The Northern States after World War II

While Naylor sets the birth of Brewster Place right after the end of World War I, she continues the story of Brewster for approximately thirty years. Many immigrants and Southern blacks arrived in New York after the War, searching for jobs. Like many of those people, Naylor's parents, Alberta McAlpin and Roosevelt Naylor, migrated to New York in 1949. Members of poor, sharecropping families, Alberta and Roosevelt felt that New York would provide their children with better opportunities than they had had as children growing up in a still-segregated South. The Naylors were disappointed to learn that segregation also existed in the North, although it was much less obvious. They did find, though, that their children could attend schools and had access to libraries, opportunities the Naylors had not enjoyed as black children.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s

The year...