This article profiles three black and Puerto Rican neighborhood leaders of Philadelphia. Their civic efforts reveal a certain style of leadership that they used to navigate their communities through the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. They charted a middle path between identifying with the established power structure and pursuing purely oppositional politics. In addition to expanding our perception of civic leadership, these figures defy binary typologies of leadership style while demonstrating continuity at the local level. With diverse backgrounds and personalities, they created and maintained interethnic and cross-class alliances. Their accomplishments reveal how migrants could quickly become representative figures in their new communities. These leaders effectively mobilized a sense of shared group identity to build legitimacy among neighborhood residents.
Though riots themselves have often been studied, scholars know little about their short-term effects. This article considers the five-year period following Pittsburgh's April 1968 riots, which allows scholars to see a moment of possibility not as evident in the long term. The riots ushered in opportunity for reform by making an abstract sense of crisis acute. They influenced change in local government, soured already strained police-community relations, hurt black business districts, and exacerbated racial tensions. Pittsburgh's black community still made some incremental progress. But overall, local power structures persisted as budget concerns and an increasingly polarized community prevented sweeping changes to improve racial disparities. The Pittsburgh case bears similarity to national trends and reveals both the possibilities and limitations of this type of protest.Keywords race relations, riots, Pittsburgh, police-community relations Journal of Urban History 39 (2) proper limits of police power prevented that. Business leaders put forth programs to promote black business and offer employment. Their successes were not enough to overcome prevailing demographic and economic trends. Citizens responded with a stronger emphasis on neighborhood organizing, but social divisions limited their reach. Behind all of these efforts, the riots called more attention to race, leading to increased tensions in everyday interactions that stifled cooperative efforts for change. The window of opportunity opened by the Pittsburgh riots was soon shut by economic realities and heightened racial polarization. 3 Officials and residents in other riot-torn cities faced similar dilemmas and constraints.The first few years after the riots provided opportunities for addressing pressing issues, but they also stimulated counterforces that undermined those efforts. Authorities called for immediate action to address the issues underlying violent protest, and residents expected quick results. Moreover, local governments enjoyed a relatively short period during which new program initiatives were fiscally feasible. Urban economic conditions after the early seventies, affected most notably by deindustrialization, high inflation, population decline, shifting priorities in federal funding allocations, and widespread reverberations of the energy crisis, precluded cities struggling for solvency from directing resources toward ameliorating racial, class, and urban-suburban disparities. The choices made in the late sixties and early seventies therefore became that much more important.Existing studies have begun to reveal the transformative power of riots in the late sixties. James Button and Dennis Gale have shown that riots spurred new programs and temporarily increased social spending at the federal level, most visibly in the Model Cities program. 4 Local context, though, was much more decisive. 5 Quantitative studies suggest that riots encouraged more city government spending or a shift in allocations, mostly increasing funding for public safety rat...
The Kerner Commission Report sought to understand the context of riots in the 1960s. Released in 1968, it outlined conditions in black neighborhoods and offered policy recommendations for improvement. Weeks after the report's release, widespread disorder erupted in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Political and budgetary constraints prevented adoption of the report's recommendations to address the widening gap between black and white Americans.
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