Abstract
This issue of Urban Affairs Review marks the first of Volume 60 and thus the 60th anniversary of the journal's publication, which began in September 1965. 1 To celebrate we will revisit articles from successive decades in the six issues of this volume, starting in this issue with Conant's “Black Power: Rhetoric and Reality” (1968), and then moving on to articles from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s in issues 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, respectively. 2 We will also be publishing occasional short retrospective articles by former editors and other prominent urbanists, starting with Mollenkopf (2023) in this issue, in which he recalls the issues and conflicts that were animating the study of urban politics when he started graduate school at Harvard in 1967.
Conant's article was published as part of a special issue on race and urban politics in the United States with articles on racial residential segregation (Taeuber 1968), Black interest groups (Bailey 1968), the issue of separatism versus integration (Safa 1968), the politics of a small and entirely Black suburb at the edge of a large Northeastern city (Kramer and Walter 1968), the role of “maximum feasible participation” in the planning and governance of anti-poverty programs in Cleveland (Bowen and Masotti 1968), a wide-ranging review essay by Matthew Holden, Jr. (1968), and a review of Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812, by August Meier (1968).
With the possible exception of Taeuber's article on racial residential segregation, the articles in the 1968 special issue have largely been forgotten. Yet it's precisely for that reason that we believe it's worthwhile to revive them, as they serve as an important time capsule on a very different period in US urban politics and policy, and they shed some light on how our urban politics has both changed and remained the same. As the broadest and more forward-looking of these articles, we thought Conant's (1968) was thus the most important to revisit.
Conant's article focuses primarily on the impact of the post-World War II Great Migration of Black people into Northern cities and its impact on Black empowerment—or, as he puts it, the achievement of full social citizenship among Black Americans. On this point he is resolutely optimistic, noting that “Black Americans will eventually achieve full social citizenship; the question is how and when.” His answer in part is in the takeover of city governments with growing Black populations, and he predicted that Newark, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Detroit were most likely to elect Black mayors in the near future (meaning ostensibly the 1970s), followed by Chicago, New Orleans, Oakland, and St. Louis, and then Camden and Trenton. And indeed every one of those cities did elect a Black mayor, though not along the timeline Conant predicted: First was Newark, where voters elected Kenneth Allen Gibson in 1970, then Detroit (Coleman Young 1973), Atlanta (Maynard Jackson 1974), Oakland (Lionel Wilson 1977), New Orleans (Ernest Morial 1978), Camden (Randy Primas 1980), Chicago (Harold Washington 1983), Baltimore (Kurt Schmoke 1987), Trenton (Douglas Palmer 1990), and finally, St. Louis (Freeman Bosley 1993).
Possibly more significant than Black mayors was how Conant conceived of white populations as possibly attempting to thwart Black control. He suggested three potential strategies. First was the annexation of surrounding suburbs and communities as a means of diluting the Black vote in the expanded central cities, though Conant correctly notes that that was not an option that would be pursued by large Northeastern cities. Second, he suggests that urban leaders would use federal redevelopment money to build housing and other projects in the suburbs in order to attract Black people to move out of central cities, thereby reducing their political influence in those cities. And finally, Conant figured white people would attempt to maintain control through metropolitan councils where they would be the majority.
There are several tensions in these various predictions and speculations. On the one hand, Conant appears to have enough faith in the importance of central cities that he believed white people would strive to maintain control over their governments rather than simply abandon them for the suburbs. This may reflect the fact that he was writing with some remnant of optimism prior to Supreme Court cases such as Milliken v. Bradley (1974) that underwrote the benefits of White flight, and the disastrous declines in central city populations that came with the 1970s (every single city Conant mentions as likely to elect a Black mayor had significant population declines in that decade, from six % in Oakland and New Orleans, to 27% in St. Louis). Yet on the other hand, he also seems to follow the thinking somewhat typical of the 1960s that the establishment of metropolitan councils would lead to the withering away of traditional municipal governments (cf. Gottman 1961, 761–764).
There is a similar tension as well in Conant's discussion of integration versus separatism. He on the one hand argues for separate and Black-controlled institutions in central cities nearly to the point of claiming that separate Black municipalities are necessary, yet he also argues that this separatism should be a stepping stone toward integration: “Negro leaders who do not look beyond separatism toward the political realities of an integrated society cannot survive or help their people to survive in a nation where consolidation and centralization are the inevitable responses to the technical demands of a society whose unparalleled resources are the driving incentive.”
