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The
Politics of Public Housing
Black Women's Struggles Against Urban Inequality
By Rhonda Y. Williams
Rhonda Y. Williams appearing at
Enoch Pratt Free Library
Central Library/ Wheeler
Auditorium / 400 Cathedral Street /
Sunday, February 6, 2005
Part urban history, part
collective biography,
The
Politics of Public Housing weaves
nearly 70 years of Baltimore’s public housing past with
personal accounts of the war on poverty from those who not only
fought it but who lived it daily. It provides an absorbing and
intimate portrait of the black women who called the projects
their home and fought to keep them that way.
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Product Details —
320 pages; 21
halftones & line illus.; 6-1/8
x 9-1/4; 0-19-515890-3
Dr.
Rhonda Y. Williams is
Associate Professor of Women's Studies and History at Case Western
Reserve University. A Baltimore native, she received her Ph.D. from the
University of Pennsylvania. |
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Reviews
Black women have
traditionally represented the canvas on which many debates about
poverty and welfare have been drawn. For a quarter century after
the publication of the notorious Moynihan report, poor black
women were tarred with the same brush: "ghetto moms"
or "welfare queens" living off the state, with little
ambition or hope of an independent future. At the same time, the
history of the civil rights movement has all too often succumbed
to an idolatry that stresses the centrality of prominent leaders
while overlooking those who fought daily for their survival in
an often hostile urban landscape.
In this collective biography, Rhonda Y. Williams takes us
behind, and beyond, politically expedient labels to provide an
incisive and intimate portrait of poor black women in urban
America. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Williams challenges
the notion that low-income housing was a resounding failure that
doomed three consecutive generations of post-war Americans to
entrenched poverty. Instead, she recovers a history of
grass-roots activism, of political awakening, and of class
mobility, all facilitated by the creation of affordable public
housing.
The stereotyping
of black women, especially mothers, has obscured a complicated
and nuanced reality too often warped by the political agendas of
both the left and the right, and has prevented an accurate
understanding of the successes and failures of government
anti-poverty policy.
At long last giving human form to a community of women who have
too often been treated as faceless pawns in policy debates,
Rhonda Y. Williams offers an unusually balanced and personal
account of the urban war on poverty from the perspective of
those who fought, and lived, it daily.
—
Publisher, Oxford University Press
There are far too
few books from the perspective of poor black women, even fewer
that give them the credit they deserve for pushing local, state,
and federal governments to fulfill the promises of the New Deal
and the War on Poverty. Rhonda William’s beautifully written
and sweeping narrative makes fresh and important contributions
to urban history, African-American women’s history, and the
history of poverty policy in this country.
—Annelise
Orleck, author of Common Sense & a Little Fire
A remarkable piece
of work, doing for Baltimore what Making the second Ghetto did
for Chicago. Williams brings welcome new light to bear on the
struggle of poor black women for respectability and inclusion,
inclusion on their terms. Drawing on a rich data set covering
forty years, Williams renders vivid portraits of individuals
while also conveying a clear conception of the changing societal
trends and public policies with which they had to contend.
—Charles
Payne, author of I’ve Got the Light of Freedom
An innovative
study of the history of the activist work of low-income black
women. Deeply researched and eloquently rendered, this book
provides a new model for understanding urban political
history—not from the bottom up, but from the inside out.
—Barbara
Dianne Savage, author of Broadcasting Freedom
The
Politics of Public Housing presents a new face and place of civil rights struggle—poor
women in the Baltimore “projects”
and their mobilization for adequate housing income, education,
and dignity. Rhonda Williams has written an illuminating and
provocative study of black women who waged their own war on
poverty in the 1950s and 1960s.
—Evelyn
Brooks Higginbotham, author of Righteous Discontent
Moving from the New
Deal and World War II through the War on Poverty and the new
social movements of the 1970s,
The
Politics of Public Housing
illuminates the grassroots activism of poor black women for
decent shelter and adequate income in fresh and surprising ways.
After Williams, scholars will have to consider housing as a
major domain of the welfare state. Hers is a most important
study.
—Eileen Boris, editor (with
Nupur Chaudhuri) of Voices of Women Historians
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