Download or read book Blockbusting in Baltimore written by W. Edward Orser and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative study of racial upheaval and urban transformation in Baltimore, Maryland investigates the impact of "blockbusting"—a practice in which real estate agents would sell a house on an all-white block to an African American family with the aim of igniting a panic among the other residents. These homeowners would often sell at a loss to move away, and the real estate agents would promote the properties at a drastic markup to African American buyers. In this groundbreaking book, W. Edward Orser examines Edmondson Village, a west Baltimore rowhouse community where an especially acute instance of blockbusting triggered white flight and racial change on a dramatic scale. Between 1955 and 1965, nearly twenty thousand white residents, who saw their secure world changing drastically, were replaced by blacks in search of the American dream. By buying low and selling high, playing on the fears of whites and the needs of African Americans, blockbusters set off a series of events that Orser calls "a collective trauma whose significance for recent American social and cultural history is still insufficiently appreciated and understood." Blockbusting in Baltimore describes a widely experienced but little analyzed phenomenon of recent social history. Orser makes an important contribution to community and urban studies, race relations, and records of the African American experience.
Download or read book Not in My Neighborhood written by Antero Pietila and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2010 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baltimore is the setting for (and typifies) one of the most penetrating examinations of bigotry and residential segregation ever published in the United States. Antero Pietila shows how continued discrimination practices toward African Americans and Jews have shaped the cities in which we now live. Eugenics, racial thinking, and white supremacist attitudes influenced even the federal government's actions toward housing in the 20th century, dooming American cities to ghettoization. This all-American tale is told through the prism of Baltimore, from its early suburbanization in the 1880s to the consequences of "white flight" after World War II, and into the first decade of the twenty-first century. The events are real, and so are the heroes and villains. Mr. Pietila's engrossing story is an eye-opening journey into city blocks and neighborhoods, shady practices, and ruthless promoters. -- Book jacket.
Download or read book Flickering Treasures written by Amy Davis and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These vintage and contemporary images of Baltimore movie palaces explore the changing face of Charm City with stories and commentary by filmmakers. Since the dawn of popular cinema, Baltimore has been home to hundreds of movie theaters, many of which became legendary monuments to popular culture. But by 2016, the number of cinemas had dwindled to only three. Many theaters have been boarded up, burned out, or repurposed. In this volume, Baltimore Sun photojournalist Amy Davis pairs vintage black-and-white images of downtown movie palaces and modest neighborhood theaters with her own contemporary color photos. Flickering Treasures delves into Baltimore’s cultural and cinematic history, from its troubling legacy of racial segregation to the technological changes that have shaped both American cities and the movie exhibition business. Images of Electric Park, the Century, the Hippodrome, and scores of other beloved venues are punctuated by stories and interviews, as well as commentary from celebrated Baltimore filmmakers Barry Levinson and John Waters. A map and timeline reveal the one-time presence of movie houses in every corner of the city, and fact boxes include the years of operation, address, architect, and seating capacity for each of the 72 theaters profiled, along with a brief description of each theater’s distinct character.
Download or read book Front Stoops in the Fifties written by Michael Olesker and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This personal history of prominent Baltimoreans sheds light on the social transformations already taking place in the supposedly innocent 1950s. Front Stoops in the Fifties recounts the stories of some of Baltimore’s most famous personalities as they grew up during the “decade of conformity”—just before they entered the turbulent 1960s. Focusing on the period before JFK’s assassination, Olesker looks to individuals who would go on to influence the brewing cultural revolution. Such familiar names as Jerry Leiber, Nancy Pelosi, Thurgood Marshall, and Barry Levinson figure prominently in Michael Olesker’s fascinating account, which draws on personal interviews and journalistic research. Olesker tells the story of Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi, daughter of the mayor, who grew up in a political home and eventually became the first woman Speaker of the House. Thurgood Marshall, schooled in a racially segregated classroom, went on to argue Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka before the U.S. Supreme Court and rewrite race-relations law. These and many other stories come to life in Front Stoops in the Fifties. “[A] fascinating read . . . The shocking part is just how relevant these stories remain today.” —Baltimore Post-Examiner “[A] crisp, insightful dispatch from a skilled writer who knows his city and its history.” —David Simon, executive producer of HBO’s The Wire
Download or read book The Voucher Promise written by Eva Rosen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Park Heights -- Housing insecurity & survival strategies -- The promise of housing vouchers -- The challenges of using the voucher -- "A tenant for every house"--"Not in my front yard" -- Choosing to move, choosing to stay
Download or read book Come and Be Shocked written by Mary Rizzo and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She investigates more mainstream art, from the teen dance sensation The Buddy Deane Show to the comedy-drama Roc to the crime show The Wire, from Anne Tyler's award-winning book The Accidental Tourist to Barry Levinson's movie classic Diner.
