Black Mayors and Black Progress

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Adam Davies
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
American City ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Black Mayors ◽  
National Economic

This chapter assesses how African Americans fared under black political leadership during the 1970s. After first exploring the upsurge in the number of black elected officials from the mid-1960s onward, the chapter turns to developments in Los Angeles and Atlanta, cities that in 1973 both elected their first black mayor (Tom Bradley and Maynard Jackson, respectively). An in-depth analysis of Bradley and Jackson's campaigns and first two terms in office focuses on the various factors that shaped their respective political philosophies and mayoralties. Confronted by broader national economic problems, and with limited city resources at their disposal, both Bradley and Jackson deferred to white downtown business interests and pursued pro-growth policies that ultimately reinforced the disadvantages facing their poor and working-class black constituents. For the black middle class and elite in both cities, however, African American city leadership proved to be a wellspring of opportunity.

Making Black Los Angeles

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marne L. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
American Founding ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

Black Los Angeles started small. The first census of the newly formed Los Angeles County in 1850 recorded only twelve Americans of African descent alongside a population of more than 3,500 Anglo Americans. Over the following seventy years, however, the African American founding families of Los Angeles forged a vibrant community within the increasingly segregated and stratified city. In this book, historian Marne L. Campbell examines the intersections of race, class, and gender to produce a social history of community formation and cultural expression in Los Angeles. Expanding on the traditional narrative of middle-class uplift, Campbell demonstrates that the black working class, largely through the efforts of women, fought to secure their own economic and social freedom by forging communal bonds with black elites and other communities of color. This women-led, black working-class agency and cross-racial community building, Campbell argues, was markedly more successful in Los Angeles than in any other region in the country. Drawing from an extensive database of all African American households between 1850 and 1910, Campbell vividly tells the story of how middle-class African Americans were able to live, work, and establish a community of their own in the growing city of Los Angeles.

Castle, Vernon (1887–1918) & Castle, Irene Foote (1893–1969)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan C. Cook
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Individual Response ◽  
Active Lifestyle ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
One Step ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

During the years 1911–1917, Irene Foote Castle (1893–1969) and her husband Vernon Castle (1887–1918) explicitly marketed ragtime dancing as "modern" to their upper-class and, increasingly, middle-class audiences eager to partake in new kinaesthetic forms of popular culture. Dancers, who previously skipped to the 6/8 marching meter of the two step, began to trot, strut, and glide, taking a step on each beat of syncopated 2/4 meter music long associated with African American culture. Easily learned, these new one-step dances invited improvisation and individual response. Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Castle, as they called themselves, became the most public proponents of new trotting dances and distinguished their style from those previously associated with working-class consumers, through discursive and embodied associations of modernity, whiteness, class prestige, and restraint. Irene Castle presented new modes of modern femininity through her corset-less fashions, short haircut, and active lifestyle. With the assistance of their agent Elisabeth Marbury, the Castles collaborated with noted African American composer and bandleader James Reese Europe, who composed works for them and whose ensemble accompanied their live performances. Thus while drawing on the "primitive" yet energizing power of syncopated music, the Castles and their self-proclaimed "refined" dance style offered a modernity that promised newfound vitality while maintaining racial hierarchies.

The face of noncompliance in family interaction

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 573-598
Author(s):  
Marjorie H. Goodwin ◽  
Heather Loyd
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Adult Child ◽  
Family Interaction ◽  
Video Ethnography ◽  
Appropriate Behavior ◽  
Historic Center ◽  
Family Culture ◽  
The Face

AbstractThis article examines the co-construction of dispute in parent-child remedial interchanges, where preference for provocation rather than agreement exists. Employing methodologies of video ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and conversation analysis, we examine practices for dispute management in middle class Los Angeles families (1540 h of video across 32 US families were collected and examined between 2002 and 2005) as well as in (sub)-working-class families in the historic center neighborhood of the Quartieri Spagnoli in Napoli, Italy (120 h of video across six families were collected and examined between 2008 and 2010). We problematize the notion that preference structures featuring politeness and moves towards swift social equilibrium in remedial interchanges are the basic organizing principles used in family interaction. Our findings suggest that rather than quickly restoring ritual equilibrium, children can create their own “character contests” in which they compete with parents for control. In response to a child’s breach, noncompliance, or offensive action, the parents can sanction inappropriate behavior, and socialize the child into what counts, in the family culture, as morally appropriate behavior. Whereas in US middle class families, the parents pursue apologies, in Neapolitan (sub)-working-class families, the parents are more concerned about explanations and accounts for inappropriate desires and actions. There is no expectation that the children apologize for untoward behavior. Across culture and class, during adult-child socializing encounters, moral claims intersect with affective stances to develop and negotiate personhood, identity, and adherence to cultural norms.

