Abstract
In his biography of Robert F. Williams, Timothy Tyson wrote that Williams’s life “illustrated that ‘the civil rights movement’ and ‘the Black Power movement’ emerged from the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom.” 1 While Tyson focuses on the life of an individual, scholars in the early twenty-first century have taken to heart Tyson’s argument that there exists more commonality between the Civil Rights and Black Power movements than traditional historiography has suggested. Numerous historians have applied it in broad ways to produce more complex and nuanced understandings of the black freedom struggle. Peniel Joseph, Nancy MacLean, Thomas Sugure, Jeanne Theoharis, Komzi Woodard, and others have looked beyond the ideological differences in these movements to suggest that everyday concerns, especially those faced by African Americans in urban environments, provide a better way to identify how African Americans sought to overcome discrimination and contend with political, economic, and social changes since World War II. 2 Examining the city, and the challenges faced by those who lived in them, provides an opportunity to understand how wage inequalities, housing, education, class and gender differences, political disparities, and police brutality continue to shape the ways African Americans push for social justice.
The five books presented here fit within a growing body of literature that centers the urban landscape in conversations about black activism. They offer readers a way of connecting local politics and community activism to national movements for equality by highlighting the importance of the urban environment to race and class struggles, the politics of self-defense, and black freedom. The authors demonstrate how the city became a contested space, one ripe with daily negotiations between the inhabitants and institutions over race difference, economic opportunity, and political autonomy for African Americans. The common thread connecting all five books is the assertion that the interwar period and more importantly, World War II’s stimulus for migration, especially black migration to urban environments, occurred because of the perceived promises of urban living and the possibilities of a better life. However, massive migration drastically changed cities and upset power balances that cut across race and class divisions. As a result, transformed postwar urban spaces underscored institutional class and race disparities. Nevertheless, these disparities also created the conditions by which African Americans challenged inequality.
Joe Trotter and Jared Day’s Race and Renaissance offers the most comprehensive account of African American urban history in the group of books reviewed. Trotter and Day set out to write not a “detailed case study of postwar African American life,” as they indicate in the introduction, but a “work of synthesis” that the authors’ hope will provide a foundation for future research on Pittsburgh’s black community (p. xvii). Although Pittsburgh had its own distinct characteristics, its African American community was as much a part of larger national movements for racial justice and shared in the concerns that affected African Americans as in other parts of the county. Drawn to the city for the economic opportunities, African Americans nevertheless faced economic and racial discrimination that meant they had to rely on grassroots, direct-action campaigns to better the lives of the city’s black population. The authors trace the history of the city’s black community from its industrial beginnings in the late nineteenth century, but the focus of Race and Renaissance is on the post-World War II period, through deindustrialization in the 1960s and 1970s and into postindustrial life in the late twentieth century. Trotter and Day offer a conceptual framework for other scholars working on African American urban life that blends such themes as migration, residential segregation, and working-class formation with an emphasis of how economic and demographic forces influenced the politics, institutions, and culture of the city’s black community. As is the case with the other books in this review, Trotter and Day show how efforts to address systematic economic, social, and political inequalities revealed a complicated history of both race solidarity and race and class division over ideology and strategy.
For African Americans, migration to the city also mirrored increasingly expanded demands for equality in the postwar period. In Black Rage in New Orleans, for example, Leonard Moore argues that these two factors brought African Americans into contact with the “most visible arm [institution] of the state: the police” (p. 1). Because white flight to the suburbs occurred at the same time black migration to the city increased, the police became the frontline guardians to maintain the racial and social status quo as both protectors of white privilege and opponents of black progress. They accomplished this through what Moore defined as an all-encompassing “police brutality,” which included everything from police homicides, unlawful arrests, assaults, sexual and nonsexual exploitation, to a general lack of justice for African Americans in court. Police brutality transcended class distinction and was a daily reality that unified the whole of the black community, but it affected poor and working-class blacks particularly. This group of black urbanites, according to Moore, not only complained about brutal police behavior but also mounted sustained grassroots, anti-brutality campaigns. This set them apart from middle-class African Americans who lacked a sustained commitment to the anti-brutality fight because of their intermittent support of anticrime measures, their connections to mainstream political organizations whose strategies often focused on conservative legal means to fight brutality and because some feared the loss of patronage gains in the wake of national civil rights successes. From this perspective, the study of black urban life also offers the opportunity to examine the complex class dimensions of the history of race activism and present-day divisions within the black community.
As police brutality increasingly became part of national narratives of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the 1970s, urban campaigns such as the anti-brutality campaign in New Orleans reveal how integrated into the urban life of blacks were the “politics of self-defense” (pp. 4-5 and 13). The politics of self-defense were the strategies employed by African Americans to ensure the protection, literally and figuratively, of the black community. While self-defense went hand and hand in New Orleans and other cities with the arrival of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s, it was also one of the most important civil rights issues for urban African Americans in the postwar period. As with Trotter and Day’s Pittsburgh, Moore’s focus on the residents of New Orleans can stand in for any city with a significant population of African Americans or other minorities in the postwar period who saw fair policing as a basic right. African Americans linked fair police protection and treatment with democracy, which “triggered the creation of countless organizations . . . to make the NOPD [New Orleans Police Department] more responsive to the needs of the African American community” (p. 254). These organizations, while not always successful, represented one-way urban citizens engaged in defense against distinctly unequal institutional cultures.
