American Babylon

by Self, Robert O.

• ISBN13: 9780691070261
• ISBN10: 0691070261
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-10-01
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

As the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined.American Babylontells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights and black power politics as well as the history of suburbanization and home-owner politics. Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes, and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension. American Babylondemonstrates that the history of civil rights and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began during the World War II years and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers, and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership. Using the East Bay as a starting point, Robert Self gives us a richly detailed, engaging narrative that uniquely integrates the most important racial liberation struggles and class politics of postwar America.

Author Biography

Robert O. Self is Assistant Professor of History and Urban Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Abbreviations	xv
Introduction	1	(20)
PART I: URBAN AND SUBURBAN POLITICS AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM, 1945-1964	21	(112)
1. Industrial Garden	23	(38)
2. Working Class	61	(35)
3. Tax Dollar	96	(37)
PART II: RACE, URBAN TRANSFORMATION, AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SEGREGATION, 1954-1966	133	(82)
4. Redistribution	135	(42)
5. Opportunity Politics	177	(38)
PART III: BLACK LIBERATION AND SUBURBAN REVOLT, 1964-1978	215	(113)
6. Black Power	217	(39)
7. White Noose	256	(35)
8. Babylon	291	(37)
Conclusion	328	(7)
Appendix: Population, Housing, and Taxes	335	(4)
Notes	339	(40)
Index	379