The Legacy of Adolph Reed,Jr.’s “Black Urban Regime”

It is an understatement to characterize as far-reaching Adolph Reed, Jr.’s impact on American scholars of urban and racial politics. I was reminded of this in the weeks just preceding the Urban Affairs Association panel devoted to honoring Adolph’s work, when I finally got around to reading Robert Self’s American Babylon, a chronicle of race relations, uneven urban development, and emergent property rights-inflected suburban activism in early postwar Oakland, California. Among the many impressive parts of Self’s book is his careful analysis of evolving Left-activism in African-American West Oakland and south Berkeley. All credit for this fascinating account is due Robert Self’s research and interpretive mastery, but as one combs his footnotes—and traces the broader literature orienting his East Bay story—time and again one encounters the work of Adolph Reed.

I first read Adolph’s work in the 1980s, and if my memory is correct, that first piece was his essay “The Black Urban Regime: Structural Origins and Constraints.” This and five other essays from the 1980s and 1990s are collected in Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (University of Minnesota Press), which remains essential reading for anyone interested in the racial component of American urban politics, urban politics more generally, or race as component of American culture. Returning to these essays is stimulating, and even after many years and quite a number of re-readings, indeed eye-opening. Immediately impressive is the breadth of Adolph’s interests and reading. One combs his footnotes—many stretching to a page in length—and often encounters what, in effect, constitute short bibliographic essays. Adolph’s writing has always been striking for its engagement with a clearly construed audience. Most of us in academia struggle to articulate our thoughts; Adolph forges impressive, sometimes startling lines of argument intended to reach readers/thinkers seeking to look behind the surface of public events, discontented with conventional journalism and more generally, orthodoxies both Right and Left, and—not least—turned off by mainstream social science.

Adolph’s prose is also fun, in the way that reading H.L. Mencken or Thorstein Veblen can entertain as well as inform. Just thumbing through the pages of Stirrings in the Jug, I reacquainted myself with Adolph’s gift for the exhilarating epithet: “suburban freeloaders,” “putatively leftist black pundits,” “Straussianism of the Benetton generation.” Yet ultimately, what is most distinctive about Adolph’s social and political commentary is his persistent effort to specify a transformative political agency, how individuals and movements of the Left can refine their analyses, reach broader constituencies, and act to achieve a more just social order.

When written in the 1980s, “The Black Urban Regime” operated within precisely that intellectual field, pinpointing how the ascendancy of African-American municipal officeholders tended not to reshape the characteristic aims and distributional performance of city-level policy making, even as regime theory, more broadly defined, asserted—in the face of the economistic determinism of both Paul Peterson and various Neo-Marxian writers—that some degree of local political agency was possible. The core of Adolph’s analysis in “The Black Urban Regime”: without incessant prodding from activists outside city government and conventional electoral/political party channels, there was no chance that local policy would deviate to any significant degree from the orthodoxies of group advancement via patronage and standard growth politics. The ascendant black municipal elites of that generation, as a rule, possessed neither the vision nor political savvy to push through a meaningful “just” local policy agenda. In the quarter-century since the initial publication of “The Black Urban Regime,” both those regimes and regime theory itself have evolved in significant and to some extent unanticipated ways. In reference to the regimes—and as well, several of the cities that produced them (e.g., Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles)—ongoing economic transformation, residential gentrification, and demographic reordering have reduced the size of black constituencies, and for at least the near future, reduced the likelihood of African-American-dominated municipal administrations. Regime theory, more generally, continues to be a preferred lens for interpreting the main contours of American urban policy making, but as a result of new institutional realities—the increasing reliance on private actors and public entities apart from municipal government to drive policy—and ever more expansive globalization, the capacity of local political figures to shape policy through city-specific coalition-building, in the view of many observers, has been attenuated.

Yet in spite of these shifts in on-the-ground-reality and interpretive supposition, the “The Black Urban Regime”’s critical approach to urban policy making remains very useful. I will illustrate this by briefly discussing two recent publications: Leland Saito and Jonathan Truong’s “The L.A. Live Community Benefits Agreement: Evaluating the Agreement Results and Shifting Political Power in the City,” which appeared in the March 2015 issue of Urban Affairs Review; Pierre Clavel and Robert Giloth’s “Planning for Manufacturing: Chicago After 1983,” which was published in the February 2015 issue of the Journal of Planning History.

