Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family

by Bruce Haynes (UC Davis) and Syma Solovitch

Sociologist Michael Burawoy (2004) has argued that the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. In Down the Up Staircase, authors Bruce D. Haynes and Syma Solovitch combine elements of memoir and social history to chronicle the journey of one Harlem family across three generations, weaving their story into the social fabric of Harlem itself. The narrative captures the tides of change that pushed blacks forward through the twentieth century as well as the many forces that ravaged black communities, including Haynes’ own. Infusing a unique sociological perspective into the classic American mobility saga, the book explores the tenuous nature of status and mobility among the black middle class and the tension between personal agency and structural determinants.

Bruce D. Haynes is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis and a Senior Fellow in the Urban Ethnography Project at Yale University and an author of The Ghetto: Contemporary Issues and Controversies (co-author R. Hutchison, Westview Press, 2011), and Red Lines, Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb (Yale University Press 2001 reissued in paper in 2006). He received his PhD from the Sociology Program of the CUNY Graduate Center.

 — A reception will follow the event —

Time: Monday, October 30th @ 4:30-6:30 PM
Place: The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street)
Room 6112 (Sociology Lounge)