Sociology 4949: Outline--Week Thirteen

I. World War II as a turning point in American racial history

A. 1930s and early 1940s

1. Deportations to Mexico during the 1930s

2. Exclusion of Farmworkers (mostly minority) from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935

3. Continuation of Jim Crow segregation, including segregated military units.

4. Continuation of Chinese Exclusion Act and limits on land ownership by Japanese immigrants

5. "Relocation camps" for Japanese and Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor

6. In a public opinion poll in 1942, Americans identified Jews as the third most dangerous group to the United States, after Germans and Japanese. During the War the United States Congress rejected a plan that would have brought 20,000 Jewish children to the United States to escape from Nazism; shortly thereafter it endorsed a considerably larger plan to bring English children here.

B. Enlistment in the military during the War. Every minority group, from Japanese and Chinese Americans to American Indians to Mexican Americans and African Americans, fought in the war in higher proportions than white Americans (see chapter 14 of Takaki)

C. Movement of minorities to cities and into industrial employment and unions

D. The logic of the war itself. We did not enter the war in order to stop the Holocaust. But once we were in the war and particularly as the death camps were liberated at the end of the war and the photos reached the United States, we had a powerful impetus to redefine ourselves as everything the Hitler regime was not.

E. Video: One Survivor Remembers

F. We can view the whole period from the 1940s to the 1960s as the greatest opening up of minority opportunities in American history, much of it the result of social movement activism by minorities and their allies.

1. 1941: President Roosevelt issues Executive Order 8802, abolishing race discrimination in defense industries and in government jobs

2. 1943: Congress repeals the Chinese exclusion Act

3. 1948: President Truman desegregates the American military

4. 1949: Supreme Court holds that restrictive covenants are unconstitutional

5. 1952: in the McCarran-Walter Act, Congress finally nullifies the 1790 law that limited citizenship to whites

6. 1954: Supreme Court overturns Plessy vs. Ferguson, which had given legal sanction to the whole system of Jim Crow segregation, including segregated schools, and by the late 1970s, the Southern school system was actually less segregated than schools in the rest of the country.

7. 1964: Congress passes the Civil Rights Act

8. 1965: Congress passes the Immigration Reform Act and the Voting Rights Act

9. 1967: Congress passes the Fair Housing Act

 

II. On the other hand, we can also view it as a period that planted the seeds of raised expectations and dashed hopes that resulted in the wave of rioting after the Martin Luther King assassination in 1968 and the Los Angeles riot of 1993 and that particularly for less educated African Americans, there's been little improvement

A. NYT, Nov 29, 2009: "Food Stamp Use Soars and Stigma Fades"

Interactive Map

Look at the the write-ups at the bottom for Los Angeles, Hidalgo County, and Missouri

Look at the first entries in the chart of food stamp recipients by county, in order of percentage on food stamps

Find St. Louis County, Hennepin, Ramsay, Cook County on the map

 

B. Even educated African Americans still face major obstacles to inequality

NYT, Dec 1, 2009 : "In Job Hunt, College Degree Can't Close Racial Gap."

III. Chicago (Soc 3841: Urban Justice Tour)

A. Nicholas Lehman--The Promised Land: the Great Black Migration and How It Changed America

Chicago black population: 1940, 278,000; 1950, 491,000; 1960, 813,000. At high point, 2200 blacks moving to Chicago every week... UMD Library: Video--"Going to Chicago"

1. World War II and "piling up"

2. After the war: Chicago Housing Authority, under the leadership of black chairman, Robert Taylor, and white liberal reformer, Elizabeth Wood, as executive director, still in the early stages of developing public housing in Chicago, began a modest effort to integrate housing projects in white neighhborhood, beginning with a new project called Airport Homes on the southwest side in December 1946... what happened? six days and nights of riots... several more efforts with much the same result

3. Illinois legislature passed a law giving the Chicago City Council the power to determine location of public housing in Chicago... Wood and Taylor dismissed... almost all subsequent public housing in Chicago was located in ghetto areas, mostly on the south side or the near west side. Robert Taylor homes (notice irony of the name) the largest: 28 buildings along State street, holding some 28,000 "official" tenants (eventually would be mostly single mothers and their children)

B. Venkatesh, American Project: the Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto:

1. Early hopefulness at Robert Taylor Homes... accepting middle class too.... but changing regulations soon forced working and middle class blacks out of the project. Problems included:

a. The very design: lack of places for play and informal socializing, isolation from other community organizations and institutions , obstacles to informal social control

b. Poor construction and lack of maintenance: Elevators first to go, eventually much of the hallway lighting gone, problems with plumbing and heating, units abandoned (taken over by squatters, gangs, etc)

1) How were construction contracts bid at the time these large housing projects were constructed? Machine politics

2) Funding dependent on national politics.

3) Management of Chicago Housing Authority... politics and incompetence... e.g. whole sub-basement full of brand new refrigerators at Henry Horner Homes, at a time when many units did not have a working fridge

c. Role of gangs and eventual drug trade and gang wars... evolved from neighborhood defense organizations into competing criminal enterprises... (Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day)

d. Minimal formal social control: police went in only as part of large-scale "sweeps"

e. Minimal funding during the Reagan presidency

f. In sum, an extremely poor, overcrowded, deteriorated, dangerous and intimidating setting that had few points of connection with the larger community

B. Gautreaux: lawsuit charging the federal government, through its Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Chicago Housing Authority with having worked together to locate all of Chicago's major housing projects in segregated black neighborhoods

1. In the process, these neighborhoods had become places of concentrated poverty... see William Julius Wilson on the effects of the civil rights laws on segregated inner city neighborhood and his discussion of what happens when neighborhoods become 40 or 50% poverty families?

2. Lawsuit eventually settled by federal government's agreement to move 7100 housing project families into new neighborhoods that were less segregated and more affluent... finally accomplished by mid-1990s, with mostly positive effects for the families that moved... no cooperation from the Chicago Housing Authority

C. 1998: HUD seized legal control of the CHA, and began demolishing the largest housing projects and "replacing" them with Hope VI Projects (mixed income, "screening" of low income applicants)... occupants of housing projects given Section 8 vouchers..

A. Robert Taylor Homes entirely demolished by 2006... Hope VI really just getting a good start on Chicago's south side in terms of new construction... displaced tenants given Section 8 vouchers and left on their own to find new housing

B. Mary Patillo, Black on the Block... the demolition of several highrise housing projects known collectively as the Lakefront homes

C. Demolition of Henry Horner Homes and Cabrini Green on the near west side

D. Where did the former tenants of the housing projects go?

Chicago Reporter, November 18, 2009: "Chicago's South Side Has the Nation's Second-Highest Unemployment Rate." "Bronzeville" now being redeveloped, but the poverty has simply moved further south.... What replaced the housing projects? Section 8 vouchers and no planning at all