Saito and Truong describe a contemporary Los Angeles in which service-sector labor unions and neighborhood activism increasingly counter long-standing power centers such as downtown business interests and the building trades. In particular, their article profiles the evolution of the Anschutz Entertainment Group-initiated L.A. Live Sports and Entertainment District, and as well, of the community benefits agreement (CBA), the developer has signed with a coalition of labor and community organizations. Saito and Truong report on the agreement’s affordable housing set-aside agreement and are especially impressed by the employee recruitment efforts that have resulted from the CBA. Yet Saito and Truong also observe of the labor and community groups that have promoted this arrangement: “these coalitions support growth.” It is in reference to precisely that point that Adolph Reed’s critical approach to policy assessment becomes relevant. Without meaning to disparage either the vision or hard work of the groups that have engineered this deal (or of Saito and Truong’s judgment), one must ask, “how transformative can this arrangement really be?” A substantial area within central Los Angeles will be rebuilt as upscale entertainment venues, restaurants, and retailing. The housing component will also be upscale; the agreed-to affordable housing will be built elsewhere. The vast majority of jobs to be created will be in service-sector occupations—possibly better paid than their counterparts in some other cities—with a very limited mobility, much less experiential, horizon. The L.A. Live CBA is surely better than nothing, but in its main features represents an incremental tweaking of the typical downtown mega-project.

Clavel and Giloth’s article is an altogether different variety of policy assessment: a retrospective look at an uncharacteristic black urban regime—the mid-1980s Chicago mayoralty of Harold Washington—and its efforts to preserve local manufacturing, and in particular, living-wage paychecks for blue-collar workers. The main body of Clavel and Giloth’s narrative recounts the various policy innovations introduced during the Washington years, seeking to track their impact and “reach” over time. To characterize the prevailing theme of their assessment, Clavel and Giloth view the willful effort to retain Chicago industry as a missed opportunity. In part, this is a function of the short duration of the Washington mayoralty. Within months of his reelection as mayor in 1987, Harold Washington succumbed to a heart attack. Some portion of the innovations his administration had planted in city government—which had taken root in only the preceding couple of years—immediately expired.

However, the legacy of the Washington administration cannot be so neatly characterized (much less, terminated). Important components of the Washington program—as documented by political scientist Joel Rast in Remaking Chicago (Northern Illinois University Press)—were indeed carried over by the Richard M. Daley administration. Nevertheless, as the 1990s gave way to the 2000s, death by bureaucratic dilution combined with ebbing grassroots support for industrial retention lead Clavel and Giloth to conclude that the transformative promise of the Washington years was not sustained. Again, I note that Adolph Reed’s approach to the connections between agency—in this case, both the vision of Mayor Richard M. Daley, and as well, the capacity of the grassroots advocates promoting local industrial policy to shape programming and maintain a political arms length from city government—and structure—the relentlessness of “feel good” residential gentrification, the allures of Neoliberal panaceas (for instance, public asset privatization), and Olympic hosting—readily explains what was by the mid-2000s the withering away of concerted local industrial policy in Chicago.

Activist as well as formidable scholar, Adolph Reed’s relation to the academy is directly analogous to how, in “The Black Urban Regime,” he construes the relationship between African-American Left-activists and local black officeholders. Within the academy, Adolph has pushed the rest of us to examine social phenomena more critically than we might have otherwise, and to offer policy perspectives and engage in actual political activity that we otherwise might not have countenanced. “The Black Urban Regime,” and beyond this particular essay, Adolph Reed’s approach to cities, black politics, and the embedded injustices of American society do not represent policy analysis as most program experts or academics construe the term. Nevertheless, policy analysis of a very high order is just what this essay, and Adolph Reed through much of his writing, have been up to: the empirically penetrating, relentlessly logical assessment of how political action and public policy might produce fundamental social change. As such, Adolph Reed’s intellectual stance is as relevant today as it was in the 1980s and remains a model for all of us seeking to engage in critical political and public policy analysis.