There is a direct line from the argument for breaking Black neighborhoods off into separate municipalities as a form of Black empowerment to the notion of “white fortressing” elaborated by Godinez Puig (2023) in this issue. As Puig defines it with her case study of Georgia, white fortressing is the formation of local governments for explicitly racial reasons, to create new legal boundaries that separate majority white populations from majority Black populations in order to segregate a tax base for the purposes of supplying services to that white population. The argument for municipal separatism and autonomy as a means of Black empowerment reflected in Conant could be seen as contradicting Puig's further claim that the explicitly race-based justifications for contemporary local government formation distinguish them from the 1950s and 1960s, when race tended to play a more muted role in the explicit justifications (if not the implicit motivations) for local government formations; whether it does or not would seem to hinge on whether Black and white race-based justifications for municipal autonomy can be considered equivalent. (Puig notes as well less successful contemporary attempts in Georgia at Black fortressing, possibly more reminiscent of the kind of racialized municipal autonomy discussed by Conant.) The point here is simply to point to the continuity of this discussion on the pages of UAR, from 1968 to 2023.
There is as well at least a dim line of continuity between discussions of rioting, protest, and violence between the 1960s and the 2020s. Articles on riots and urban violence were common in UAR in the 1960s and 1970s (see, for instance, Anderson and Dynes 1976; Berkowitz 1974; Dotson 1974; Lupsha 1969; McElroy and Singell 1973), while there was a muted and very minor response after the 1992 Rodney King riots (Liggett 1994; Marks, Barreto and Woods 2004); and a similar response after the George Floyd protests (Burch 2023)—though in this latter case we may yet see more articles. Possibly the diminished focus on riots, rioting, and urban violence is due to their decreased prevalence and impact in the United States since the 1960s and 1970s, and their absorption into larger academic fields of contentious politics and civil resistance that focus to a greater extent on cases outside the United States.
Yet at the same time, the contemporary question of the potential strategic role of violence at the margins of otherwise nonviolent civil resistance movements (see Chenoweth 2023) is reflected as well in Conant's (1968) comment that riots are a “threat weapon” that “must be regarded by responsible militants as a temporary expedient of political organizational development in the black community, for riots are traumatic and destructive events. Up to a point, they will jolt the white community into constructive response. Beyond that elusive point, the white society will respond to the demands of hard-core bigots and other repressive forces to put down and further alienate the black community” (p. 13)—a point largely reinforced by Wasow's (2020) findings that violent protests in the 1960s and 1970s had different outcomes from nonviolent protests in that the former tended to lead to media framings of “social control.”
Given the salience of rioting and urban violence in the 1960s it seems appropriate that Mollenkopf (2023) begins his reminiscence of starting graduate school in 1967 with an image of a riot in Cincinnati as he left Ohio for Cambridge, Massachusetts. Once at Harvard he found himself sitting at a crucial inflection point in urban studies and urban politics, when the previous pluralist orthodoxy of Dahl (1961), Sayre and Kaufman (1960), Banfield (1961), Polsby (1963), and others, was giving way to what Mollenkopf refers to as a “more critical form of urban studies” (p. 13) emerged, focusing more on the city as a feature of larger structural inequalities and the potential of social movements to alter urban policy.
The result in both academia and the larger world was largely division, backlash, and retreat. As he put it in Contested City, “In the final analysis, the Great Society failed to bridge the gap between the actual operation of federal programs and the needs and aspirations of central-city neighborhood residents” (Mollenkopf 1983, 17). A more conservative mood nationally was evident with the election of Richard Nixon only a year after he started graduate school, and the previous generation of political scientists moved away from urban studies—and indeed in the 1980s and 1990s were known to sometimes explicitly advise their graduate students not to study urban politics.
And yet here we are in the 2020s with a journal that publishes more articles than it ever has in the past, contributing to a vast universe of work on urban politics and policy. There is, as I have at least hinted at herein, a clear if imperfect accumulation and advancement of knowledge on a variety of topics, from the relationship between racial division and the organizational structure of municipal government, to the role of violence in urban protests.