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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
Rhonda
Y. Williams Explores
Interplay of Race, Gender, Class in Public
Housing
August 10, 2004
In the
popular imagination, urban public housing complexes are places
of squalor and violence, inhabited predominantly by poor black
women and their children subsisting on welfare.
The
reality is far more complex. The vast majority of public housing
tenants are law-abiding people who want only to make a better
life for themselves and their families. But doing so often means
battling hostile bureaucracies, apathetic city governments, and
urban decline resulting in the loss of population and tax base.
Rhonda
Y. Williams, associate professor of history at Case Western
Reserve University, explores issues of race, class, and gender
in public housing in her new book The Politics of Public
Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality
(Oxford University Press: 2004).
The
book traces the development of public housing in Baltimore from
its beginnings under the New Deal to the early 1990s, when
Baltimore and other cities began tearing down high-rise public
housing and dispersing its residents. It also examines the
growing political activism of tenants as they strive to improve
their living conditions, gain greater responsiveness from the
bureaucrats and politicians they deal with, and fight for basic
human rights and dignity.
Williams
explains that the book is “about black women’s struggles
against urban inequality and racism.” She continues: “What
I’m really concerned with is how these women negotiated better
lives for themselves and their families and negotiated
discrimination in the era of Jim Crow. The women are really the
central story of the narrative.”
The
book particularly focuses on African-American women, in part
because as the years went by they constituted an ever-larger
percentage of public housing residents, but also to debunk myths
about poor black women.
“Ronald
Reagan (in the early 1980s) created a debilitating type of
language with the notion of the lazy welfare queen,” a
negative image of low-income black women that had roots in
stereotypes of earlier periods, Williams argues. “These are
the stereotypes that low-income black women have had to
continuously struggle against. Further, the assumptions that
‘welfare is black women’ or that ‘public housing is poor
black people,’ are erroneous not only because white people
benefited from both welfare and public housing, but because such
pat assumptions mask a much more complicated story of racial
demographic change, economic disparity, social inequality, and
everyday people’s battles for survival.
Williams’s
interest in the topic began when she was a newspaper reporter
intern in Baltimore. “One of my first assignments was to go to
a public housing complex and cover a story about some
recreational day care programs. And you grow up hearing warnings
about public housing, so I admit I found myself just a tad
nervous.” But she soon saw there was little to fear in the
complex and that the people in it were no different from those
she encountered elsewhere.
The
memory stuck with her when she left newspapering to attend
graduate school in American history at the University of
Pennsylvania and was searching for a thesis topic. “My initial
focus was on public housing and what it meant in terms of urban
policy and urban space,” she says. “But when I started doing
the research, I began seeing these tenant struggles popping up.
And when I put that alongside the ‘they’re lazy, they
don’t want to do anything to better themselves’ stereotypes,
it took me down the path that is now this book.”
Baltimore,
it turned out, was an ideal place to study. Williams grew up and
still has family there. But more importantly, Baltimore is a
border city, with characteristics of both a northern industrial
city and a southern city where Jim Crow laws existed until the
1960s. In addition, Williams says, its housing, racial patterns,
and politics had been studied much less than those in larger
cities like New York and Chicago.
Williams
believes the struggles of Baltimore’s public housing
residents, like those in other cities, are an overlooked part of
the story of African Americans’ quest for equality and civil
rights. “If you focus on the major organizations, like the
NAACP, then you lose a lot of the other kinds of activities
going on at the grassroots in terms of people fighting for their
civil rights.”
Writing
the book, Williams says, has taught her about “the complexity
of human experience, the way people negotiate life’s travails,
sometimes successfully and sometimes not. But the struggle
itself is important. And these women’s stories really bear
that out. In fact, I end the book with one of the women saying,
‘The key thing for me as an activist has been to try to change
things and improve my life. I’m glad I didn’t sit on the
sidelines.’ And I think that’s important. Not to sit on the
sidelines.”
*
* *
About Case Western Reserve University
Case
is among the nation's leading research institutions. Founded in
1826 and shaped by the unique merger of the Case Institute of
Technology and Western Reserve University, Case is distinguished
by its strengths in education, research, service, and
experiential learning. Located in Cleveland, Case offers
nationally recognized programs in the Arts and Sciences, Dental
Medicine, Engineering, Law, Management, Medicine, Nursing, and
Social Sciences. The Commission on Presidential Debates selected
Case to host the U.S. vice presidential debate on October 5,
2004. http://www.case.edu.
Source:
http://www.case.edu/news/2004/8-04/publichousing.htm |
