Author: Wilbur C. RichPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780815323402
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Book Description
First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Black Mayors and School Politics
Author: Wilbur C. RichPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780815323402
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Book Description
First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Black Mayors and School Politics
Author: Wilbur C RichPublisher: Garland Science
ISBN: 1000525953
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 163
Book Description
First Published in 1996. Some people believe that if inner-city black children had excellent schools, they would perform better in them. Granted, schools are a part of the problem, but they are not all of the solution. Schools are only buildings where teachers, administrators, and students interact. Learning is a more much complex process. There are many forces arrayed against an inner-city child that preclude him/her from mastering the education process. Among these forces are poverty, family instability, disruptive classroom environments, and incompetent teachers. There seems to be no end to research and speculation about how to overcome these forces. However, the author asserts that the gap between black and white children continues to widen. With research beginning in 1989, exploring three school systems for this study: Detroit, Michigan; Gary, Indiana; and Newark, New Jersey. The book presents a systematic survey of school politics in these three cities, giving particular emphasis to local reform efforts.
A Political Education
Author: Elizabeth Todd-BrelandPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469646595
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Book Description
In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.
Black Mayors, White Majorities
Author: Ravi K. PerryPublisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496203577
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275
Book Description
Recent years have seen an increase in the number of African Americans elected to political office in cities where the majority of their constituents are not black. In the past, the leadership of black politicians was characterized as either "deracialized" or "racialized"--that is, as either focusing on politics that transcend race or as making black issues central to their agenda. Today many African American politicians elected to offices in non-majority-black cities are adopting a strategy that universalizes black interests as intrinsically relevant to the needs of their entire constituency. In Black Mayors, White Majorities Ravi K. Perry explores the conditions in which black mayors of majority-white cities are able to represent black interests and whether blacks' historically high expectations for black mayors are being realized. Perry uses Toledo and Dayton, Ohio, as case studies, and his analysis draws on interviews with mayors and other city officials, business leaders, and heads of civic organizations, in addition to official city and campaign documents and newspapers. Perry also analyzes mayoral speeches, the 2001 ward-level election results, and city demographics. Black Mayors, White Majorities encourages readers to think beyond the black-white dyad and instead to envision policies that can serve constituencies with the greatest needs as well as the general public.
Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power
Author: Leonard N. MoorePublisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252071638
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Book Description
As the first elected black mayor of a major U.S. city, Cleveland's Carl B. Stokes embodied the transformation of the civil rights movement from a vehicle of protest to one of black political power. In this wide-ranging political biography, Leonard N. Moore examines the convictions and alliances that brought Stokes to power. Impelled by the problems plaguing Cleveland's ghettos in the decades following World War II, Stokes and other Clevelanders questioned how the sit-ins and marches of the civil rights movement could correct the exclusionary zoning practices, police brutality, substandard housing, and de facto school segregation that African Americans in the country's northern urban centers viewed as evidence of their oppression. As civil unrest in the country's ghettos turned to violence in the 1960s, Cleveland was one of the first cities to heed the call of Malcolm X's infamous "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech. Understanding the importance of controlling the city's political system, Cleveland's blacks utilized their substantial voting base to put Stokes in office in 1967. Stokes was committed to showing the country that an African American could be an effective political leader. He employed an ambitious and radically progressive agenda to clean up Cleveland's ghettos, reform law enforcement, move public housing to middle-class neighborhoods, and jump-start black economic power. Hindered by resistance from the black middle class and the Cleveland City Council, spurned by the media and fellow politicians who deemed him a black nationalist, and unable to prove that black leadership could thwart black unrest, Stokes finished his four years in office with many of his legislative goals unfulfilled. Focusing on Stokes and Cleveland, but attending to themes that affected many urban centers after the second great migration of African Americans to the North, Moore balances Stokes's failures and successes to provide a thorough and engaging portrait of his life and his pioneering contributions to a distinct African American political culture that continues to shape American life.
