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"African American neighborhoods New York (State) New York History."
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The roots of urban renaissance : gentrification and the struggle over Harlem
Displaying gleaming new shopping centers and refurbished row houses, Harlem today bears little resemblance to the neighborhood of the midcentury urban crisis. Brian Goldstein traces Harlem's widely noted \"Second Renaissance\" to a surprising source: the radical 1960s social movements that resisted city officials and fought to give Harlemites control of their own destiny. In the post-World War II era, large-scale, government-backed redevelopment drove the economic and physical transformation of urban neighborhoods. But in the 1960s, young Harlem activists inspired by the civil rights movement recognized urban renewal as one more example of a power structure that gave black Americans little voice in the decisions that most affected them. They demanded the right to plan their own redevelopment and founded new community-based organizations to achieve that goal. In the following decades, those organizations became the crucibles in which Harlemites debated what their streets should look like and who should inhabit them. Radical activists envisioned a Harlem built by and for its low-income, predominantly African-American population. In the succeeding decades, however, community-based organizations came to pursue a very different goal: a neighborhood with national retailers and increasingly affluent residents. In charting the history that transformed Harlem by the twenty-first century, The Roots of Urban Renaissance demonstrates that gentrification was not imposed on an unwitting community by unscrupulous developers or opportunistic outsiders. Rather, it grew from the neighborhood's grassroots, producing a legacy that benefited some longtime residents and threatened others.-- Provided by publisher
Book
Before Harlem
In the years between 1880 and 1915, New York City and its environs underwent a tremendous demographic transformation with the arrival of millions of European immigrants, native whites from the rural countryside, and people of African descent from both the American South and the Caribbean. While all groups faced challenges in their adjustment to the city, hardening racial prejudices set the black experience apart from that of other newcomers. Through encounters with each other, blacks and whites, both together and in opposition, forged the contours of race relations that would affect the city for decades to come.Before Harlemreveals how black migrants and immigrants to New York entered a world far less welcoming than the one they had expected to find. White police officers, urban reformers, and neighbors faced off in a hostile environment that threatened black families in multiple ways. Unlike European immigrants, who typically struggled with low-paying jobs but who often saw their children move up the economic ladder, black people had limited employment opportunities that left them with almost no prospects of upward mobility. Their poverty and the vagaries of a restrictive job market forced unprecedented numbers of black women into the labor force, fundamentally affecting child-rearing practices and marital relationships. Despite hostile conditions, black people nevertheless claimed New York City as their own. Within their neighborhoods and their churches, their night clubs and their fraternal organizations, they forged discrete ethnic, regional, and religious communities. Diverse in their backgrounds, languages, and customs, black New Yorkers cultivated connections to others similar to themselves, forming organizations, support networks, and bonds of friendship with former strangers. In doing so, Marcy S. Sacks argues, they established a dynamic world that eventually sparked the Harlem Renaissance. By the 1920s, Harlem had become both a tragedy and a triumph-undeniably a ghetto replete with problems of poverty, overcrowding, and crime, but also a refuge and a haven, a physical place whose very name became legendary.
eBook
Making a Promised Land
Making a Promised Landexamines the interconnected histories of African American representation, urban life, and citizenship as documented in still and moving images of Harlem over the last century. Paula J. Massood analyzes how photography and film have been used over time to make African American culture visible to itself and to a wider audience and charts the ways in which the \"Mecca of the New Negro\" became a battleground in the struggle to define American politics, aesthetics, and citizenship. Visual media were first used as tools for uplift and education. With Harlem's downturn in fortunes through the 1930s, narratives of black urban criminality became common in sociological tracts, photojournalism, and film. These narratives were particularly embodied in the gangster film, which was adapted to include stories of achievement, economic success, and, later in the century, a nostalgic return to the past. Among the films discussed areFights of Nations(1907),Dark Manhattan(1937),The Cool World(1963),Black Caesar(1974),Malcolm X(1992), andAmerican Gangster(2007). Massood asserts that the history of photography and film in Harlem provides the keys to understanding the neighborhood's symbolic resonance in African American and American life, especially in light of recent urban redevelopment that has redefined many of its physical and demographic contours.
