Black Chicago

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Horne
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Steel Mills

This chapter examines Patterson's arrival in Chicago. After operating semiclandestinely in Europe and coordinating the Scottsboro campaign, being deployed to Chicago almost seemed like a demotion for Patterson. Surely, the Second City was no backwater, and given its steel mills teeming with proletarians, it was more eye-catching for a self-respecting Marxist-Leninist than a relatively less-endowed Manhattan. Still, the abjectly horrible conditions faced by the Negro working class—including many abodes bereft of water or even toilets—were suggestive of the fact that there was much work to do. Indeed, Patterson was dumbfounded by what he found in black Chicago: 60 percent of Negroes were unemployed, which was “reflected in the terribly dilapidated houses, the crowded kitchenettes, the gambling and vice.” Thus, he said, “We need scores of housing projects that exceed the Ida B. Wells project in scope and in provision” since “the Negro ghetto is an eyesore to democracy.”

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 413-436
Author(s):  
Paul Watt
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Public Housing ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Policy Recommendations ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Deprivation Indices ◽  
External Forces ◽  
Urban Marginality ◽  
Housing Estates ◽  
Comparative Urbanism

The concluding chapter summarises the key findings and suggests policy recommendations. Part I delineated the pernicious impacts of neoliberalism and austerity on public/social housing in London, and analysed the role that estate demolition has played. Part II cast a sociological gaze not only at how working-class housing, lives and spaces are materially deprived and symbolically devalued by powerful external forces (neoliberalism and austerity), but also at how such housing, lives and spaces become valued and valuable. This emphasis on positive values corrects those policy perspectives that view estates through the epistemologically narrow lens of quantitative area-based deprivation indices. In comparative urbanism terms, London social housing estates remain substantially different from the anomic, often dangerous spaces of urban marginality such as US public housing projects (Wacquant). Part III focused on residents’ experiences of living through regeneration. It demonstrated how the valuation/devaluation duality tilts around in terms of place belonging. Comprehensive redevelopment diminishes the valued aspects of estates, while the devalued aspects are heightened and eventually dominate. The book provides several policy recommendations and research agendas. Demolition-based regeneration schemes inevitably result in state-led gentrification, but refurbishment-only schemes have the potential to improve estates and residents’ lives.

Pittsburgh and North

2019 ◽  
pp. 6-17
Author(s):  
Terry Chester Shulman
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Unrest ◽  
Steel Mills ◽  
Immigrant Mother ◽  
Irish Americans

A look at the impoverished working-class city of Pittsburgh that Maurice Costello was born into in 1877. Amid devastating economic and social unrest, his Irish immigrant mother struggles to support herself and her infant son after the death of his father in the steel mills. As Maurice reaches adulthood, the rise of Irish Americans in the entertainment world offers a way out. He cuts his professional teeth with the Harry Davis Company inthe heart of the city’s vibrant theatrical district, before striking out on his own as a traveling actor.

Erasing the suburbs: the grands ensembles in documentary film and television, 1950–80

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Canteux
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Mixed Use ◽  
Visual Construction ◽  
Grands Ensembles

The author explores a three-decade transformation in the audio-visual construction of the grands ensembles, the large-scale housing projects that well before the riots of 2005 had come to typify the blighted French suburb. Analysis is based on films commissioned by the French housing ministry and on television broadcasts aired from the 1950s to the 1980s. The earliest promotional films opposed the grands ensembles to the historic working-class suburbs outlying Paris: where the latter habitat was overcrowded and unhealthy, the rationally planned modern estates promised order, comfort and hygiene. Period documentaries amplified these contrasts the better to ‘erase’ from memory the pre-modern suburb and to make cost-effective mass lodging a national cause. As early as the mid-1960s, the author notes, negative aspects of the grands ensembles – shoddy construction, poor transportation, and scant amenities – came to dominate French screens. From the early 1970s onward, the largest estates were portrayed as immigrant spaces deserted by the middle class and beset with poverty and crime. The state’s attempt to redress the suburb’s image by launching the mixed-use villes nouvelles in the 1970s and 1980s proved unsuccessful, so indelible were these images of suburban blight.

Opportunities Found and Lost

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Korstad
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The South ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
United Auto Workers ◽  
Auto Workers ◽  
The North ◽  
Steel Mills ◽  
Tobacco Workers

This chapter explores two examples of the workplace-oriented civil rights militancy that arose in the 1940s—one in the South and one in the North. It analyzes the unionization of predominantly black tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the ferment in the United Auto Workers in Detroit, Michigan, that made that city a center of black working-class activism in the North. Similar movements took root among newly organized workers in the cotton compress mills of Memphis, the tobacco factories of Richmond and Charleston, the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Birmingham, the stockyards and farm equipment factories of Chicago and Louisville, and the shipyards of Baltimore and Oakland.

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