| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Rhonda Y. Williams. The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles Against Urban Inequality. (Transgressing Boundaries.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. xiii, 306. $29.95.
By the late 1960s, public housing in the United States had gained a widespread and wholly negative image, tainting its residents as drug dealers or loafers and symbolizing the ills of postindustrial cities. Rhonda Y. Williams does not sidestep issues of rising crime rates and poverty, deteriorating buildings, and government neglect, but she does seek to paint a fuller picture by including the voices and efforts of activists, mostly black and mostly women, who lived in public housing and fought for social justice for their communities. From the earliest days of federal low-income housing, when optimism pervaded the experiment, women who lived in public housing organized for better neighborhoods and respectability. As the decades wore on, argues Williams, the circumstances activists faced changed drastically, but the search for respectability—which included having material needs met as well as demands for respect and dignity—linked the generations of residents who became community leaders and attempted "to make the government live up to its ideals and promises" (p. 8).	1
The setting for this story is Baltimore, Maryland, where public housing emerged during the late Depression era to offer homes to the working poor. The location and composition of the earliest developments and those built to ease housing shortages during World War II cemented growing racial segregation, but African Americans welcomed the access to new housing after years of severe shortages and did not initially challenge these policies. During the 1940s, community members launched self-help activities and worked closely with management. When the views of residents and officials increasingly diverged in the 1950s, community leaders began challenging existing practices and demanding the right to contribute to policy formation.	. . .

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