Download or read book The Black Butterfly written by Lawrence T. Brown and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best-selling look at how American cities can promote racial equity, end redlining, and reverse the damaging health- and wealth-related effects of segregation. Winner of the IPPY Book Award Current Events II by the Independent Publisher The world gasped in April 2015 as Baltimore erupted and Black Lives Matter activists, incensed by Freddie Gray's brutal death in police custody, shut down highways and marched on city streets. In The Black Butterfly—a reference to the fact that Baltimore's majority-Black population spreads out like a butterfly's wings on both sides of the coveted strip of real estate running down the center of the city—Lawrence T. Brown reveals that ongoing historical trauma caused by a combination of policies, practices, systems, and budgets is at the root of uprisings and crises in hypersegregated cities around the country. Putting Baltimore under a microscope, Brown looks closely at the causes of segregation, many of which exist in current legislation and regulatory policy despite the common belief that overtly racist policies are a thing of the past. Drawing on social science research, policy analysis, and archival materials, Brown reveals the long history of racial segregation's impact on health, from toxic pollution to police brutality. Beginning with an analysis of the current political moment, Brown delves into how Baltimore's history influenced actions in sister cities such as St. Louis and Cleveland, as well as Baltimore's adoption of increasingly oppressive techniques from cities such as Chicago. But there is reason to hope. Throughout the book, Brown offers a clear five-step plan for activists, nonprofits, and public officials to achieve racial equity. Not content to simply describe and decry urban problems, Brown offers up a wide range of innovative solutions to help heal and restore redlined Black neighborhoods, including municipal reparations. Persuasively arguing that, since urban apartheid was intentionally erected, it can be intentionally dismantled, The Black Butterfly demonstrates that America cannot reflect that Black lives matter until we see how Black neighborhoods matter.
Download or read book The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins written by Antero Pietila and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-11-02 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johns Hopkins destroyed his private papers so thoroughly that no credible biography exists of the Baltimore Quaker titan. One of America’s richest men and the largest single shareholder of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, Hopkins was also one of the city’s defining developers. In The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins, Antero Pietila weaves together a biography of the man with a portrait of how the institutions he founded have shaped the racial legacy of an industrial city from its heyday to its decline and revitalization. From the destruction of neighborhoods to make way for the mercantile buildings that dominated Baltimore’s downtown through much of the 19th century to the role that the president of Johns Hopkins University played in government sponsored “Negro Removal” that unleashed the migration patterns that created Baltimore’s existing racial patchwork, Pietila tells the story of how one man’s wealth shaped and reshaped the life of a city long after his lifetime.
Download or read book The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America written by Richard Rothstein and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller • Notable Book of the Year • Editors' Choice Selection One of Bill Gates’ “Amazing Books” of the Year One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction Gold Winner • California Book Award (Nonfiction) Finalist • Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) Finalist • Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review). Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.