Ghetto Formation and Armed Resistance in East St. Louis, Illinois

2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 435-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
MALCOLM McLAUGHLIN
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Community ◽  
Race Riot ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Armed Resistance ◽  
The City ◽  
Self Defence

This article explores African American armed resistance during the 1917 East St. Louis race riot in the context of black migration and ghetto formation. In particular it considers the significance of the development of the black urban community, composed of an emerging working class and a dynamic, militant and increasingly influential middle class. It was that community which came under attack by white mobs in 1917, and this work illuminates the infrastructure of resistance in the city, showing how African Americans drew upon the resources of the nascent ghetto and older traditions of self-defence to protect their homes and families.

Regionalism, Social Class, and Elite Perceptions of Working-Class Foodways during the Era of the Great Migration

2019 ◽  
pp. 97-122
Author(s):  
Jennifer Jensen Wallach
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Food Culture ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
Class Project ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
The Great Migration

This chapter explores the class tensions inherent in the middle-class project of reforming black food habits, demonstrating that working-class African Americans frequently did not share the certainty that foodways could be used as an avenue for citizenship and doubted many of the assumptions embedded in the project of cultural elevation subscribed to by black food reformers. One of the issues at the heart of the culinary tensions among members of the black community was the emerging question about whether there was a distinctive African American way of eating that was separate from mainstream American food culture. In the context of the Great Migration, “southern” food often became labeled “black” food in the northern cities that served as the terminus for black migrants. This transformation took place much to the consternation of black food reformers who, on the whole, resisted the idea of essential black cultural practices.

Get Up, Stand Up

2018 ◽  
pp. 28-41
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Fitzgerald
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Financial Success ◽  
Secular Humanism ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Standing Up

Focusing on Richardson’s childhood, this chapter details how Gloria’s family socialized her according to gender norms for middle-class black girls yet allowed her to be her own person. They supported her when she displayed strong personality traits, such as standing up for herself against perceived injustices. Richardson’s family taught her to respect the black working class, who were so important to her family’s financial success, and she was expected to carry on the tradition of race service. Richardson’s family also played an influential role in the development of her philosophies on race and class, her political leadership, and her secular humanism, all of which would play a part in her civil rights activism.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

Unification and Its Discontents

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Brian Kovalesky
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School District ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The State ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
City Schools

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the height of protests and actions by civil rights activists around de facto school segregation in the Los Angeles area, the residents of a group of small cities just southeast of the City of Los Angeles fought to break away from the Los Angeles City Schools and create a new, independent school district—one that would help preserve racially segregated schools in the area. The “Four Cities” coalition was comprised of residents of the majority white, working-class cities of Vernon, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Bell—all of which had joined the Los Angeles City Schools in the 1920s and 1930s rather than continue to operate local districts. The coalition later expanded to include residents of the cities of South Gate, Cudahy, and some unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, although Vernon was eventually excluded. The Four Cities coalition petitioned for the new district in response to a planned merger of the Los Angeles City Schools—until this time comprised of separate elementary and high school districts—into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The coalition's strategy was to utilize a provision of the district unification process that allowed citizens to petition for reconfiguration or redrawing of boundaries. Unification was encouraged by the California State Board of Education and legislature in order to combine the administrative functions of separate primary and secondary school districts—the dominant model up to this time—to better serve the state's rapidly growing population of children and their educational needs, and was being deliberated in communities across the state and throughout Los Angeles County. The debates at the time over school district unification in the Greater Los Angeles area, like the one over the Four Cities proposal, were inextricably tied to larger issues, such as taxation, control of community institutions, the size and role of state and county government, and racial segregation. At the same time that civil rights activists in the area and the state government alike were articulating a vision of public schools that was more inclusive and demanded larger-scale, consolidated administration, the unification process reveals an often-overlooked grassroots activism among residents of the majority white, working-class cities surrounding Los Angeles that put forward a vision of exclusionary, smaller-scale school districts based on notions of local control and what they termed “community identity.”

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