Customer Reviews

Jacksonville: The Consolidation Story, from Civil Rights to the Jaguars (Florida History and Culture)

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I am moving to Jacksonville soon, and this book was a handy history of Jacksonville in the last half of the 20th century. The book shows how Jacksonville's heritage is that of the rural, blue collar south: conservative Democratic until the 1990s, conservative Republican thereafter.

It points a reasonably distinctive portrait of Jacksonville 50 years ago: uneducated (with no four-year college in 1956), heavily industrial, and so polluted that in 1948, "sulphuric acid droplets in the air began to disintegrate nylon stockings on women on the streets of downtown Jacksonville."

Occasionally, the book is stingy with analysis: for example, it mentions city government's love affair with expressways here and there but fails to address the possible relationship between highways, suburban sprawl, and downtown deterioration.

The book discusses education often, but here too is uncritical of bureaucrats, routinely assuming that more education spending means more education. Although the book occasionally notes that desegregation was not a complete success in Jacksonville, a more complete analysis would have compared Jacksonville to other cities. Is Jacksonville a city where desegregation worked with a few hitches, or one where (as in most northern cities) desegregation ended with an all-black urban school system surrounded by white suburban schools? This book does not answer that question.

The last chapter of the book is focused on Jacksonville's city-county consolidation: but the book's discussion of scholarly commentary is too focused on comparing Jacksonville with Tampa, which has annexed significant swaths of suburbia (as opposed to other cities with more limited annexation powers such as Cleveland or Detroit). Are taxpayers better off because Jacksonville has one city government instead of 20? It is hard to tell from this book.