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Black Citymakers Book Review

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Dominic Akandwanaho HUID: 40871950 AAAS 16: Sociology of the black community TF: Khytie Brown In his book, Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America, Marcus Hunter addresses a critical aspect of scholarship about structural racial discrimination and inequality that had not been previously given much scholarly examination. He attempts to explore the responses and reaction of people in weak positions—the truly disadvantaged, to systemic racial discrimination and social inequality. Specifically, he examines a black community in the Seventh ward of Philadelphia —a community that, according to previous work done by W.E Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro, is faced with many social ills such as poverty and crime. Hunter …show more content…

Although this effort is ultimately unsuccessful, it points to Hunters view that an act of agency need not be successful to count as a meaningful way of engagement and of shaping the evolution of the city. In fact, this view corroborates and gives credence to his assertion that the truly disadvantaged (whose efforts may therefore not always be successful), can still be seen as citymakers (p.214). He goes on to write about housing reform efforts in the 1930s that lead to a lot of migration out of the neighborhood, a long and successful effort to stop the construction of a highway that would split a neighborhood as well as the successful election of W. Wilson Goode in 1983 as the first black Mayor of the region (p. 185). Throughout the book, Hunter provides examples of intra-political and intra-racial politics, which serve to remind us that history is not always so straightforward. In chapter 5, he juxtaposes the Du Boisian observation that the Negro vote was a tool of republicans (p. 167-168) to the post-civil rights era. Hunter also examines how the campaigns by the American’s for democratic action and the Philadelphia party create conditions for the election of Mr.

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In the book “Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City” written by Dr. Elijah Anderson, the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University, brings to light the different issues that are regular in the city today. The street codes have a huge influence on the activities and conduct of numerous young people in the inner city or “hood”. In the hood, Anderson demonstrates that there are numerous social disasters like high rates of unemployment, and teen pregnancy. The principle power contributing to these street codes, according to Anderson, is racism; though that kind of behavior is accelerated by the existing economic and political commands in the city (Anderson 34). The “Code of the Street”

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But, when these officials were elected to Congress, they passed the “black codes” and thus the relations between the president and legislators became worst (Schriefer, Sivell and Arch R1). These so called “Black Codes” were “a series of laws to deprive blacks of their constitutional rights” that they were enacted mainly by Deep South legislatures. Black Codes differ from a state to another but they were stricter in the Deep South as they were sometimes irrationally austere. (Hazen 30) Furthermore, with the emergence of organizations such as the Red Shirts and the White League with the rise of the Conservative White Democrats’ power, efforts to prevent Black Americans from voting were escalating (Watts 247), even if the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S constitution that gave the Blacks the right to vote had been ratified in 1870.

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