Black Mayors and School Politics

Black Mayors and School Politics
Author: Wilbur C. Rich
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 221
Release: 1996
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780815323402

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

African-American Mayors

African-American Mayors
Author: David R. Colburn
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780252026348

On November 7, 1967, the voters of Cleveland, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, elected the nation's first African-American mayors to govern their cities. Ten years later more than two hundred black mayors held office, and by 1993 sixty-seven major urban centers, most with majority-white populations, were headed by African Americans.Once in office, African-American mayors faced vexing challenges. In large and small cities from the Sunbelt to the Rustbelt, black mayors assumed office during economic downturns and confronted the intractable problems of decaying inner cities, white flight, a dwindling tax base, violent crime, and diminishing federal support for social programs. Many encountered hostility from their own parties, city councils, and police departments; others worked against long-established power structures dominated by local business owners or politicians. Still others, while trying to respond to multiple demands from a diverse constituency, were viewed as traitors by blacks expecting special attention from a leader of their own race. All struggled with the contradictory mandate of meeting the increasing needs of poor inner-city residents while keeping white businesses from fleeing to the suburbs.This is the first comprehensive treatment of the complex phenomenon of African-American mayors in the nation's major urban centers. Offering a diverse portrait of leadership, conflict, and almost insurmountable obstacles, this volume assesses the political alliances that brought black mayors to office as well as their accomplishments--notably, increased minority hiring and funding for minority businesses--and the challenges that marked their careers. Mayors profiled include Carl B. Stokes (Cleveland), Richard G. Hatcher (Gary), "Dutch" Morial (New Orleans), Harold Washington (Chicago), Tom Bradley (Los Angeles), Marion Barry (Washington, D.C.), David Dinkins (New York City), Coleman Young (Detroit), and a succession of black mayors in Atlanta (Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young, and Bill Campbell).Probing the elusive economic dimension of black power, African-American Mayors demonstrates how the same circumstances that set the stage for the victories of black mayors exaggerated the obstacles they faced.

Black Mayors and School Politics

Black Mayors and School Politics
Author: Wilbur C Rich
Publisher: Garland Science
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2021-12-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000525953

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.

Black Mayors, White Majorities

Black Mayors, White Majorities
Author: Ravi K. Perry
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2022-07-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496203577

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.

Double Trouble

Double Trouble
Author: J. Phillip Thompson III
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2005-12-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0195346467

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.

Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power

Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power
Author: Leonard N. Moore
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780252071638

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.

A Political Education

A Political Education
Author: Elizabeth Todd-Breland
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2018-10-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1469646595

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.

David Dinkins and New York City Politics

David Dinkins and New York City Politics
Author: Wilbur C. Rich
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0791480798

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.

Follow the Money

Follow the Money
Author: Sarah Reckhow
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2013-01-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0199937737

Some of the nation's wealthiest philanthropies, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in education reform. With vast wealth and a political agenda, these foundations have helped to reshape the reform landscape in urban education. In Follow the Money, Sarah Reckhow shows where and how foundation investment in education is occurring and presents in-depth analysis of the effects of these investments within the two largest urban districts in the United States: New York City and Los Angeles. In New York City, centralized political control and the use of private resources have enabled rapid implementation of reform proposals. Yet this potent combination of top-down authority and outside funding also poses serious questions about transparency, responsiveness, and democratic accountability in New York. Furthermore, the sustainability of reform policies is closely linked to the political fortunes of the current mayor and his chosen school leader. While the media has highlighted the efforts of drastic reformers and dominating leaders such as Joel Klein in New York City and Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., a slower, but possibly more transformative, set of reforms have been taking place in Los Angeles. These reforms were also funded and shaped by major foundations, but they work from the bottom up, through charter school operators managing networks of schools. This strategy has built grassroots political momentum and demand for reform in Los Angeles that is unmatched in New York City and other districts with mayoral control. Reckhow's study of Los Angeles's education system shows how democratically responsive urban school reform could occur-pairing foundation investment with broad grassroots involvement. Bringing a sharp analytical eye and a wealth of evidence to one of the most politicized issues of our day, Follow the Money will reshape our thinking about educational reform in America.

To be Mayor of New York

To be Mayor of New York
Author: Chris McNickle
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 1993
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780231076364

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.