city in 2016. Across the essays, Jackson traces his family’s history and the multigenerational efforts to attain a middle-class life as people of color in the context of a racist society. He first covered these topics in the book My Father’s Name: A Black Virginia Family After the Civil War (2012) and in his 2016 article in Harper’s Magazine on Freddie Gray, “The City That Bleeds.” Himes and his book Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (2011), which won the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Notably, Shelter is not the first of Jackson’s works to explore his family history or Baltimore’s contentious racial legacy. Shelter is a collection of essays that trace the struggles of being Black and middle class in Baltimore through the experiences of the author and his family. In this illuminating text, Lawrence Jackson brings to bear his impressive academic record: he holds a PhD in English and American literature from Stanford University and is currently Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History at Johns Hopkins University. His extensive publications include biographies of Ralph Ellison and Chester B.