Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement

Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement PDF Author: Joe William TrotterJr.
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813179939
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
During the Great Migration, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became a mecca for African Americans seeking better job opportunities, wages, and living conditions. The city's thriving economy and vibrant social and cultural scenes inspired dreams of prosperity and a new start, but this urban haven was not free of discrimination and despair. In the face of injustice, activists formed the Urban League of Pittsburgh (ULP) in 1918 to combat prejudice and support the city's growing African American population. In this broad-ranging history, Joe William Trotter Jr. uses this noteworthy branch of the National Urban League to provide new insights into an organization that has often faced criticism for its social programs' deep class and gender limitations. Surveying issues including housing, healthcare, and occupational mobility, Trotter underscores how the ULP—often in concert with the Urban League's national headquarters—bridged social divisions to improve the lives of black citizens of every class. He also sheds new light on the branch's nonviolent direct-action campaigns and places these powerful grassroots operations within the context of the modern Black Freedom Movement. The impact of the National Urban League is a hotly debated topic in African American social and political history. Trotter's study provides valuable new insights that demonstrate how the organization has relieved massive suffering and racial inequality in US cities for more than a century.

Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement

Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement PDF Author: Joe William TrotterJr.
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813179939
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book

Book Description
During the Great Migration, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became a mecca for African Americans seeking better job opportunities, wages, and living conditions. The city's thriving economy and vibrant social and cultural scenes inspired dreams of prosperity and a new start, but this urban haven was not free of discrimination and despair. In the face of injustice, activists formed the Urban League of Pittsburgh (ULP) in 1918 to combat prejudice and support the city's growing African American population. In this broad-ranging history, Joe William Trotter Jr. uses this noteworthy branch of the National Urban League to provide new insights into an organization that has often faced criticism for its social programs' deep class and gender limitations. Surveying issues including housing, healthcare, and occupational mobility, Trotter underscores how the ULP—often in concert with the Urban League's national headquarters—bridged social divisions to improve the lives of black citizens of every class. He also sheds new light on the branch's nonviolent direct-action campaigns and places these powerful grassroots operations within the context of the modern Black Freedom Movement. The impact of the National Urban League is a hotly debated topic in African American social and political history. Trotter's study provides valuable new insights that demonstrate how the organization has relieved massive suffering and racial inequality in US cities for more than a century.

Daybreakers, the Story of the Urban League of Pittsburgh

Daybreakers, the Story of the Urban League of Pittsburgh PDF Author: Arthur J. Edmunds
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description


Making Their Own Way

Making Their Own Way PDF Author: Peter Gottlieb
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252066177
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
"A model study, one of two or three genuinely indispensable books on that momentous movement historians know as the Great Migration. Peter Gottlieb shatters the received portrait of southern migrants as bewildered, premodern folk, 'utterly unprepared' for the complexities of urban life. African Americans in his account emerge as complex, creative agents, exploiting old solidarities and building new ones, transforming the urban landscape even as it transformed them." -- James Campbell, Northwestern University "Engagingly written and well organized. . . . A major addition to the fields of Afro-American, urban, and working-class history." -- Howard N. Rabinowitz, Georgia Historical Quarterly "Gottlieb uses oral histories, corporate records, and primary and secondary scholarship to present a useful picture of an important part of the Great Migration that followed World War I." -- George Lipsitz, Choice "Sensitive and yet also incisive. . . . clear and often compelling. An outstanding study." -- James R. Barrett, Journal of American Ethnic History Publication of this work was supported in part by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Canaan, Dim and Far

Canaan, Dim and Far PDF Author: Adam Lee Cilli
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820358894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Canaan, Dim and Far argues for the importance of Pittsburgh as a case study in analyzing African American civil rights and political advocacy in an urban setting. Focusing on the period from the Progressive Era to the end of World War II, this book spotlights neglected aspects of middle-class Black activism in the decades preceding the civil rights movement. It features a revolving cast of social workers, medical professionals, journalists, scholars, and lawyers whose social justice efforts included but also extended past racial uplift ideology and respectability politics. Adam Lee Cilli shows how these Black reformers experimented with a variety of strategies as they moved fluidly across ideologies and political alliances to find practical solutions to profound inequities. In the period under study, they developed crucial social safety supports in Black communities that buffered southern migrants against the physical, civil, and legal impositions of northern Jim Crow; they waged comprehensive campaigns against anti-Black stereotypes; and they built inroads into the industrial labor movement that accelerated Black inclusion. Committed to an expansive vision of economic and political citizenship, Pittsburgh’s activists challenged white America to face its contradictions and to live up to its democratic ideals.

