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Shifting Ground in Metropolitan America: Class, Race, and Power in Oakland and the East Bay, 1945-77 Author: Robert Self Dissertation School: University of Washington Pages: 410 Publication Date: January 1998 Availability: Access Number: 10704 Abstract: This dissertation is about the making of American urban political culture and urban space in three decades after World War II. It begins in the years immediately following the war, when a group of trade union workers and their political organizations fought the business elite for control of the city council in Oakland, California. It ends in 1977, when a coalition led by middle and working class African Americans elected Lionel Wilson Oakland's first Black and reform mayor. In between, I trace deep shifts in Oakland's political culture and its urban spaces. The boundaries of this study are conveniently political, but they mark only the surface. Through a detailed examination of local contests over work, race, urban space, and political power, I link the decline of the class-based political culture of the 1940s with the rise of a race oriented political culture in the 1960s/70s, and I show how these shifting politics were related to concerns over the evolution of urban space in the postwar period. This project reconsiders a familiar narrative. That narrative begins with World War II and the first of a series of large-scale migrations of African-American and White workers to Northern and West Coast cities. Racial discrimination in housing and job markets, deindustrialization and middle class exodus, and federal redevelopment and antipoverty programs followed in the 1950s and 1960s. By the late 1960s, commentators spoke of an “urban crisis,” whose set of characteristics–severe inner city unemployment, segregated education, and depleted municipal tax bases, among others—had come to seem inevitable. This dissertation seeks to move beyond the “urban crisis” paradigm, to frame urban neighborhoods and political culture as dynamic, productive, and evolving. Rather than placing the “crisis” at the center of this narrative, this dissertation places urban space itself and local political actors, from labor unions to Chamber of Commerce men and the Black Panther Party. |
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