Black America is no longer concentrated where a century of scholarship assumed it would be, and this collection argues that political analysis has to follow the movement. Smith's opening essay sets out the three mechanisms the contributors examine: immigration after the 1965 act, which made Black populations ethnically plural; suburbanisation and return migration to the South, which shifted Black electorates out of the old central cities; and gentrification, which brings white and middle-class residents back and displaces poorer Black and immigrant ones. The chapters test this locally, among African Americans, Dominicans, Haitians and West Indians in New York, in Washington as a Black-run sanctuary city, in majority-minority Durham, and in majority-white suburbs. Coalitions across these lines emerge as more contested than the minority-group model predicts. Greer's conclusion turns to the fiscal dependence of Black mayors on hostile state governments after 2016.