Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles PDF
Preview Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles
Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles This page intentionally left blank Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles Janet L. Abu-Lughod 1 2007 3 OxfordUniversityPress,Inc.,publishesworksthatfurther OxfordUniversity’sobjectiveofexcellence inresearch,scholarship,andeducation. Oxford NewYork Auckland CapeTown DaresSalaam HongKong Karachi KualaLumpur Madrid Melbourne MexicoCity Nairobi NewDelhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto Withofficesin Argentina Austria Brazil Chile CzechRepublic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore SouthKorea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright(cid:1)2007byOxfordUniversityPress,Inc. PublishedbyOxfordUniversityPress,Inc. 198MadisonAvenue,NewYork,NewYork10016 www.oup.com OxfordisaregisteredtrademarkofOxfordUniversityPress Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthispublicationmaybereproduced, storedinaretrievalsystem,ortransmitted,inanyformorbyanymeans, electronic,mechanical,photocopying,recording,orotherwise, withoutthepriorpermissionofOxfordUniversityPress. LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData Abu-Lughod,JanetL. Race,space,andriotsinChicago,NewYork,andLosAngeles/ byJanetL.Abu-Lughod. p. cm. Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex. ISBN978-0-19-532875-2 1.Raceriots—UnitedStates—History—20thcentury. 2.AfricanAmericans— Socialconditions—20thcentury. 3.UnitedStates—Racerelations. I.Title. HV6477.A382007 305.896’073—dc22 2006102002 987654321 PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmerica onacid-freepaper Remembering mymother’stolerancefordifference; myhusband’scommitmenttosocialjustice This page intentionally left blank Preface A nyresearcherwhohasspentlongyearswritingabookisalwaysambivalent whenitisdone:happytoseeitpublishedbutdisappointedthatitsresults mustbeengravedinstone(nowdigitized)—justastheprocessesofresearchand writing have led to a new level of understanding. In an ideal world, perhaps attainableinhyperspace,writerscouldrevisecontinuously,integratingtheirnew insights and interpretations, asking and answering new questions, in endless iterationsandrevisions.Butthatutopiawouldactuallybeanightmareforboth writersandreaders. Instead,thisbookrevisitssomeofthehistoricalquestionsIposedinmytoo lengthyandambitiouscomparativestudyofNewYork,Chicago,andLosAngeles as global cities within four hundred years of America’s evolving economic, political, spatial, and demographic patterns and the role of the U. S. in the world system. This book is a sequel. It explores the ‘‘race question’’ in greater detail by comparing the types of major race riots each city experienced in the twentieth century, placing these events in the context of their histories but also incorporating insights that have continued to mature since the first book appearedin1999. In this book I ask in more systematic fashion why the racial and ethnic relations in the three cities have been so different—despite being based in the sharedracistpremisesofAmericansociety—andtowhatextentthesedifferences canbeexplainedbythehistorical,geographic/spatial,andpoliticalcharacteristics of the cities themselves. There are many fruitful ways these questions might be approached,andIencourageotherscholarstopursuethem.Mystrategy,howev- er, has been to focus on race riots as ‘‘disasters’’ (following the example of Kai Erickson),thatis,asmomentsinhistoricaltimewhentheveneersofcivilityand the illusions of continuity are shattered, whether from natural or human social causes(orfromboth, as in New Orleans). Such eventsoften laybarefissuresin the taken-for-granted social structure, thus revealing agonizing conflicts and pain. Eventually, some healing takes place, as the skin grows back over the viii Preface wounds,albeitleavingscarsoverachangedstructure.ForAmericans,theWorld Trade Center disaster is the most dramatic recent case of human origin, in response to which we are witnessing only the first stages of aftershock and wideningrepercussions. Disasters, by their nature, take place in ‘‘abnormal time,’’ the experience bracketedinmemorybysuddenbeginningsandmoredrawn-outendings.Race