Racial Migrations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse E. Hoffnung-Garskof
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Caribbean ◽  
Migrant Communities ◽  
Greenwich Village ◽  
Political Network ◽  
Revolutionary Nationalism ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
New Yorkers

In the late nineteenth century, a small group of Cubans and Puerto Ricans of African descent settled in the segregated tenements of New York City. At an immigrant educational society in Greenwich Village, these early Afro-Latino New Yorkers taught themselves to be poets, journalists, and revolutionaries. At the same time, these individuals built a political network and articulated an ideal of revolutionary nationalism centered on the projects of racial and social justice. These efforts were critical to the poet and diplomat José Martí's writings about race and his bid for leadership among Cuban exiles, and to the later struggle to create space for black political participation in the Cuban Republic. This book presents a vivid portrait of these largely forgotten migrant revolutionaries, weaving together their experiences of migrating while black, their relationships with African American civil rights leaders, and their evolving participation in nationalist political movements. By placing Afro-Latino New Yorkers at the center of the story, the book offers a new interpretation of the revolutionary politics of the Spanish Caribbean, including the idea that Cuba could become a nation without racial divisions. A model of transnational and comparative research, the book reveals the complexities of race-making within migrant communities and the power of small groups of immigrants to transform their home societies.

Activism from the Start

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-26
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Garodnick
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
York City ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
World War ◽  
City Life ◽  
East Village ◽  
The Town ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter begins by describing the redbrick buildings that emerge out of the East Village on Manhattan's East Side, the plain and unenticing facades of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village that disguise the unique slice of city life that takes place within. It talks about Stuy Town's idyllic quality that contradicts the tumultuous history that produced this middle-class enclave tucked in the midst of Manhattan. It also explains Stuy Town's roots that are planted in bitter soil as the town was born of government-backed, and subsidized, racist policies and displaced with poor New Yorkers. The chapter tells Stuy Town's story of activism, where elected officials, civil rights leaders, and tenants joined together to fight against corporate greed and unjust policies, and for the rights of New Yorkers. It recounts how Stuy Town emerged from a housing crisis in New York City that began during World War I.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Omar G. Encarnación
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American History ◽  
Gay Rights ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Safe Environment ◽  
Greenwich Village ◽  
Judy Garland ◽  
Lgbt People ◽  
Police Commissioner ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter mentions New York police commissioner James P. O’Neill, who during a safety briefing for the 2019 WorldPride festival apologized for an event that took place on June 28, 1969. It recounts the raid of the Stonewall Inn in 1969, a bar in Greenwich Village that provided a safe environment for LGBT people to gather and socialize. The raid turned into a violent clash that spread around the bar’s vicinity and lasted for several days. It also speculates what prompted the rioting at the Stonewall Inn, exploring the theory that the death of singer-actress and gay icon Judy Garland put gay New Yorkers on edge. The chapter discusses the paramount importance of the Stonewall Riots to the rise of the contemporary gay rights movement. It points out that conventional wisdom considers the Stonewall rebellion to have been the first instance of gay resistance in American history.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta Gold
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
Racially Mixed ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City ◽  
New Yorkers

This book explores the emergence of New York City's tenant movement as the leading voice for an alternative vision of residence and citizenship against the backdrop of suburban expansion. It considers how tenants responded to the unprecedented housing crisis that faced New Yorkers at the end of World War II and discusses their positions on three public policy questions: public housing, slum clearance, and civil rights. It also examines the tenants' creation of labor-union cooperatives and their fight against “urban renewal”; the struggle over the rent strikes that erupted in Harlem and other ghettos in 1963; and how community politics played out in racially mixed neighborhoods where tenants waged campaigns against redevelopment in the mid-1960s. The book highlights the variety of ways in which New York tenants laid claim to what Marxists have called “the right to the city”: a kind of democratic say over the uses of capital to shape the urban environment and the lives of its inhabitants.