Download or read book How the Suburbs Were Segregated written by Paige Glotzer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the rise of the segregated suburb often begins during the New Deal and the Second World War, when sweeping federal policies hollowed out cities, pushed rapid suburbanization, and created a white homeowner class intent on defending racial barriers. Paige Glotzer offers a new understanding of the deeper roots of suburban segregation. The mid-twentieth-century policies that favored exclusionary housing were not simply the inevitable result of popular and elite prejudice, she reveals, but the culmination of a long-term effort by developers to use racism to structure suburban real estate markets. Glotzer charts how the real estate industry shaped residential segregation, from the emergence of large-scale suburban development in the 1890s to the postwar housing boom. Focusing on the Roland Park Company as it developed Baltimore’s wealthiest, whitest neighborhoods, she follows the money that financed early segregated suburbs, including the role of transnational capital, mostly British, in the U.S. housing market. She also scrutinizes the business practices of real estate developers, from vetting homebuyers to negotiating with municipal governments for services. She examines how they sold the idea of the suburbs to consumers and analyzes their influence in shaping local and federal housing policies. Glotzer then details how Baltimore’s experience informed the creation of a national real estate industry with professional organizations that lobbied for planned segregated suburbs. How the Suburbs Were Segregated sheds new light on the power of real estate developers in shaping the origins and mechanisms of a housing market in which racial exclusion and profit are still inextricably intertwined.
Download or read book Searching for a Viable Alternative written by W. Edward Orser and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Lines Between Us written by Lawrence Lanahan and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterful narrative—with echoes of Evicted and The Color of Law—that brings to life the structures, policies, and beliefs that divide us Mark Lange and Nicole Smith have never met, but if they make the moves they are contemplating—Mark, a white suburbanite, to West Baltimore, and Nicole, a black woman from a poor city neighborhood, to a prosperous suburb—it will defy the way the Baltimore region has been programmed for a century. It is one region, but separate worlds. And it was designed to be that way. In this deeply reported, revelatory story, duPont Award–winning journalist Lawrence Lanahan chronicles how the region became so highly segregated and why its fault lines persist today. Mark and Nicole personify the enormous disparities in access to safe housing, educational opportunities, and decent jobs. As they eventually pack up their lives and change places, bold advocates and activists—in the courts and in the streets—struggle to figure out what it will take to save our cities and communities: Put money into poor, segregated neighborhoods? Make it possible for families to move into areas with more opportunity? The Lines Between Us is a riveting narrative that compels reflection on America's entrenched inequality—and on where the rubber meets the road not in the abstract, but in our own backyards. Taking readers from church sermons to community meetings to public hearings to protests to the Supreme Court to the death of Freddie Gray, Lanahan deftly exposes the intricacy of Baltimore's hypersegregation through the stories of ordinary people living it, shaping it, and fighting it, day in and day out. This eye-opening account of how a city creates its black and white places, its rich and poor spaces, reveals that these problems are not intractable; but they are designed to endure until each of us—despite living in separate worlds—understands we have something at stake.
Download or read book Start Shooting written by Charlie Newton and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The best way I can describe the Four Corners neighborhood of Chicago is find a length of rebar, scratch a big cross into the concrete, set your feet solid in the quadrant you like best, lean back, and start shooting.” Officer Bobby Vargas is hard-edged but idealistic, a Chicago cop who stands at the epicenter of a subterranean plot that will have horrific ramifications for both himself and the entire city. Twenty-five years earlier, a gruesome murder rocked the unforgiving streets of Four Corners. Now, suddenly, a dying Chicago paper is running a serial exposé on new evidence in that old case, threatening to implicate Bobby and his older brother, Ruben—a decorated, high-ranking detective and cop- prince of the streets. The smear campaign stirs up decades-old bad blood, leading the Vargas brothers down an increasingly twisted and terrifying path, where the sins of the past threaten to destroy what remains of the truth. As readers and critics discovered in his first novel, Calumet City, Charlie Newton’s Chicago is a landscape as brutal and poignant as any in modern crime fiction—a multi-faceted, shockingly violent labyrinth of gangland politics, political backstabbing, corporate malfeasance, and, possibly, hope. Start Shooting is a riveting read.
Download or read book Race for Profit written by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.
