PLACE-MAKING AND THE FAILURE OF MULTICULTURALISM IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN CITY

2010 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American City ◽  
Place Making

“Something Apart, Yet an Integral Part”: Duke Ellington's Harlem and the Nexus of Race and Nation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Daniel Matlin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Intellectual Work ◽  
Duke Ellington ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Life

Harlem loomed large in the imagination of Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, one of the twentieth century's most significant composers and an important theorist of the condition of being black and American. This article provides insights into Ellington's social thought by foregrounding his evocations of Harlem and his efforts to interpolate that neighborhood into the physical, cultural, and imaginative spaces of US national life. In doing so, it also situates Ellington's ideas in relation to the competing intellectual currents of the Harlem Renaissance movement that had inspired his project of racial vindication. More broadly, the article argues that understanding of the history of African American ideas of race and nation benefits from analysis of discursive place-making and the spatial practices of artistic and intellectual work. Attending to space and place recuperates the complexity and multiplicity of such ideas, which are often concealed by abstracted discussion of concepts such as “integration.”

African-American Mayors: Race, Politics, and the American City

2002 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 724
Author(s):  
Michael W. Homel ◽  
David R. Colburn ◽  
Jeffrey S. Adler
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American City ◽  
Race Politics

“A Great Injustice”: Urban Capitalism and the Limits of Freedom in Nineteenth-Century New York City

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422097611
Author(s):  
Alexander Manevitz
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African American ◽  
York City ◽  
Early History ◽  
American City ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Central Park ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
History Of

Seneca Village was the largest African American landowning community in New York City until it was destroyed to build Central Park. Although it has largely been overlooked, Seneca Village reframes the early history of American capitalism at the intersection of race, freedom, and urban development, diversifying the narrative to place African American city-dwellers as actors at the center of the narrative. Real estate capitalism made Seneca Village possible, with residents using it as a means to social, political, and economic advancement, but it also destroyed Seneca Village. That paradox reveals how an emerging American urban commercial capitalism consolidated power in places Seneca Villagers could not access even when they tried. These men and women played critical, yet unacknowledged, roles as the whole nation struggled to navigate multiple visions of capitalism, their inherent inequalities, and their implications for the future.

Black Mayors and Black Progress

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Adam Davies
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
American City ◽  
Business Interests ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Black Mayors ◽  
National Economic

This chapter assesses how African Americans fared under black political leadership during the 1970s. After first exploring the upsurge in the number of black elected officials from the mid-1960s onward, the chapter turns to developments in Los Angeles and Atlanta, cities that in 1973 both elected their first black mayor (Tom Bradley and Maynard Jackson, respectively). An in-depth analysis of Bradley and Jackson's campaigns and first two terms in office focuses on the various factors that shaped their respective political philosophies and mayoralties. Confronted by broader national economic problems, and with limited city resources at their disposal, both Bradley and Jackson deferred to white downtown business interests and pursued pro-growth policies that ultimately reinforced the disadvantages facing their poor and working-class black constituents. For the black middle class and elite in both cities, however, African American city leadership proved to be a wellspring of opportunity.

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