Down the Up Staircase tells the story of one Harlem family across three generations, connecting its journey to the historical and social forces that transformed Harlem over the past century. Bruce D. Haynes and Syma Solovitch capture the tides of change that pushed blacks forward through the twentieth century—the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the early civil rights victories, the Black Power and Black Arts movements—as well as the many forces that ravaged black communities, including Haynes's own. As an authority on race and urban communities, Haynes brings unique sociological insights to the American mobility saga and the tenuous nature of status and success among the black middle class.

In many ways, Haynes's family defied the odds. All four great-grandparents on his father's side owned land in the South as early as 1880. His grandfather, George Edmund Haynes, was the founder of the National Urban League and a protégé of eminent black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois; his grandmother, Elizabeth Ross Haynes, was a noted children's author of the Harlem Renaissance and a prominent social scientist. Yet these early advances and gains provided little anchor to the succeeding generations. This story is told against the backdrop of a crumbling three-story brownstone in Sugar Hill that once hosted Harlem Renaissance elites and later became an embodiment of the family's rise and demise. Down the Up Staircase is a stirring portrait of this family, each generation walking a tightrope, one misstep from free fall.

"A candid and profoundly personal contribution to America's racial history." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"This thoughtful and sobering memoir weaves the beauty and tragedy of Haynes's family story into the complex history of Harlem.... Like Harlem's story, the memoir is bittersweet, painting a full and complicated picture of black upper-class life over generations." - Publishers Weekly

"Down the Up Staircase combines elements of memoir and sociology, culminating in an incredibly rich story." - Bookish

"In this thoughtfully conceived and crafted memoir, the authors offer evocative, relentlessly honest portrayals without judgment. In doing so, they encourage the reader to ponder the variables in her own life, the tides and forces that help or hinder her pursuit of the sweet life." - The New York Times Book Review

"[A] moving memoir." - East Bay Times

"As Isabel Wilkerson did expertly in 'The Warmth of Other Suns' — the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic tale of the Great Migration — Haynes and Solovitch follow their relatives through decades, revealing the impact of public policy and social change on the family from generation to generation." - Washington Post

"Haynes and Solovitch weave memoir and sociology to document the shifting fortunes of the black middle-class family, and of Harlem itself, and illuminate the tenuous nature of status and success among the black middle class." - The Davis Enterprise

"Interweaving a variety of sociological concepts and historical examinations with intimate portraits of this singular family, Down the Up Staircase takes readers on an entertaining and provocative tour of twentieth-century urban America." - New Books in Sociology

"Down The Up Staircase is more than a story of a family, far more than the chronology of a home. And yet the entire tale — the story of the black experience in the 20th century—feels like it’s being very intimately told to you from the parlor." - The Bowery Boys

"Like Harlem’s story, the memoir is bittersweet, painting a full and complicated picture of black upper-class life over generations." - Harlem World Magazine

"In Down the Up Staircase: Three generations of a Harlem Family, Bruce D. Haynes (with his co-author, Syma Solovitch) gives us a poignant memoir of his own Uptown youth in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and also reaches further back to when his grandparents bought a townhouse in the Sugar Hill district in 1931." - Times Literary Supplement

"Every sociologist—indeed everyone—interested in race, mobility, and the African American experience should read this book. It will motivate rethinking of the stakes and consequences for African Americans striving to get or stay ahead. For sociologists and other scholars of race and the urban experience, as well as lay readers who desire to understand more fully much of what black family life in urban America was all about during the past 100 years, it should be a required text." - Sociological Forum

"Haynes and Syma Solovitch show a surprisingly complex account of black middle class life in a biographically and analytically novel way. . . . Down the Up Staircase adds an important lens to the numerous complexities of generational social mobility for African Americans in the United States." - City & Community

"Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family is at once a history of Black Harlem, Black social science in and beyond the academy, and the Black elite class. . . . In Haynes and Solovitch’s narrative hands, the book’s key characters – the three generations of the Haynes family, the Convent Avenue brownstone, and Harlem – do sweeping and personal historical work about race, class, and cities in twentieth century America." - Ethnic and Racial Studies

"Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family, guides readers through the double glass doors of the Haynes family home as the tell the tale of Harlem's historical and social transformation using the family's crumbling three-story brownstone as the backdrop. Haynes and Solovitch pull back the proverbial curtains to document the tenuous nature of achievement, success, and status among the black middle class." - Contemporary Sociology