African American Urban History since World War II

African American Urban History since World War II PDF Author: Kenneth L. Kusmer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226465128
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
Historians have devoted surprisingly little attention to African American urban history ofthe postwar period, especially compared with earlier decades. Correcting this imbalance, African American Urban History since World War II features an exciting mix of seasoned scholars and fresh new voices whose combined efforts provide the first comprehensive assessment of this important subject. The first of this volume’s five groundbreaking sections focuses on black migration and Latino immigration, examining tensions and alliances that emerged between African Americans and other groups. Exploring the challenges of residential segregation and deindustrialization, later sections tackle such topics as the real estate industry’s discriminatory practices, the movement of middle-class blacks to the suburbs, and the influence of black urban activists on national employment and social welfare policies. Another group of contributors examines these themes through the lens of gender, chronicling deindustrialization’s disproportionate impact on women and women’s leading roles in movements for social change. Concluding with a set of essays on black culture and consumption, this volume fully realizes its goal of linking local transformations with the national and global processes that affect urban class and race relations.

African American Urban History since World War II

African American Urban History since World War II PDF Author: Kenneth L. Kusmer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226465128
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 552

Get Book Here

Book Description
Historians have devoted surprisingly little attention to African American urban history ofthe postwar period, especially compared with earlier decades. Correcting this imbalance, African American Urban History since World War II features an exciting mix of seasoned scholars and fresh new voices whose combined efforts provide the first comprehensive assessment of this important subject. The first of this volume’s five groundbreaking sections focuses on black migration and Latino immigration, examining tensions and alliances that emerged between African Americans and other groups. Exploring the challenges of residential segregation and deindustrialization, later sections tackle such topics as the real estate industry’s discriminatory practices, the movement of middle-class blacks to the suburbs, and the influence of black urban activists on national employment and social welfare policies. Another group of contributors examines these themes through the lens of gender, chronicling deindustrialization’s disproportionate impact on women and women’s leading roles in movements for social change. Concluding with a set of essays on black culture and consumption, this volume fully realizes its goal of linking local transformations with the national and global processes that affect urban class and race relations.

Race and Renaissance

Race and Renaissance PDF Author: Joseph William Trotter Jr.
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822977559
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
African Americans from Pittsburgh have a long and distinctive history of contributions to the cultural, political, and social evolution of the United States. From jazz legend Earl Fatha Hines to playwright August Wilson, from labor protests in the 1950s to the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, Pittsburgh has been a force for change in American race and class relations. Race and Renaissance presents the first history of African American life in Pittsburgh after World War II. It examines the origins and significance of the second Great Migration, the persistence of Jim Crow into the postwar years, the second ghetto, the contemporary urban crisis, the civil rights and Black Power movements, and the Million Man and Million Woman marches, among other topics. In recreating this period, Trotter and Day draw not only from newspaper articles and other primary and secondary sources, but also from oral histories. These include interviews with African Americans who lived in Pittsburgh during the postwar era, which reveal firsthand accounts of what life was truly like during this transformative epoch. Race and Renaissance illuminates how Pittsburgh's African Americans arrived at their present moment in history. It also links movements for change to larger global issues: civil rights with the Vietnam War; affirmative action with the movement against South African apartheid. As such, the study draws on both sociology and urban studies to deepen our understanding of the lives of urban blacks.

The African American Urban Experience

The African American Urban Experience PDF Author: J. Trotter
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403979162
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
From the early years of the African slave trade to America, blacks have lived and laboured in urban environments. Yet the transformation of rural blacks into a predominantly urban people is a relatively recent phenomenon - only during World War One did African Americans move into cities in large numbers, and only during World War Two did more blacks reside in cities than in the countryside. By the early 1970s, blacks had not only made the transition from rural to urban settings, but were almost evenly distributed between the cities of the North and the West on the one hand and the South on the other. In their quest for full citizenship rights, economic democracy, and release from an oppressive rural past, black southerners turned to urban migration and employment in the nation's industrial sector as a new 'Promised Land' or 'Flight from Egypt'. In order to illuminate these transformations in African American urban life, this book brings together urban history; contemporary social, cultural, and policy research; and comparative perspectives on race, ethnicity, and nationality within and across national boundaries.