Self-defense also helps explain the rise of radical urban social movements in the latter part of the twentieth century. In Living for the City, Donna Murch argues that urban migration to Northern California led to the expansion of Black Power and a black radicalism during the postwar period that allowed African Americans to critique “state violence, agitated for ‘relevant’ education, and demand for the immediate redistribution of wealth” (p. 11). While Moore centers black radical community activism as a response to police brutality, Murch sees black radicalism as connected to the rising political consciousness of recent urban migrants and their families who, among others, saw access to public education as essential to democracy and economic freedom. Most Americans in the postwar period understood education as one avenue toward upward mobility. The G.I. Bill’s educational provisions, as well as the federal government’s focus on expanding university educational opportunities for low-income students, speaks to the benefits engendered by a college education. California, like many states, made a commitment to the expansion of public education through an expansion of their state and community colleges, especially in urban environments. An unintended consequence of this expansion, however, was the nurturing of a new generation of young black activists who used “urban campuses . . . as incubators of radical ideas” (p. 7). Campus-based organization such as the Afro-American Association, the Soul Student Advisory Council, and the Black Panther Party focused on raising black consciousness but also mobilized black youth who blended their new radical activism with their imaginings of the issues affecting the black urban community, which included, among other things, poverty and labor disparities, housing segregation, and self-defense.
As a space where individuals sought transformation, American institutions, such as colleges and universities in the postwar period, were also sites of negotiations over authority, claims to community space, and challenges to racial and economic disparities for students and the communities in which they were located. In Harlem vs. Columbia University, Stefan Bradley follows the successful challenge by Harlem residents and student protestors against Columbia University’s plans to build a private gymnasium on public land in Morningside Park in 1968 and 1969. Bradley reveals how a seemingly local community controversy about land encroachment and property ownership became national news, representing the conflicts that occurred between institutions owned or led by whites and minority communities in urban spaces. The “town and gown divide” provides a space to extricate the conflict over community ownership and class and race divides. While this event can be placed within the larger student protest movements against university administrations in the late 1960s, like Murch, Bradley suggests that more important to this story is the underlying black radicalism that supported Harlem’s residents’ ability to challenge an institution like Columbia. Black Power manifested itself in the ability of “black students and black working-class community members to overcome class differences to deal with an issue that affected black people” (p. 190). And although racially integrated struggles for civil rights had been a mainstay for mainstream civil rights activists, the strength and success of the Columbia protest, like those that Murch focused on in Oakland, was the ability of black radical student activists and members of the Student’s Afro-American Society to privilege black urban residents’ interests in their activities on and off campus.
Harlem’s black community’s success in defeating an institution whose normative operation allowed whites to exercise some measure of control over black lives did not occur just because of the work between black students and the black working class in the community. Working-class, grassroots organizers had long focused on community control politics as a response to race discrimination that resulted in limiting economic and social mobility. Community control politics or community organizing were the strategies, actions, or negotiations employed by activists working toward greater democracy and equality in the community. By the 1960s, working-class activists increasingly relied on one of the main tenets of Black Power radicalism, the “politics of disruption and direct action” as a strategy against inequality (p. 2).
David Goldberg and Trevor Griffey’s edited collection Black Power as Work chronicles how local movements, according to the authors, “blurred the lines between civil rights and black power” in working against discrimination. In other words, from the 1960s forward, civil rights strategies increasingly required the addition of black radical tactics to improve the lives of urban blacks. Through an examination of urban renewal and construction projects, affirmative action plans, and labor industry disputes, the authors in Goldberg and Griffey’s volume argue that grassroots activists addressed economic disparities by turning to “Black Power labor politics and community control organizing to gain access to jobs as well as control of the economic and physical development of inner cities” (p. 3). Ultimately, the essays in this volume, as highlighted by Griffey’s essay “From Jobs to Power,” show how the construction industry, trade unions, and Black Power’s contributions to working-class radicalism help explain the ongoing importance of construction jobs to black economic self-determination and political autonomy in the lives of urban residents. The city and its residents relied on construction and the construction industry, not just for the growth of urban spaces but also for the economic opportunities construction projects afforded individuals. Patterns of discrimination, even while urban renewal and affirmative action projects were meant to target African Americans and other minorities, meant that blacks were left with little recourse but to rely on community efforts that employed direct action strategies, engage in the politics of self-defense in the broadest terms, and participate in local politics, to live and thrive in the city. Far from the traditional narratives of civil rights, the five books reviewed here provide additional paths to narrating African American struggles in challenging social, economic, and political inequalities and, in doing so, reveal the vast ways that the city can be used to understand urban politics, community activism, and black power.