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While writing her first book, Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America (University of Michigan Press, 2006), Kim M. Williams RI ’09 learned that the Latino population of the United States had surpassed the black population in number. Struck by the news but not sure of its significance, she jotted down the following on a Post-It note: What does it mean when blacks are no longer at the center of civil rights enforcement? She would carry that note with her for nearly five months, pondering the answer.

A chance meeting with a book on her husband’s shelf helped determine how Williams would eventually address that question. In The Politics of Displacement: Racial and Ethnic Transition in Three American Cities (Academic Press, 1980), Peter Eisinger had studied what happened when a black mayor supplanted a white mayor. As Williams read, she began to frame an updated study of her own.

With a team of graduate students, Williams conducted hundreds of interviews in nine American cities, all of which had elected at least one black mayor between 1968 and 2006. In the summer of 2007, as the drama in Washington around immigration reform escalated, her team queried African American elites—those with the power or resources to influence their local politics—on their attitudes about Latino political influence, immigration policy, and a host of other matters related to changing racial demographics.

At the Radcliffe Institute, where Williams holds the Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellowship, she’s analyzing the data that forms the backbone of her new book, titled “Transition: The Politics of Racial and Ethnic Change in Urban America.” Along the way, she’s had to step outside her field of political science, both theoretically and methodologically, to pursue her topic. “My field, racial and ethnic relations, is in a real state of flux right now,” she says. “People are being forced by the facts on the ground to reconsider basic things that we all thought we knew.”

  For example, some might assume that black Americans would feel hostility toward Latino immigrants, and that immigration works against African American economic interests. But polls tell a different story: “It turns out that black Americans have much more liberal views than their white counterparts,” says Williams.

In terms of demographic majorities—whether it’s a city where blacks and white are the majority, where blacks and Latinos are, or where many races live—Williams says each variation sets up different expectations about how people get along. She’d like to get away from the term “displacement,” which she feels suggests conflict.

“We ought to expect a range of behaviors between blacks and Latinos,” she says. “Collaboration in some places, conflict in some places, and ambivalence and uncertainty in other places—or a mix of all those things. The goal of our study is to better understand the dynamics behind these variations.”

Illustration by John Ritter; photo by Tony Rinaldo