In the first book to present the history of Baltimore school desegregation, Howell S. Baum shows how good intentions got stuck on what Gunnar Myrdal called the "American Dilemma." Immediately after ...the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the city's liberal school board voted to desegregate and adopted a free choice policy that made integration voluntary.
Baltimore's school desegregation proceeded peacefully, without the resistance or violence that occurred elsewhere. However, few whites chose to attend school with blacks, and after a few years of modest desegregation, schools resegregated and became increasingly segregated. The school board never changed its policy. Black leaders had urged the board to adopt free choice and, despite the limited desegregation, continued to support the policy and never sued the board to do anything else.
Baum finds that American liberalism is the key to explaining how this happened. Myrdal observed that many whites believed in equality in the abstract but considered blacks inferior and treated them unequally. School officials were classical liberals who saw the world in terms of individuals, not races. They adopted a desegregation policy that explicitly ignored students' race and asserted that all students were equal in freedom to choose schools, while their policy let whites who disliked blacks avoid integration. School officials' liberal thinking hindered them from understanding or talking about the city's history of racial segregation, continuing barriers to desegregation, and realistic change strategies.
From the classroom to city hall, Baum examines how Baltimore's distinct identity as a border city between North and South shaped local conversations about the national conflict over race and equality. The city's history of wrestling with the legacy of Brown reveals Americans' preferred way of dealing with racial issues: not talking about race. This avoidance, Baum concludes, allows segregation to continue.
The date is April 29, 2015. Baltimore is reeling from the devastating riots sparked by the death in police custody of twenty-five-year-old African American Freddie Gray. Set against this grim ...backdrop, less than thirty-six hours after the worst rioting Baltimore has seen since the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox take the field at Camden Yards. It is a surreal event they will never forget: the only Major League game ever played without fans. The eerily quiet stadium is on lockdown for public safety and because police are needed elsewhere to keep the tense city from exploding anew.When the Crowd Didn't Roar chronicles this unsettling contest-as well as the tragic events that led up to it and the therapeutic effect the game had on a troubled city. The story comes vividly to life through the eyes of city leaders, activists, police officials, and the media that covered the tumultuous unrest on the streets of Baltimore, as well as the ballplayers, umpires, managers, and front-office personnel of the teams that played in this singular game, and the fans who watched it from behind locked gates. In its own way, amid the uprising and great turmoil, baseball stopped to reflect on the fact that something different was happening in Baltimore and responded to it in an unprecedented way, making this the unlikeliest and strangest game ever played.
In this collective biography, Rhonda Y. Williams takes us behind, and beyond, politically expedient labels to provide an incisive and intimate portrait of poor black women in urban America. Drawing ...on dozens of interviews, Williams challenges the notion that low-income housing was a resounding failure that doomed three consecutive generations of post-war Americans to entrenched poverty. Instead, she recovers a history of grass-roots activism, of political awakening, and of class mobility, all facilitated by the creation of affordable public housing. The stereotyping of black women, especially mothers, has obscured a complicated and nuanced reality too often warped by the political agendas of both the left and the right, and has prevented an accurate understanding of the successes and failures of government anti-poverty policy.
Historic preservation is typically regarded as an elitist practice.
In this view, designating a neighborhood as historic is a project
by and for affluent residents concerned with aesthetics, not
...affordability. It leads to gentrification and rising property
values for wealthy homeowners, while displacement afflicts
longer-term, lower-income residents of the neighborhood, often
people of color. Through rich case studies of Baltimore and
Brooklyn, Aaron Passell complicates this story, exploring how
community activists and local governments use historic preservation
to accelerate or slow down neighborhood change. He argues that this
form of regulation is one of the few remaining urban policy
interventions that enable communities to exercise some control over
the changing built environments of their neighborhoods. In
Baltimore, it is part of a primarily top-down strategy for
channeling investment into historic neighborhoods, many of them
plagued by vacancy and abandonment. In central Brooklyn,
neighborhood groups have discovered the utility of landmark
district designation as they seek to mitigate rapid change with
whatever legal tools they can. The contrast between Baltimore and
Brooklyn reveals that the relationship between historic
preservation and neighborhood change varies not only from city to
city, but even from neighborhood to neighborhood. In speaking with
local activists, Passell finds that historic district designation
and enforcement efforts can be a part of neighborhood community
building and bottom-up revitalization. Featuring compelling
narrative interviews alongside quantitative data, Preserving
Neighborhoods is a nuanced mixed-methods study of an important
local-level urban policy and its surprisingly varied consequences.