riotsclearlytakeplacein‘‘abnormal’’time.Butitwouldbeaterriblemistaketo eitheroverinterprettheir violenceassymptomsofunbridgeabledifferenceor to dismissthemas‘‘uncaused’’emotionalresponses. In this book I use these events as ways to understand more deeply what GunnarMyrdalandhisassociatescalledan‘‘Americandilemma.’’AlthoughIhave triedtoreconstructtheorderofeventsandtodescribehow thelevelsofviolence developedovertimeandspreadinspace,Ihavealsosoughttoavoidsensational- ism,thealmosthystericalapproachthatjournalisticaccountsexploittodramatize raceriotsas‘‘crimes.’’Ihaveintentionallynotincludedphotographs. Rather, I am particularly interested in tracing the various ways that the actors engaged in or observing these struggles interpret them, and particularly how the ‘‘forces of law and order’’ (the police and key municipal officials) respond to the events. In short, my approachviews riots as a revealing instance of ‘‘social structure in action,’’ when the behaviors of each of the parties to the conflict not only act, react, and adjust to the situational crisis itself but arealso guidedbylocalprecedentsforhandlingthem. Aword of caution is needed. My analysis depends largely on data drawn fromexistingcasestudiesofthesixmajorriotsselectedforcloserstudy.Thishas inevitablyresultedinacertainunevennessoftreatment.Therichestsourcesdeal withthe1919Chicagoriotandwiththe1965and1992LosAngelesriots.Atleast two good studies exist that describe the New York riots of 1935 and 1943, but a definitivestudyofthe1964NewYorkriothasyettobewritten.Lackingthat,my analysisofNewYork’spoliticalsystemanditsdemographicchangeshasbenefited fromthetwentyyearsIhavespentlivinginandstudyingthatcitysince1987.To mydespair,nosyntheticaccountoftheChicagoriotof1968yetexists,andIhave thereforehadtoconstructonefromarchivaldataandpublicreports.Fortunately, these sources could be supplemented by my 25 years of living in and studying Chicagoandbymyownobservationsduringtheriotitself. Thisbook,defectiveasitmaybe,isthefirsttocomparemajorriotsinthe threecities.Ihopethatitwillencourageotherstofleshoutthemissingaccounts andtoreviseandcorrecttheerrorsforwhichImusttakefullresponsibility. Acknowledgments O bviously, in the course of the decades in which I have been trying to understand cities and more specifically to research and write this book, I have accumulated too many debts to teachers, fellow scholars, friends and students(notmutuallyexclusive),tocriticalandconstructivereaders,tolibraries, granting institutions, and supportive universities to even begin to enumerate them.Theyknowwhotheyare,andIbowtoacknowledgethem.However,Iwant particularly to single out the anonymous reviewers for the Press who called my attention toadditional sources,toMichaelJ.Rosenfeld,Amanda Seligman,and Michael Flamm who read individual chapters and/or provided useful primary documents, and to Jeffrey Morenoff, Willlam Bowen, and Donna Genzmer for makingavailableoriginalcomputer-generatedmaps. My chief debts, however, are to the authors of books and articles I have absorbed and pondered ever since, as a high school student growing up in Newark, New Jersey, Iwrote my senior thesis on the ‘‘Negro Novel’’more than sixty years ago. That was my first attempt to make sense out of what I call the ‘‘American disease’’ of racial oppression, against which I have marched and protested,althoughthisisthefirsttimeIdaretoaddmypublishedvoicetothe vast dialogue on race relations in the United States. Truly, we all stand on the shouldersofgiants:manyoftheirnamescanbefoundhiddenintheendnotes. Thereis,however,myspecialdebttotheHarryFrankGuggenheimFoun- dation, which, even as my book on New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s GlobalCitieswasonitslongroadtopublicationattheUniversityofMinnesota Press,awardedmearesearchgrantin1997–98tobeginaprojecttentativelytitled ‘‘Race/Ethnicity,Space,andPoliticalCulture:AComparativeStudyofCollective ViolenceinNewYork,Chicago,andLosAngeles.’’Itiswithembarrassmentthat I realize that a decade has elapsed since then, but I hope they will accept this belatedfruitfromtheseedtheyhelpedtoplant. At Oxford University Press, I have been blessed. I am grateful to editor James Cook for shepherding the manuscript through the complex intellectual,
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