Going Home
Going Home

Author: Richard F. Fenno

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-04-15

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0226241327

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Thirty years ago there were nine African Americans in the U.S. House of Representatives. Today there are four times that number. In Going Home, the dean of congressional studies, Richard F. Fenno, explores what representation has meant—and means today—to black voters and to the politicians they have elected to office. Fenno follows the careers of four black representatives—Louis Stokes, Barbara Jordan, Chaka Fattah, and Stephanie Tubbs Jones—from their home districts to the halls of the Capitol. He finds that while these politicians had different visions of how they should represent their districts (in part based on their individual preferences, and in part based on the history of black politics in America), they shared crucial organizational and symbolic connections to their constituents. These connections, which draw on a sense of "linked fates," are ones that only black representatives can provide to black constituents. His detailed portraits and incisive analyses will be important for anyone interested in the workings of Congress or in black politics.

Rebuilding Cleveland
Rebuilding Cleveland

Author: Diana Tittle

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0814205607

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Rebuilding Cleveland is a critical study of the role that The Cleveland Foundation, the country's oldest community trust, has played in shaping public affairs in Cleveland, Ohio, over the past quarter-century. Drawing on an examination of the Foundation's private papers and more than a hundred interviews with Foundation personnel and grantees, Diana Tittle demonstrates that The Cleveland Foundation, with assets of more than $600 million, has provided continuing, catalytic leadership in its attempts to solve a wide range of Cleveland's urban problems. The Foundation's influence is more than a matter of money, Tittle shows. The combined efforts of professional philanthropists and a board of trustees traditionally dominated by Cleveland's business elite, but also including members appointed by various elected officials, have produced innovative civic leadership that neither group was able to achieve on its own. Through an examination of the Foundation's ongoing and sometimes painful organizational development, Tittle explains how the Foundation came to be an important catalyst for progressive change in Cleveland. Rebuilding Cleveland takes the reader back to 1914, when Cleveland banker Frederick C. Goff invented the concept of a community foundation and pioneered a national movement of social scientists, business leaders, and government officials that made philanthropy a more effective force for private involvement in public affairs. Tittle follows the Foundation through the 1960s, when it began a major new initiative to establish itself as a civic agenda-setter and problem solver, to the present, as a new generation of Foundation leaders continues to build upon this renewed sense ofpurpose.

Snowbelt Cities
Snowbelt Cities

Author: Richard M. Bernard

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780253311771

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"A major contribution to the literature on changing US regionalism, the volume is handsomely produced and thoroughly documented." --Choice "... useful and well researched... " --American Politics Review "This is an excellent book for use in the course on comparative urban development... It is a book that should be read by any urbanist who believes that a historical orientation is the best prelude for understanding the future of urban development into the 21st century." --Urban Studies Specialists in urban history and urban affairs join forces to compare the recent political histories of twelve major northeastern and midwestern cities. These excellent essays delineate intricate patterns of political competition among leaders of competing groups, who generally agree on a pro-business, pro-growth agenda, as in the Sunbelt. The realtive power of nonbusiness groups, however, sets these northern cities apart from those of the Sunbelt and has formed the basis of the Snowbelt's postwar politics.

Comrades
Comrades

Author: Judson L. Jeffries

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2007-12-25

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0253027780

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Essays about the original Black Panther Party’s local chapters in seven American cities that seek “to move beyond the usual media stereotypes . . . Recommended” (Choice). The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. It was perhaps the most visible of the Black Power groups in the late sixties and early seventies, not least because of its confrontational politics, its rejection of nonviolence, and its headline-catching, gun-toting militancy. Important on the national scene and highly visible on college campuses, the Panthers also worked at building grassroots support for local black political and economic power. Although there have been many books about the Black Panthers, none has looked at the organization and its work at the local level. This book goes beyond Oakland and Chicago examines the work and actions of seven local initiatives in Baltimore, Winston-Salem, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. These local organizations are revealed as committed to programs of community activism that focused on problems of social, political, and economic justice.