eBook
How East New York became a ghetto
In response to the riots of the mid-‘60s, Walter Thabit was hired to work with the community of East New York to develop a plan for low- and moderate-income public housing. In the years that followed, he experienced first-hand the forces that had engineered East New York’s dramatic decline and that continued to work against its successful revitalization. How East New York Became a Ghetto describes the shift of East New York from a working-class immigrant neighborhood to a largely black and Puerto Rican neighborhood and shows how the resulting racially biased policies caused the deterioration of this once flourishing area.
A clear-sighted, unflinching look at one ghetto community, How East New York Became a Ghetto provides insights and observations on the histories and fates of ghettos throughout the United States.
eBook
Red Lines, Black Spaces
Runyon Heights, a community in Yonkers, New York, has been populated by middle-class African Americans for nearly a century. This book-the first history of a black middle-class community-tells the story of Runyon Heights, which sheds light on the process of black suburbanization and the ways in which residential development in the suburbs has been shaped by race and class.Relying on both interviews with residents and archival research, Bruce D. Haynes describes the progressive stages in the life of the community and its inhabitants and the factors that enabled it to form in the first place and to develop solidarity, identity and political consciousness. He shows how residents came to recognize common political interests within the community, how racial consciousness provided an axis for social solidarity as well as partial insulation from racial slights, and how the suburb afforded these middle-class residents a degree of physical and social distance from the ghetto. As Haynes explores the history of Runyon Heights, we learn the ways in which its black middle class dealt with the tensions between the political interests of race and the material interests of class.
eBook
Declining Mortality Inequality within Cities during the Health Transition
In the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, large cities had extremely high death rates from infectious disease. Within major cities such as New York City and Philadelphia, there was significant variation at any point in time in the mortality rate across neighborhoods. Between 1900 and 1930 neighborhood mortality convergence took place in New York City and Philadelphia. We document these trends and discuss their consequences for neighborhood quality of life dynamics and the economic incidence of who gains from effective public health interventions.
Journal Article
Writing from the Margins of the Margins: Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem
Whereas Harlem is construed as a positive all-black space whose very \"blackness\" seems to have a certain radical potential to counter dominant white society and engender political renewal, the \"Jewishness\" of the Lower East Side is depicted as unable to mobilize such radical potential. Because they dramatize the different ways countercultural sections within the African American and Jewish American communities were attempting to self-fashion, create alternative norms, and inscribe themselves as oppositional subjects in the US landscape, these texts can be read as revealing something about the markedly dissimilar positionality of these two minority groups during the Jazz Age.
Journal Article
High-Status Residential Segregation among Racial and Ethnic Groups in Five Metro Areas, 1980-1990
Objective. This paper examines the extent to which high-status racial and ethnic persons are segregated from their less-educated counterparts, and the extent to which they are isolated in neighborhoods among other high-status persons. Methods. Data are drawn from 1980 and 1990 census data for five metropolitan areas. Class segregation is measured using the indices of dissimilarity and exposure. Results. Though Wilson (1987) claimed that black class segregation increased during the 1970s, I found that it had barely increased, and it actually decreased during the 1980s. High-status whites are most isolated among all other college graduates in 1990. Changes in high-status isolation were place specific, in that they were greatest among whites in two metropolitan areas, among blacks in two areas, and among Asians in one area. Therefore, Massey's (1996) \"Age of Extremes\" model fits best for whites in 1990, and among whites, Asians, and blacks in selected places during the 1980s. Conclusions. Overall, whites and Asians live in neighborhoods more populated with persons of similar status, while blacks and Hispanics live in tracts more populated with persons of dissimilar status. Even when controlling for class, the racial and ethnic status of blacks and Hispanics is a factor in where they reside in these urban centers.
Journal Article