Summary Of American Babylon By Robert O. Self

The overall argument of Robert O. Self’s Introduction, in the book “American Babylon,” are the different aspects of postwar Oakland and the East Bay, socially, economically, and politically. There are three key claims Self makes in the Introduction. First, Self claims there were two controversial political ideologies in postwar Oakland, one being black power, including politics of deference and empowerment, and second a neo-populist, conservative homeowner politics of white residents. Another claim Self makes is the idea that the postwar black struggle and politics of suburban building shaped the political culture in Oakland and the East Bay. The third key claim Self makes is the modernization of space; space as property, as a social imagination, and as a political scale. In his introduction, Self uses many sources to make his argument clear. For example, Self references, To Stand and Fight: The Civil

To support this argument, Self makes three key claims. First, African American residents were organizing to gain economic and political power. The second key claim Self makes is the effect of unionization for unorganized workers, and the job ceiling many working class employees faced. Finally, Self claims West Oakland was an extremely important and a dynamic center of the political culture that soon enriched the Bay Area. In order to prove his point, Self used many effective sources. The first source, The Populists Persuasion: An American History by Micheal Kazin, helped explain the politics of the working class during this time. Furthermore, Self uses Fred Stripp’s The Treatment of Negro-American Workers and Albert S. Broussard’s Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, effectively to describe the unfair treatment African Americans were subjected to in the workplace and housing market compared to their white