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.
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.
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.
Baltimore '68 Elfenbein, Jessica; Hollowak, Thomas; Nix, Elizabeth
06/2011
eBook
In 1968, Baltimore was home to a variety of ethnic, religious, and racial communities that, like those in other American cities, were confronting a quickly declining industrial base. In April of that ...year, disturbances broke the urban landscape along lines of race and class.
This book offers chapters on events leading up to the turmoil, the riots, and the aftermath as well as four rigorously edited and annotated oral histories of members of the Baltimore community. The combination of new scholarship and first-person accounts provides a comprehensive case study of this period of civil unrest four decades later.
This engaging, broad-based public history lays bare the diverse experiences of 1968 and their effects, emphasizing the role of specific human actions. By reflecting on the stories and analysis presented in this anthology, readers may feel empowered to pursue informed, responsible civic action of their own.
Baltimore '68is the book component of a larger public history project, "Baltimore '68 Riots: Riots and Rebirth." The project's companion website (http://archives.ubalt.edu/bsr/index.html ) offers many more oral histories plus photos, art, and links to archival sources. The book and the website together make up an invaluable teaching resource on cities, social unrest, and racial politics in the 1960s. The project was the corecipient of the 2009 Outstanding Public History Project Award from the National Council on Public History.
The history of the United States is often told as a movement westward, beginning at the Atlantic coast and following farmers across the continent. But cities played an equally important role in the ...country’s formation. Towns sprung up along the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, as Spaniards and Englishmen took Indian land and converted it into private property. In this reworking of early American history, Mary P. Ryan shows how cities—specifically San Francisco and Baltimore—were essential parties to the creation of the republics of the United States and Mexico. Baltimore and San Francisco share common roots as early trading centers whose coastal locations immersed them in an international circulation of goods and ideas. Ryan traces their beginnings back to the first human habitation of each area, showing how the juggernaut toward capitalism and nation-building could not commence until Europeans had taken the land for city building. She then recounts how Mexican ayuntamientos and Anglo American city councils pioneered a prescient form of municipal sovereignty that served as both a crucible for democracy and a handmaid of capitalism. Moving into the nineteenth century, Ryan shows how the citizens of Baltimore and San Francisco molded landscape forms associated with the modern city: the gridded downtown, rudimentary streetcar suburbs, and outlying great parks. This history culminates in the era of the Civil War when the economic engines of cities helped forge the East and the West into one nation.
Civic Intimacies van Doorn, Niels
2019, 2019-06-07, Letnik:
12
eBook
Black queer lives often exist outside conventional civic institutions and therefore have to explore alternative intimacies to experience a sense of belonging. Civic Intimacies examines how—and to ...what extent—these different forms of intimacy catalyze the values, aspirations, and collective flourishing of Black queer denizens of Baltimore. Niels van Doorn draws on 18 months of immersive ethnographic fieldwork for his innovative cross-disciplinary analysis of contemporary debates in political and cultural theory. Van Doorn describes the way that these systematically marginalized communities improvise on citizenship not just to survive but also to thrive despite the proliferation of violence and insecurity in their lives. By reimagining citizenship as the everyday reparative work of building support structures, Civic Intimacies highlights the extent to which sex, kinship, memory, religious faith, and sexual health are rooted in collective practices that are deeply political. These systems sustain the lives of Black queer Baltimoreans who find themselves stuck in a city they cannot give up on—even though it has in many ways given up on them.
As a border city Baltimore made an ideal arena to push for change during the civil rights movement. It was a city in which all forms of segregation and racism appeared vulnerable to attack by the ...National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's methods. If successful in Baltimore, the rest of the nation might follow with progressive and integrationist reforms. The Baltimore branch of the NAACP was one of the first chapters in the nation and was the largest branch in the nation by 1946. The branch undertook various forms of civil rights activity from 1914 through the 1940s that later were mainstays of the 1960s movement. Nonviolent protest, youth activism, economic boycotts, marches on state capitols, campaigns for voter registration, and pursuit of anti-lynching cases all had test runs.
Borders of Equality
Brown
Despite increasingly nuanced understandings of the neurobiology of addiction and a greater appreciation of the social and economic conditions that allow drug dependency to persist, there remain many ...unknowns regarding the individual experience of substance abuse and its treatment. In recent years, novel pharmaceutical therapies have given rise to both new hopes for recovery and renewed fears about drug diversion and abuse.In The Clinic and Elsewhere, Todd Meyers looks at the problems of meaning caused by drug dependency and appraises the changing terms of medical intervention today.
By following a group of adolescents from the time they enter drug rehabilitation treatment through their reentry into the outside world-the clinic, their homes and neighborhoods, and other institutional settings-Meyers traces patterns of life that become mediated by pharmaceutical intervention. His focus is not on the drug economy but rather on the therapeutic economy, where new markets, transactions of care, and highly porous conceptions of success and failure come together to shape addiction and recovery. The book is at once a meditative work of anthropology, a demonstration of the theoretical and methodological limits of medical research, and a forceful intervention into the philosophy of therapeutics at the level of the individual.
Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Nfyy21fxp8&list=UUge4MONgLFncQ1w1C_BnHcw&index=12&feature=plc
Concentration‐discharge (c‐Q) relations have been used to infer watershed‐scale processes governing solute fluxes. Prior studies have documented inconsistent concentration‐discharge patterns at the ...storm‐event scale driven by changes in end‐member concentrations. Other studies have evaluated c‐Q data from all periods in a composite fashion to quantify chemostasis (relatively invariant changes in concentration over several orders of magnitude variation in streamflow). Here we examine 3 years of high‐frequency nitrate and discharge data (49,861 data points) to complement 14 years of weekly data (699 data points) for an urban stream in Baltimore, MD, U.S. to quantify c‐Q relationships. We show that these relationships are variable through time and depend on the temporal scale at which they are investigated. On a storm‐event scale, the sensor data exhibit a watershed‐specific dQ/Q threshold when storms switch from counter‐clockwise to clockwise c‐Q behavior. On a seasonal scale, we show the influence of hydrologic variability and in‐stream metabolism as controls on stream nitrate concentrations and fluxes. On a composite scale, we evaluate the c‐Q data for chemostasis using analysis of both c‐Q slopes and CVc/CVQ, as a function of time. The slopes of c‐Q data for both long‐term weekly and high‐frequency data sets are in close agreement on an annual basis and vary between dry and wet years; the CVc/CVQ analysis is less sensitive to hydroclimate variability. This work highlights the value of both long‐term and high‐frequency c‐Q data collection for calculating and analyzing solute fluxes.
Key Points
Variations in c‐Q relationships exist across multiple scales of analysis: event, seasonal, annual, long‐term
Detection of c‐Q chemostasis is dependent upon frequency of data collection and the metric of analysis (slope versus CVc/CVQ)
Evaluation of c‐Q at a storm‐event scale reveals a dQ/Q threshold that separates counterclockwise versus clockwise hysteretic behavior
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