Soul Searching
Soul Searching

Author: Christopher Sieving

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2011-05-01

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0819571342

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The sixties were a tremendously important time of transition for both civil rights activism and the U.S. film industry. Soul Searching examines a subject that, despite its significance to African American film history, has gone largely unexplored until now. By revisiting films produced between the march on Washington in 1963 and the dawn of the “blaxploitation” movie cycle in 1970, Christopher Sieving reveals how race relations influenced black-themed cinema before it was recognized as commercially viable by the major studios. The films that are central to this book—Gone Are the Days (1963), The Cool World (1964), The Confessions of Nat Turner (never produced), Uptight (1968), and The Landlord (1970)—are all ripe for reevaluation and newfound appreciation. Soul Searching is essential reading for anyone interested in the politics and cultural movements of the 1960s, cinematic trends like blaxploitation and the American “indie film” explosion, or black experience and its many facets. Ebook Edition Note: All images have been redacted.

Good Kids, Bad City
Good Kids, Bad City

Author: Kyle Swenson

Publisher: Picador

Published: 2019-02-12

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1250120241

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From award-winning investigative journalist Kyle Swenson, Good Kids, Bad City is the true story of the longest wrongful imprisonment in the United States to end in exoneration, and a critical social and political history of Cleveland, the city that convicted them. In the early 1970s, three African-American men—Wiley Bridgeman, Kwame Ajamu, and Rickey Jackson—were accused and convicted of the brutal robbery and murder of a man outside of a convenience store in Cleveland, Ohio. The prosecution’s case, which resulted in a combined 106 years in prison for the three men, rested on the more-than-questionable testimony of a pre-teen, Ed Vernon. The actual murderer was never found. Almost four decades later, Vernon recanted his testimony, and Wiley, Kwame, and Rickey were released. But while their exoneration may have ended one of American history’s most disgraceful miscarriages of justice, the corruption and decay of the city responsible for their imprisonment remain on trial. Interweaving the dramatic details of the case with Cleveland’s history—one that, to this day, is fraught with systemic discrimination and racial tension—Swenson reveals how this outrage occurred and why. Good Kids, Bad City is a work of astonishing empathy and insight: an immersive exploration of race in America, the struggling Midwest, and how lost lives can be recovered.

The Rise of Stadiums in the Modern United States
The Rise of Stadiums in the Modern United States

Author: Mark Dyreson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1317989287

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Many Americans know more about the stadiums that loom over their cityscapes or college campuses than they do about any other aspect of the nation’s geography. Stadiums serve as iconic monuments of urban and university identities. Indeed, the power of sport in modern American culture has produced ‘sportscapes’—landscapes literally shaped by their devotion to athletic competition. Curiously, given the importance of the secular cathedrals in American culture, historians have paid little attention to these edifices. The Rise of Stadiums in the Modern United States: Cathedrals of Sport seeks to remedy that oversight. This book will analyze stadiums from a variety of perspectives, paying special attention to the links between the ‘built environment’ in which Americans watch and play games and the larger social environments that the nation’s sporting practices inhabit. The Rise of Stadiums in the Modern United States: Cathedrals of Sport explores the role of stadiums in shaping urban identities, determining the economics of intercollegiate athletics, influencing local and national politics. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power
Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power

Author: Leonard N. Moore

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780252071638

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As the first elected black mayor of a major U.S. city, Cleveland's Carl B. Stokes embodied the transformation of the civil rights movement from a vehicle of protest to one of black political power. In this wide-ranging political biography, Leonard N. Moore examines the convictions and alliances that brought Stokes to power. Impelled by the problems plaguing Cleveland's ghettos in the decades following World War II, Stokes and other Clevelanders questioned how the sit-ins and marches of the civil rights movement could correct the exclusionary zoning practices, police brutality, substandard housing, and de facto school segregation that African Americans in the country's northern urban centers viewed as evidence of their oppression. As civil unrest in the country's ghettos turned to violence in the 1960s, Cleveland was one of the first cities to heed the call of Malcolm X's infamous "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech. Understanding the importance of controlling the city's political system, Cleveland's blacks utilized their substantial voting base to put Stokes in office in 1967. Stokes was committed to showing the country that an African American could be an effective political leader. He employed an ambitious and radically progressive agenda to clean up Cleveland's ghettos, reform law enforcement, move public housing to middle-class neighborhoods, and jump-start black economic power. Hindered by resistance from the black middle class and the Cleveland City Council, spurned by the media and fellow politicians who deemed him a black nationalist, and unable to prove that black leadership could thwart black unrest, Stokes finished his four years in office with many of his legislative goals unfulfilled. Focusing on Stokes and Cleveland, but attending to themes that affected many urban centers after the second great migration of African Americans to the North, Moore balances Stokes's failures and successes to provide a thorough and engaging portrait of his life and his pioneering contributions to a distinct African American political culture that continues to shape American life.

