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REVIEWS
| The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles Against Urban Inequality. By Rhonda Y. Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. v plus 306 pp.).
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| Rhonda Williams tells a much bigger story in The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles Against Urban Inequality than one might suspect at first glance. Or to put it more accurately, Williams enables the players in this important history to narrate their tale and in so doing they tell a story that reaches back to the Great Depression era of de jure segregation and spans the postwar decades of increasing de facto segregation. They describe a movement for tenants' rights in Baltimore that finds common cause with the 1960s welfare rights movement organizing across the nation. And they vividly demonstrate the imperative of the human condition, the desire and right for "dignity, respect and fairness." |
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These storytellers are predominantly poor African-American women and a smattering of equally poor white women, residents in Baltimore's public housing and activists in the tenants' rights movement of the New Deal through the Great Society eras. Based on over fifty oral history interviews with people who are too often absent from the historical record, except perhaps as victims, what emerges is a powerful sense of poor women's agency. These women responded to and influenced public housing conditions and legislation on the local, state and federal levels. |
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By shifting the "angle of vision to the people on the ground affected by New Deal and Great Society social welfare policies," Williams makes a convincing case for continuity of activism and racially discriminatory practices across the pre- and post-Brown eras. 1960s tenants' rights organizations had their roots in tenants' councils that black women organized during the 1940s to demand adequate housing for Baltimore's black residents contributing to the war effort. Through the lobbying efforts of civil rights organizations, public housing was ultimately built for Baltimore's black population during World War II though on hazardous and polluted land. As Williams documents, the federal government plays a key role in constructing urban inequality through the discriminatory practices of agencies such as the Federal Housing and Veterans Administrations. And like blacks in cities throughout the country, Baltimore's African Americans were victims of the post-war "urban renewal" trend that resulted in the displacement of tens of thousands of poor people of color. By the early 1960s, public housing was a critical necessity for these urban refugees. |
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The heart of the story is the 1960s period during which public housing tenants are living in deteriorating conditions and organizing to improve them. Through the lens of these women's real experiences, Williams offers a nuanced analysis of the War on Poverty. The Great Society campaign to eradicate poverty focused on rehabilitating poor people's behavior and avoided addressing the structural foundation of racial and economic inequality. Yet, as Williams repeatedly demonstrates, the antipoverty programs gave tangible resources to poor, black women who then used these funds to take control of their communities, develop leadership skills, and ultimately shape housing and welfare legislation. |
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It was often on the most local level that public housing tenants subverted and expanded the parameters of antipoverty programs. The Resident Aide Program is a case in point. Initiated in 1969 by Baltimore's housing authority it hired public housing tenants to perform "the housekeeping duties of government." Paid modest salaries, the women performed a range of jobs that included mediating relations between the housing staff and residents, overseeing elevator and laundry room operations, and encouraging good housekeeping. While the policing aspect of their work sometimes made them suspect by tenants, the resident aides also took advantage of their insider status to gain trust, advocate on behalf of the residents, demand necessary security for the housing project, and initiate training and recreation programs. Equally important, the resident aides spoke of developing self-respect and becoming spokeswomen for public housing tenants, articulating the shared desire for respectability and decent living conditions. |
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