Book Reviews

This last analysis provides the springboard for the final two chapters that are case studies of African American and Italian American communities aimed at showing how the giving patterns reveal how each group viewed itself and how it shaped its own social world. According to Tuennerman-Kaplan, African American giving efforts were more numerous and organized. African Americans, perhaps because of pervasive racism, developed many institutions to help themselves. Churches drew congregants into a network of social relationships with the implicit, and at times explicit, obligation to care for one another. Church Aid and Pastor's Aid Societies were prominent features of many African American churches such as St. John's AME and Shiloh Baptist; Cory Methodist Church had seven aid societies. Along with congregant-oriented giving, church societies reached out to give aid across the community and church leaders came together to pursue issues of common concern to all African Americans residents. Fraternal orders, sisterhoods, burial societies, and other mutual aid organizations also served as community giving networks. Through this aid network, African Americans in Cleveland thus met many of their own needs for "social services, for spiritual enrichment, for culture, and for information" (123). 

Italian American immigrants, on the other hand, did not develop such networks until the later years of this study because they tended to band together according to their region of origin in Italy. Not perceiving of themselves as Italians with common interests and concerns, they were far less inclined than African Americans to form community network of givers. Yet, here too, Tuennerman-Kaplan argues, a social analysis of giving practices demonstrates how a group exercises power. In this case, by refusing to become aid recipients, Italian Americans were choosing "social and cultural independence" (128), and in forming only certain kinds of mutual aid societies - such as the Societá Gildonese or the Fratellanza Siciliana - they were choosing to maintain their older village identities.

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