Village We Lost: Reclaiming Black Community in the Age of Integration

The Village We Lost is the third book in The Grove Trilogy - a sustained argument for what Black America needs in order to flourish. It is the communal architecture volume: a rigorous, pastoral, historically grounded account of how Black community life was built, how it was dismantled, and what it would take to rebuild it. Drawing on the scholarship of William Julius Wilson, E. Franklin Frazier, Robert Sampson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the 2024 Brookings Institution Black Progress Index, Dr. Grove traces the systematic removal of the institutional infrastructure - the churches, schools, businesses, fraternal orders, and mutual aid networks - that held Black communities together through the long night of Jim Crow. He does not assign blame for the loss. He assigns responsibility for the rebuilding. Organized around ten chapters and three appendices - a Village Readiness Assessment, a five-era historical timeline, and a four-track discussion guide - the book equips readers to move from understanding what was lost to actively participating in what must be restored. The Village We Lost is written for the person who has done their own interior work, rebuilt their household, and is now ready to bring what they carry back to the community that shaped them.