Battle for Bed-Stuy: The Long War on Poverty in New York City - Hardcover

Woodsworth, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674545060 ISBN 13: 9780674545069

Verlag: Harvard University Press, 2016

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Críticas:

An impressive work that shows how local bureaucracies and energized political activists--in this case innovative African American residents and property owners--made the War on Poverty do what it was intended to do: reflect the interests of local people who knew Bed-Stuy was a community, not a so-called slum.--Kent B. Germany, University of South Carolina [This book] will especially interest readers who want to understand the political economy of the war on poverty. Moreover, though Woodsworth's book focuses on a single American neighborhood, it gives readers a look at the forces that led to failures, and successes, in combating poverty in many American cities during the post-war period. The book is very well written...Battle for Bed-Stuy is an excellent introduction to how the war on poverty played out in the largest ghetto in American's largest city.-- (11/01/2016) In this engaging and powerful book, Michael Woodsworth recasts the War on Poverty as the fruit of a long community-based struggle against urban disinvestment and racism. By showing just how much of 1960s urban reform percolated up from the grassroots, Battle for Bed-Stuy offers fresh insight into the relationship between activism and policy and the promises and perils of place-based politics.--Mason B. Williams, author of City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York This original and well-written account of postwar community activism makes an excellent and provocative case that Bed-Stuy, long overshadowed by Harlem, is a key site for understanding postwar African American history.--Karen Ferguson, author of Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism

Reseña del editor:

A half-century after the launch of the War on Poverty, its complex origins remain obscure. Battle for Bed-Stuy reinterprets President Lyndon Johnson's much-debated crusade from the perspective of its foot soldiers in New York City, showing how 1960s antipoverty programs were rooted in a rich tradition of grassroots activism and policy experiments. Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, with 400,000 mostly black, mostly poor residents, was often labeled "America's largest ghetto." But in its elegant brownstones lived a coterie of home-owning professionals intent on stemming disorder and unifying the community. In the 1950s and 1960s, Bed-Stuy's black middle class worked with city officials and, later, Senator Robert Kennedy to tackle youth crime, physical decay, and capital flight. Their policy dialogue inspired several War on Poverty programs, including America's first Community Development Corporation. Such initiatives brought hope amid dark days, reinforced the social safety net, and democratized urban politics. They also empowered women like Elsie Richardson and Shirley Chisholm, community organizers who graduated into leadership positions. Yet, as Michael Woodsworth reveals, these new forms of black political power, though exercised in the name of poor people, often benefited the middle class. Bed-Stuy today, shaped by gentrification and displacement, reflects the paradoxes of midcentury reform.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Harvard University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0674545060
• ISBN 13: 9780674545069
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 424