African-American Mayors
African-American Mayors

Author: David R. Colburn

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780252026348

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On November 7, 1967, the voters of Cleveland, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, elected the nation's first African-American mayors to govern their cities. Ten years later more than two hundred black mayors held office, and by 1993 sixty-seven major urban centers, most with majority-white populations, were headed by African Americans.Once in office, African-American mayors faced vexing challenges. In large and small cities from the Sunbelt to the Rustbelt, black mayors assumed office during economic downturns and confronted the intractable problems of decaying inner cities, white flight, a dwindling tax base, violent crime, and diminishing federal support for social programs. Many encountered hostility from their own parties, city councils, and police departments; others worked against long-established power structures dominated by local business owners or politicians. Still others, while trying to respond to multiple demands from a diverse constituency, were viewed as traitors by blacks expecting special attention from a leader of their own race. All struggled with the contradictory mandate of meeting the increasing needs of poor inner-city residents while keeping white businesses from fleeing to the suburbs.This is the first comprehensive treatment of the complex phenomenon of African-American mayors in the nation's major urban centers. Offering a diverse portrait of leadership, conflict, and almost insurmountable obstacles, this volume assesses the political alliances that brought black mayors to office as well as their accomplishments--notably, increased minority hiring and funding for minority businesses--and the challenges that marked their careers. Mayors profiled include Carl B. Stokes (Cleveland), Richard G. Hatcher (Gary), "Dutch" Morial (New Orleans), Harold Washington (Chicago), Tom Bradley (Los Angeles), Marion Barry (Washington, D.C.), David Dinkins (New York City), Coleman Young (Detroit), and a succession of black mayors in Atlanta (Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young, and Bill Campbell).Probing the elusive economic dimension of black power, African-American Mayors demonstrates how the same circumstances that set the stage for the victories of black mayors exaggerated the obstacles they faced.

Where the River Burned
Where the River Burned

Author: David Stradling

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2015-05-07

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0801455650

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In the 1960s, Cleveland suffered through racial violence, spiking crime rates, and a shrinking tax base, as the city lost jobs and population. Rats infested an expanding and decaying ghetto, Lake Erie appeared to be dying, and dangerous air pollution hung over the city. Such was the urban crisis in the "Mistake on the Lake." When the Cuyahoga River caught fire in the summer of 1969, the city was at its nadir, polluted and impoverished, struggling to set a new course. The burning river became the emblem of all that was wrong with the urban environment in Cleveland and in all of industrial America.Carl Stokes, the first African American mayor of a major U.S. city, had come into office in Cleveland a year earlier with energy and ideas. He surrounded himself with a talented staff, and his administration set new policies to combat pollution, improve housing, provide recreational opportunities, and spark downtown development. In Where the River Burned, David Stradling and Richard Stradling describe Cleveland's nascent transition from polluted industrial city to viable service city during the Stokes administration.The story culminates with the first Earth Day in 1970, when broad citizen engagement marked a new commitment to the creation of a cleaner, more healthful and appealing city. Although concerned primarily with addressing poverty and inequality, Stokes understood that the transition from industrial city to service city required massive investments in the urban landscape. Stokes adopted ecological thinking that emphasized the connectedness of social and environmental problems and the need for regional solutions. He served two terms as mayor, but during his four years in office Cleveland's progress fell well short of his administration’s goals. Although he was acutely aware of the persistent racial and political boundaries that held back his city, Stokes was in many ways ahead of his time in his vision for Cleveland and a more livable urban America.