Black Firefighters and the FDNY

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Financial Stability ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Fire Department ◽  
Institutionalized Racism ◽  
White Resistance ◽  
The Impact ◽  
New Yorkers ◽  
Gain Access

For many African Americans, getting a public sector job has historically been one of the few paths to the financial stability of the middle class, and in New York City, few such jobs were as sought-after as positions in the fire department (FDNY). For over a century, generations of Black New Yorkers have fought to gain access to and equal opportunity within the FDNY. Tracing this struggle for jobs and justice from 1898 to the present, David Goldberg details the ways each generation of firefighters confronted overt and institutionalized racism. An important chapter in the histories of both Black social movements and independent workplace organizing, this book demonstrates how Black firefighters in New York helped to create affirmative action from the “bottom up,” while simultaneously revealing how white resistance to these efforts shaped white working-class conservatism and myths of American meritocracy. Full of colorful characters and rousing stories drawn from oral histories, discrimination suits, and the archives of the Vulcan Society (the fraternal society of Black firefighters in New York), this book sheds new light on the impact of Black firefighters in the fight for civil rights.

“Where’s Barry?”

2020 ◽  
pp. 231-278
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lapidus
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Spanish Caribbean ◽  
Latin Music ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter analyzes the understudied, multidimensional relationship of New York Jews with Latin music. Jewish engagement with Latin music took place throughout New York beyond the Palladium Ballroom, and the chapter presents the dance announcements in New York newspapers from 1947 to 1961 in order to show the extent of activities. It also details the historical depth of Jewish New Yorkers' involvement in Spanish Caribbean music by examining performance venues and events beyond the Catskills as well as the specific contributions of Eydie Gormé, Abbe Lane, Barry Rogers, and the dancer Ira Goldwasser. Ultimately, the chapter explores Jewish self-representations in Latin music and portrayals of Jews by non-Jews in Latin music. While there have been Jewish performers of Latin music throughout the Americas, Jewish New Yorkers' ongoing and nuanced relationship to Latin music has been unique and distinct.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Theodore H. Friedgut, Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (ed. and annotated Theodore H. Friedgut). Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014. 199 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foster Mother ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Identity Transitions ◽  
Israeli Kibbutz

This chapter reviews the book Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America: Identity Transitions in the New Odessa Jewish Commune, Odessa, Oregon, New York, 1881–1891 (2014), by Theodore H. Friedgut, together with Israel Mandelkern, Recollections of a Communist (edited and annotated by Theodore H. Friedgut). Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America is a two-in-one volume that explores an obscure episode in the history of the Jews in the late nineteenth century while at the same time connecting much of its content to the author’s own life experience as a son of western Canada’s Jewish farming colonies and, later, as an ideologically driven halutz on an Israeli kibbutz. Stepmother Russia, Foster Mother America retells one branch of the mostly forgotten history of the Am Olam agricultural movement and brings a new layer into the discussion of global Jewish agrarianism, while Recollections of a Communist offers an edited and annotated version of a memoir written by Mandelkern.

Mobilized by Injustice

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah L. Walker
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
The United States ◽  
Personal Contact ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Depth Interviews

Springing from decades of abuse by law enforcement and an excessive criminal justice system, members of over-policed communities lead the current movement for civil rights in the United States. Activated by injustice, individuals protested police brutality in Ferguson, campaigned to end stop-and-frisk in New York City, and advocated for restorative justice in Washington, D.C. Yet, scholars focused on the negative impact of punitive policy on material resources, and trust in government did not predict these pockets of resistance, arguing instead that marginalizing and demeaning policy teaches individuals to acquiesce and withdraw. Mobilized by Injustice excavates conditions under which, despite otherwise negative outcomes, negative criminal justice experiences catalyze political action. This book argues that when understood as resulting from a system that targets people based on race, class, or other group identifiers, contact can politically mobilize. Negative experiences with democratic institutions predicated on equality under the law, when connected to a larger, group-based struggle, can provoke action from anger. Evidence from several surveys and in-depth interviews reveals that mobilization as result of negative criminal justice experiences is broad, crosses racial boundaries, and extends to the loved ones of custodial citizens. When over half of Blacks and Latinos and a plurality of Whites know someone with personal contact, the mobilizing effect of a sense of injustice promises to have important consequences for American politics.

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