Teens in America's inner cities grow up and construct identities
amidst a landscape of relationships and violence, support and
discrimination, games and gangs. In such contexts, local
environments ...such as after-school programs may help youth to
mediate between social stereotypes and daily experience, or provide
space for them to consider themselves as contributing members of a
community. Based on four years of field work with both the
adolescent members and staff of an inner-city youth organization in
a large Midwestern city, Pride in the Projects
examines the construction of identity as it occurs within this
local context, emphasizing the relationships within which
identities are formed. Drawing on research in psychology,
sociology, education, and race and gender studies, the volume
highlights the inadequacies in current identity development
theories, expanding our understanding of the lives of urban teens
and the ways in which interpersonal connections serve as powerful
contexts for self-construction. The adolescents' stories illuminate
how they find ways to discover who they are, and who they would
like to be - in positive and healthy ways - in the face of very
real obstacles. The book closes with implications for practice,
alerting scholars, educators, practitioners, and concerned citizens
of the positive developmental possibilities inherent in youth
settings when we pay attention to the voices of youth.
“This book is very important in the wider context of related scholarship in the modern-day ciivil rights movement because it will be the first on the youth perspective in the NAACP. . . . I ...believe that will be widely used by scholars and the general public.”  —Linda Reed, author of Simple Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938–1963      Historical studies of black youth activism have until now focused almost exclusively on the activities of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). However, the NAACP youth councils and college chapters predate both of those organizations. They initiated grassroots organizing efforts and nonviolent direct-action tactics as early as the 1930s and, in doing so, made significant contributions to the struggle for racial equality in the United States.      This deeply researched book breaks new ground in an important and compelling area of study. Thomas Bynum carefully examines the activism of the NAACP youth and effectively refutes the perception of the NAACP as working strictly through the courts. His research illuminates the many direct-action activities undertaken by the young people of the NAACP — activities that helped precipitate the breakdown of racial discrimination and segregation in America. Beginning with the formal organization of the NAACP youth movement under Juanita Jackson, the author traces the group’s activities from their early anti-lynching demonstrations through their post–World War II “withholding patronage” campaigns to their participation in the sit-in protests of the 1960s. He also explores the evolution of the youth councils and college chapters, including their sometime rocky relationship with the national office, and shows how these groups actually provided a framework for the emergence of youth activism within CORE and SNCC.      The author provides a comprehensive account of the generational struggle for racial equality, capturing the successes, failures, and challenges the NAACP youth groups experienced at the national, state, and local levels. He firmly establishes the vital role they played in the history of the civil rights movement in the United States and in the burgeoning tradition of youth activism in the postwar decades. Thomas Bynum is an assistant professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University.
Incorporates data from multiple public-housing sites in large U.S. cities to shine light on the symptoms and behaviors of African American youth living in non-HOPE VI public housing.
In this volume, international researchers examine transformative processes of Jewish youth movements in Europe and Palestine between 1918 and 1945. They focus on the thoroughly controversial ...responses of youth to questions of tradition and future national, religious, and social community new education and equitable gender relations.
Working for the administration remains one of the most coveted career paths for young Chinese. Rejuvenating Communism: Youth Organizations and Elite Renewal in Post-Mao China seeks to understand what ...motivates young and educated Chinese to commit to a long-term career in the party-state and how this question is central to the Chinese regime’s ability to maintain its cohesion and survive. Jérôme Doyon draws upon extensive fieldwork and statistical analysis in order to illuminate the undogmatic commitment recruitment techniques and other methods the state has taken to develop a diffuse allegiance to the party-state in the post-Mao era. He then analyzes recruitment and political professionalization in the Communist Party’s youth organizations and shows how experiences in the Chinese Communist Youth League transform recruits and feed their political commitment as they are gradually inducted into the world of officials. As the first in-depth study of the Communist Youth League’s role in recruitment, this book challenges the assumption that merit is the main criteria for advancement within the party-state, an argument with deep implications for understanding Chinese politics today.
Randol Contreras came of age in the South Bronx during the 1980s, a time when the community was devastated by cuts in social services, a rise in arson and abandonment, and the rise of crack-cocaine. ...For this riveting book, he returns to the South Bronx with a sociological eye and provides an unprecedented insider's look at the workings of a group of Dominican drug robbers. Known on the streets as "Stickup Kids," these men raided and brutally tortured drug dealers storing large amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and cash. As a participant observer, Randol Contreras offers both a personal and theoretical account for the rise of the Stickup Kids and their violence. He mainly focuses on the lives of neighborhood friends, who went from being crack dealers to drug robbers once their lucrative crack market opportunities disappeared. The result is a stunning, vivid, on-the-ground ethnographic description of a drug robbery's violence, the drug market high life, the criminal life course, and the eventual pain and suffering experienced by the casualties of the Crack Era. Provocative and eye-opening, The Stickup Kids urges us to explore the ravages of the drug trade through weaving history, biography, social structure, and drug market forces. It offers a revelatory explanation for drug market violence by masterfully uncovering the hidden social forces that produce violent and self-destructive individuals. Part memoir, part penetrating analysis, this book is engaging, personal, deeply informed, and entirely absorbing.
Through a case-study of the World Youth Festival, the book provides new insights into the Soviet role in the cultural Cold War and offers an explanation why the USSR failed in the cultural battle ...against the USA and the capitalist system. With a detailed analysis of grass-roots interaction, it re-evaluates the agency of micro-level actors and argues that individuals had more chances for transnational contacts than previous scholarship has shown.
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