Black Milwaukee

Black Milwaukee PDF Author: Joe William Trotter
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252060359
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Other historians have tended to treat black urban life mainly in relation to the ghetto experience, but in Black Milwaukee, Joe William Trotter Jr. offers a new perspective that complements yet also goes well beyond that approach. The blacks in Black Milwaukee were not only ghetto dwellers; they were also industrial workers. The process by which they achieved this status is the subject of Trotter's ground-breaking study. This second edition features a new preface and acknowledgments, an essay on African American urban history since 1985, a prologue on the antebellum and Civil War roots of Milwaukee's black community, and an epilogue on the post-World War II years and the impact of deindustrialization, all by the author. Brief essays by four of Trotter's colleagues--William P. Jones, Earl Lewis, Alison Isenberg, and Kimberly L. Phillips--assess the impact of the original Black Milwaukee on the study of African American urban history over the past twenty years.

The Separate City

The Separate City PDF Author: Christopher Silver
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813161460
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
A ground-breaking collaborative study merging perspectives from history, political science, and urban planning, The Separate City is a trenchant analysis of the development of the African-American community in the urban South. While similar in some respects to the racially defined ghettos of the North, the districts in which southern blacks lived from the pre-World War II era to the mid-1960s differed markedly from those of their northern counterparts. The African- American community in the South was (and to some extent still is) a physically expansive, distinct, and socially heterogeneous zone within the larger metropolis. It found itself functioning both politically and economically as a "separate city"—a city set apart from its predominantly white counterpart. Within the separate city itself, internal conflicts reflected a structural divide between an empowered black middle class and a larger group comprising the working class and the disadvantaged. Even with these conflicts, the South's new black leadership gained political control in many cities, but it could not overcome the economic forces shaping the metropolis. The persistence of a separate city admitted to the profound ineffectiveness of decades of struggle to eliminate the racial barriers with which southern urban leaders—indeed all urban America—continue to grapple today.

Redevelopment and Race

Redevelopment and Race PDF Author: June Manning Thomas
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814339085
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
In the decades following World War II, professional city planners in Detroit made a concerted effort to halt the city's physical and economic decline. Their successes included an award-winning master plan, a number of laudable redevelopment projects, and exemplary planning leadership in the city and the nation. Yet despite their efforts, Detroit was rapidly transforming into a notorious symbol of urban decay. In Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit, June Manning Thomas takes a look at what went wrong, demonstrating how and why government programs were ineffective and even destructive to community needs. In confronting issues like housing shortages, blight in older areas, and changing economic conditions, Detroit's city planners worked during the urban renewal era without much consideration for low-income and African American residents, and their efforts to stabilize racially mixed neighborhoods faltered as well. Steady declines in industrial prowess and the constant decentralization of white residents counteracted planners' efforts to rebuild the city. Among the issues Thomas discusses in this volume are the harmful impacts of Detroit's highways, the mixed record of urban renewal projects like Lafayette Park, the effects of the 1967 riots on Detroit's ability to plan, the city-building strategies of Coleman Young (the city's first black mayor) and his mayoral successors, and the evolution of Detroit's federally designated Empowerment Zone. Examining the city she knew first as an undergraduate student at Michigan State University and later as a scholar and planner, Thomas ultimately argues for a different approach to traditional planning that places social justice, equity, and community ahead of purely physical and economic objectives. Redevelopment and Race was originally published in 1997 and was given the Paul Davidoff Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in 1999. Students and teachers of urban planning will be grateful for this re-release. A new postscript offers insights into changes since 1997.