Mayors in the Middle
Author: Jeffrey R. HenigPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691222576
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Book Description
Desperate to jump-start the reform process in America's urban schools, politicians, scholars, and school advocates are looking increasingly to mayors for leadership. But does a stronger mayoral role represent bold institutional change with real potential to improve big-city schools, or just the latest in the copycat world of school reform du jour? Is it democratic? Why have efforts to put mayors in charge so often generated resistance along racial dividing lines? Public debate and scholarly analysis have shied away from confronting such issues head-on. Mayors in the Middle brings together, for students of education policy and urban politics as well as scholars and school advocates, the most thoughtful and original analyses of the promise and limitations of mayoral takeovers of schools. Reflecting on the experience of six cities--Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C.--ten of the nation's leading experts on education politics tackle the question of whether putting mayors in charge is a step in the right direction. Through the case studies and the wide-ranging essays that follow and build upon them, the contributors--Stefanie Chambers, Jeffrey R. Henig, Kenneth J. Meier, Jeffrey Mirel, Marion Orr, John Portz, Wilbur C. Rich, Dorothy Shipps, and Clarence N. Stone--begin the process of answering questions critical to the future of inner-city children, the prospects for urban revitalization, and the shape of American education in the years to come.
Double Trouble
Author: J. Phillip Thompson IIIPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195346467
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357
Book Description
J. Phillip Thompson III, an insider in the Dinkins administration, provides the first in-depth look at how the black mayors of America's major cities achieve social change. Black constituents naturally look to black mayors to effect great change for the poor, but the reality of the situation is complicated. Thompson argues that African-American mayors, legislators, and political activists need to more effectively challenge opinions and public policies supported by the white public and encourage greater political inclusion and open political discourse within black communities. Only by unveiling painful internal oppresssions and exclusions within black politics will the black community's power increase, and compel similar unveilings in the broader interracial conversation about the problems of the urban poor. Tracing the historical development and contemporary practice of black mayoral politics, this is a fascinating study of the motivations of black politicians, competing ideologies in the black community and the inner dynamics of urban social change.
In Search of the Black Fantastic
Author: Richard ItonPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199733600
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433
Book Description
Prior to the 1960s, when African Americans had little access to formal political power, black popular culture was commonly seen as a means of forging community and effecting political change. But as Richard Iton shows, despite the changes politics, black artists have continued to play a significant role in the making of critical social spaces.
David Dinkins and New York City Politics
Author: Wilbur C. RichPublisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791480798
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
As the first African American elected mayor of New York City, David Dinkins underwent intense scrutiny—first from the black community, then from white liberal supporters, the media, and the city's electorate. Wilbur C. Rich focuses on the critical role played by the New York City media in the perception of mayoral leadership. Using interviews and words of journalists, Rich examines media coverage as both the architect and challenger of Dinkins' image. The making and unmaking of David Dinkins not only exposes much about the agency of African American politicians, but also reveals the fragility of electoral coalitions.
To be Mayor of New York
Author: Chris McNicklePublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231076364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452
Book Description
From Tammany Hall to the election of David Dinkins, To Be Mayor of New York offers insights into the effect of ethnic competition on the demise of urban political machines. Beginning with a colorful assessment of New York City's Tammany Hall as it existed in the late nineteenth century, McNickle traces the effect of the arrival of large numbers of Jewish and Italian immigrants -and later black and Puerto Rican migrants- on the Irish-dominated political machine. He focuses on the political passage of Jewish immigrants through the various small parties unique to New York -socialist, American Labor, and Liberal. Later he describes their attraction to various factions of the traditional Democratic and Republican parties. He spotlights the willingness of large numbers of Jewish voters to cast ballots for third-party candidates on the basis of their shared philosophical commitments and political priorities. McNickle then examines mayoral campaigns between 1945, the end of the LaGuardia era, and 1989, during which the Irish receded and Jews and later African-Americans emerged as the most important ethnic groups in local politics. To Be Mayor of New York offers the most complete study of the development of Jewish political participation in New York. Placing a rise of the New York City Reform Movement in historical perspective, the author explains the election of New York's first Jewish mayor, Abe Beame, and the first African-American mayor, David Dinkins, as part of the political evolution of both these groups.