The long shadow Alexander, Karl; Entwisle, Doris; Olson, Linda
Russell Sage Foundation,
2014, 20140531, 2014-06-00
eBook, Book
Contents: - The long shadow and urban disadvantageUrban disadvantage at the outset : the Baltimore backdrop. - Urban disadvantage as family disadvantage. - Stepping outside : urban disadvantage in ...neighborhood and school. - Transitioning to adulthood. - Socioeconomic destinations : the BSSYP a quarter century later. - The long shadow realized : status attainment in the BSSYP. - Race and gender stratification in urban disadvantage. - The reproduction of urban disadvantage.
Using the East Baltimore community as an example this book examines historical and current rebuilding practices in abandoned communities in urban America, their structural causes, and outcomes on the ...health of the place and the people. The role of community organizing as a necessary means to assure benefit during and after resident displacement, its challenges and successes, are described in the context of a current eminent domain-driven rebuilding project in East Baltimore.
"A must-read for anyone interested in solutions to America's housing crisis."—Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City An in-depth look at ...America's largest rental assistance program and how it shapes the lives of residents in one low-income Baltimore neighborhood Housing vouchers are a cornerstone of US federal housing policy, offering aid to more than two million households. Vouchers are meant to provide the poor with increased choice in the private rental marketplace, enabling access to safe neighborhoods with good schools and higher-paying jobs. But do they? The Voucher Promise examines the Housing Choice Voucher Program, colloquially known as "Section 8, " and how it shapes the lives of families living in a Baltimore neighborhood called Park Heights. Eva Rosen tells stories about the daily lives of homeowners, voucher holders, renters who receive no housing assistance, and the landlords who provide housing. While vouchers are a powerful tool with great promise, she demonstrates how the housing policy can replicate the very inequalities it has the power to solve.Rosen spent more than a year living in Park Heights, sitting on front stoops, getting to know families, accompanying them on housing searches, speaking to landlords, and learning about the neighborhood's history. Voucher holders disproportionately end up in this area despite rampant unemployment, drugs, crime, and abandoned housing. Exploring why they are unable to relocate to other neighborhoods, Rosen illustrates the challenges in obtaining vouchers and the difficulties faced by recipients in using them when and where they want to. Yet, despite the program's real shortcomings, she argues that vouchers offer basic stability for families and should remain integral to solutions for the nation's housing crisis.Delving into the connections between safe, affordable housing and social mobility, The Voucher Promise investigates the profound benefits and formidable obstacles involved in housing America's poor.
Baltimore was once a vibrant manufacturing town, but today, with factory closings and steady job loss since the 1970s, it is home to some of the most impoverished neighborhoods in America.The Hero's ...Fightprovides an intimate look at the effects of deindustrialization on the lives of Baltimore's urban poor, and sheds critical light on the unintended consequences of welfare policy on our most vulnerable communities.
Drawing on her own uniquely immersive brand of fieldwork, conducted over the course of a decade in the neighborhoods of West Baltimore, Patricia Fernández-Kelly tells the stories of people like D. B. Wilson, Big Floyd, Towanda, and others whom the American welfare state treats with a mixture of contempt and pity-what Fernández-Kelly calls "ambivalent benevolence." She shows how growing up poor in the richest nation in the world involves daily interactions with agents of the state, an experience that differs significantly from that of more affluent populations. While ordinary Americans are treated as citizens and consumers, deprived and racially segregated populations are seen as objects of surveillance, containment, and punishment. Fernández-Kelly provides new insights into such topics as globalization and its effects on industrial decline and employment, the changing meanings of masculinity and femininity among the poor, social and cultural capital in poor neighborhoods, and the unique roles played by religion and entrepreneurship in destitute communities.
Blending compelling portraits with in-depth scholarly analysis,The Hero's Fightexplores how the welfare state contributes to the perpetuation of urban poverty in America.