Places of Their Own

Places of Their Own PDF Author: Andrew Wiese
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226896269
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
On Melbenan Drive just west of Atlanta, sunlight falls onto a long row of well-kept lawns. Two dozen homes line the street; behind them wooden decks and living-room windows open onto vast woodland properties. Residents returning from their jobs steer SUVs into long driveways and emerge from their automobiles. They walk to the front doors of their houses past sculptured bushes and flowers in bloom. For most people, this cozy image of suburbia does not immediately evoke images of African Americans. But as this pioneering work demonstrates, the suburbs have provided a home to black residents in increasing numbers for the past hundred years—in the last two decades alone, the numbers have nearly doubled to just under twelve million. Places of Their Own begins a hundred years ago, painting an austere portrait of the conditions that early black residents found in isolated, poor suburbs. Andrew Wiese insists, however, that they moved there by choice, withstanding racism and poverty through efforts to shape the landscape to their own needs. Turning then to the 1950s, Wiese illuminates key differences between black suburbanization in the North and South. He considers how African Americans in the South bargained for separate areas where they could develop their own neighborhoods, while many of their northern counterparts transgressed racial boundaries, settling in historically white communities. Ultimately, Wiese explores how the civil rights movement emboldened black families to purchase homes in the suburbs with increased vigor, and how the passage of civil rights legislation helped pave the way for today's black middle class. Tracing the precise contours of black migration to the suburbs over the course of the whole last century and across the entire United States, Places of Their Own will be a foundational book for anyone interested in the African American experience or the role of race and class in the making of America's suburbs. Winner of the 2005 John G. Cawelti Book Award from the American Culture Association. Winner of the 2005 Award for Best Book in North American Urban History from the Urban History Association.

The Black Republic

The Black Republic PDF Author: Brandon R. Byrd
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812296540
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
In The Black Republic, Brandon R. Byrd explores the ambivalent attitudes that African American leaders in the post-Civil War era held toward Haiti, the first and only black republic in the Western Hemisphere. Following emancipation, African American leaders of all kinds—politicians, journalists, ministers, writers, educators, artists, and diplomats—identified new and urgent connections with Haiti, a nation long understood as an example of black self-determination. They celebrated not only its diplomatic recognition by the United States but also the renewed relevance of the Haitian Revolution. While a number of African American leaders defended the sovereignty of a black republic whose fate they saw as intertwined with their own, others expressed concern over Haiti's fitness as a model black republic, scrutinizing whether the nation truly reflected the "civilized" progress of the black race. Influenced by the imperialist rhetoric of their day, many African Americans across the political spectrum espoused a politics of racial uplift, taking responsibility for the "improvement" of Haitian education, politics, culture, and society. They considered Haiti an uncertain experiment in black self-governance: it might succeed and vindicate the capabilities of African Americans demanding their own right to self-determination or it might fail and condemn the black diasporic population to second-class status for the foreseeable future. When the United States military occupied Haiti in 1915, it created a crisis for W. E. B. Du Bois and other black activists and intellectuals who had long grappled with the meaning of Haitian independence. The resulting demand for and idea of a liberated Haiti became a cornerstone of the anticapitalist, anticolonial, and antiracist radical black internationalism that flourished between World War I and World War II. Spanning the Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, and Jim Crow eras, The Black Republic recovers a crucial and overlooked chapter of African American internationalism and political thought.

Black Public History in Chicago

Black Public History in Chicago PDF Author: Ian Rocksborough-Smith
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050339
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
In civil-rights-era Chicago, a dedicated group of black activists, educators, and organizations employed black public history as more than cultural activism. Their work and vision energized a movement that promoted political progress in the crucial time between World War II and the onset of the Cold War. Ian Rocksborough-Smith’s meticulous research and adept storytelling provide the first in-depth look at how these committed individuals leveraged Chicago’s black public history. Their goal: to engage with the struggle for racial equality. Rocksborough-Smith shows teachers working to advance curriculum reform in public schools, while well-known activists Margaret and Charles Burroughs pushed for greater recognition of black history by founding the DuSable Museum of African American History. Organizations like the Afro-American Heritage Association, meanwhile, used black public history work to connect radical politics and nationalism. Together, these people and their projects advanced important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labor that paralleled the shifting terrain of mid-twentieth-century civil rights.

Black Citymakers

Black Citymakers PDF Author: Marcus Anthony Hunter
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199948135
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Black Citymakers revisits the Black Seventh Ward neighborhood and residents of W.E.B. DuBois's The Philadelphia Negro over the twentieth century. Hunter's analysis demonstrates that black Philadelphians were by not mere victims of large scale socio-economic and political change, but active participants influencing the direction of urban policy and change.