City At The Point

City At The Point PDF Author: Samuel P. Hays
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 9780822954477
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
An overview of scholarly research, both published and previously unpublished, on the history of a city that has often served as a case study for measuring social change. It synthesizes the literature and assesses how that knowledge relates to our broader understanding of the processes of urbanization and urbanism. This book is especially useful for undergraduate and graduate courses on environmental politics and policy making, or as a supplement for courses on public policy making generally.

Chicago's Block Clubs

Chicago's Block Clubs PDF Author: Amanda I. Seligman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022638585X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Whether focused on flower gardens, street crime, or aesthetic conformity, urban block clubs are unusual quasi-institutions that can establish or maintain a neighborhood s appearance, social dynamics, and quality of life. But what is a block club? And how does it function? Is it a definable institution, with codifiable practices and expectations, or is it merely an assemblage of like-minded citizens who happen to live near one another? What makes one such group effective and long-lasting, while most evaporate after a few years of communal activity? These are some of the questions that Amanda Seligman addresses in her deeply researched study."

Race and Renaissance

Race and Renaissance PDF Author: Joe W. Trotter
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, uncovering firsthand accounts of what life was truly like during this transformative epoch in urban history. In these ways, Race and Renaissance illuminateshow 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.

Women and Health in America

Women and Health in America PDF Author: Judith Walzer Leavitt
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299159641
Category : Women
Languages : en
Pages : 712

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Book Description
Organised chronologically and then by topic, this volume covers studies of women and health in the colonial and revolutionary periods through the Civil War. The remainder of the book focuses on the late 19th and 20th centuries.

The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh

The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh PDF Author: Laurence A. Glasco
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822970848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
The monumental American Guide Series, published by the Federal Writers’ Project, provided work to thousands of unemployed writers, editors, and researchers in the midst of the Great Depression. Featuring books on states, cities, rivers, and ethnic groups, it also opened an unprecedented view into the lives of the American people during this time. Untold numbers of projects in progress were lost when the program was abruptly shut down by a hostile Congress in 1939. One of those, "The Negro in Pittsburgh," lay dormant in the Pennsylvania State Library until it was microfilmed in 1970. The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh marks the first publication of this rich body of information. This unique historical study of the city’s black population features articles on civil rights, social class, lifestyle, culture, folklore, and institutions from colonial times through the 1930s.

Struggles in the Promised Land

Struggles in the Promised Land PDF Author: Jack Salzman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198024924
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
Recent flashpoints in Black-Jewish relations--Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, the violence in Crown Heights, Leonard Jeffries' polemical speeches, the O.J. Simpson verdict, and the contentious responses to these events--suggest just how wide the gap has become in the fragile coalition that was formed during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Instead of critical dialogue and respectful exchange, we have witnessed battles that too often consist of vulgar name-calling and self-righteous finger-pointing. Absent from these exchanges are two vitally important and potentially healing elements: Comprehension of the actual history between Blacks and Jews, and level-headed discussion of the many issues that currently divide the two groups. In Struggles in the Promised Land, editors Jack Salzman and Cornel West bring together twenty-one illuminating essays that fill precisely this absence. As Salzman makes clear in his introduction, the purpose of this collection is not to offer quick fixes to the present crisis but to provide a clarifying historical framework from which lasting solutions may emerge. Where historical knowledge is lacking, rhetoric comes rushing in, and Salzman asserts that the true history of Black-Jewish relations remains largely untold. To communicate that history, the essays gathered here move from the common demonization of Blacks and Jews in the Middle Ages; to an accurate assessment of Jewish involvement of the slave trade; to the confluence of Black migration from the South and Jewish immigration from Europe into Northern cities between 1880 and 1935; to the meaningful alliance forged during the Civil Rights movement and the conflicts over Black Power and the struggle in the Middle East that effectively ended that alliance. The essays also provide reasoned discussion of such volatile issues as affirmative action, Zionism, Blacks and Jews in the American Left, educational relations between the two groups, and the real and perceived roles Hollywood has play in the current tensions. The book concludes with personal pieces by Patricia Williams, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Michael Walzer, and Cornel West, who argues that the need to promote Black-Jewish alliances is, above all, a "moral endeavor that exemplifies ways in which the most hated group in European history and the most hated group in U.S. history can coalesce in the name of precious democratic ideals." At a time when accusations come more readily than careful consideration, Struggles in the Promised Land offers a much-needed voice of reason and historical understanding. Distinguished by the caliber of its contributors, the inclusiveness of its focus, and the thoughtfulness of its writing, Salzman and West's book lays the groundwork for future discussions and will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary American culture and race relations.