Download or read book The Baltimore Book written by Elizabeth Fee and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 1993-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baltimore has a long, colorful history that traditionally has been focused on famous men, social elites, and patriotic events. The Baltimore Book is both a history of "the other Baltimore" and a tour guide to places in the city that are important to labor, African American, and women's history. The book grew out of a popular local bus tour conducted by public historians, the People's History Tour of Baltimore, that began in 1982. This book records and adds sites to that tour; provides maps, photographs, and contemporary documents; and includes interviews with some of the uncelebrated people whose experiences as Baltimoreans reflect more about the city than Francis Scott Key ever did.The tour begins at the B&O Railroad Station at Camden Yards, site of the railroad strike of 1877, moves on to Hampden-Woodbury, the mid-19th century cotton textile industry's company town, and stops on the way to visit Evergreen House and to hear the narratives of ex-slaves. We travel to Old West Baltimore, the late 19th-century center of commerce and culture for the African American community; Fells Point; Sparrows Point; the suburbs; Federal Hill; and Baltimore's "renaissance" at Harborplace. Interviews with community activists, civil rights workers, Catholic Workers, and labor union organizers bring color and passion to this historical tour. Specific labor struggles, class and race relations, and the contributions of women to Baltimore's development are emphasized at each stop. Author note: Elizabeth Fee is Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management of The Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health.Linda Shopes is Associate Historian at the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.Linda Zeidman is Professor of History and Economics at Essex Community College.
Download or read book White Space Black Hood written by Sheryll Cashin and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2021 C. Wright Mills Award Finalist Shows how government created “ghettos” and affluent white space and entrenched a system of American residential caste that is the linchpin of US inequality—and issues a call for abolition. The iconic Black hood, like slavery and Jim Crow, is a peculiar American institution animated by the ideology of white supremacy. Politicians and people of all colors propagated “ghetto” myths to justify racist policies that concentrated poverty in the hood and created high-opportunity white spaces. In White Space, Black Hood, Sheryll Cashin traces the history of anti-Black residential caste—boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance—and unpacks its current legacy so we can begin the work to dismantle the structures and policies that undermine Black lives. Drawing on nearly 2 decades of research in cities including Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland, Cashin traces the processes of residential caste as it relates to housing, policing, schools, and transportation. She contends that geography is now central to American caste. Poverty-free havens and poverty-dense hoods would not exist if the state had not designed, constructed, and maintained this physical racial order. Cashin calls for abolition of these state-sanctioned processes. The ultimate goal is to change the lens through which society sees residents of poor Black neighborhoods from presumed thug to presumed citizen, and to transform the relationship of the state with these neighborhoods from punitive to caring. She calls for investment in a new infrastructure of opportunity in poor Black neighborhoods, including richly resourced schools and neighborhood centers, public transit, Peacemaker Fellowships, universal basic incomes, housing choice vouchers for residents, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere. Deeply researched and sharply written, White Space, Black Hood is a call to action for repairing what white supremacy still breaks. Includes historical photos, maps, and charts that illuminate the history of residential segregation as an institution and a tactic of racial oppression.
Download or read book The Master Plan written by Chris Wilson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiring, instructive, and ultimately triumphant memoir of a man who used hard work and a Master Plan to turn a life sentence into a second chance. Growing up in a tough Washington, D.C., neighborhood, Chris Wilson was so afraid for his life he wouldn't leave the house without a gun. One night, defending himself, he killed a man. At eighteen, he was sentenced to life in prison with no hope of parole. But what should have been the end of his story became the beginning. Deciding to make something of his life, Chris embarked on a journey of self-improvement--reading, working out, learning languages, even starting a business. He wrote his Master Plan: a list of all he expected to accomplish or acquire. He worked his plan every day for years, and in his mid-thirties he did the impossible: he convinced a judge to reduce his sentence and became a free man. Today Chris is a successful social entrepreneur who employs returning citizens; a mentor; and a public speaker. He is the embodiment of second chances, and this is his unforgettable story.
