Session Abstract

The streets of urban neighborhoods are not static lines on a map or boundaries demarcating one region of urban space from another.  Instead, streets can function as spaces: spaces of labor, commerce, ideas, politics, and power.  The papers in this panel explore how people use street space and show how those uses change over time.  Jessica D. Klanderud looks at African American Depression era street labor to uncover how street spaces can be seen as sites of labor activity and capitalist development.  Through study of the streets of African American Pittsburgh, Dr. Klanderud uncovers how prostitutes, numbers men, jitney drivers and other illegal laborers addressed labor concerns through their use of street spaces as well as how these actors negotiated their differences with African American elites and others in the African American working class.  Elaine Frantz Parsons’ work looks at Reconstruction era street demonstrations by the Ku Klux Klan.   These carnivalesque exhibitions in urban space reveal how Klan members sought symbolic control of freedpeople’s actions in the public sphere.  Although Klan members’ quasi-legal status left them open to possible prosecution, they used intimidation and violence on the streets to show their power over the public and ideological spaces of the street.  Amund Tallaksen looks at the movement of New Orleans heroin markets from the streets of the French Quarter to the streets of public housing and the rise of “Black Heroin Kings.”  These transformations in the location of heroin sales and the spatial organization of drug sales led the New Orleans police department to integrate their narcotics squad.  Overall, these papers investigate the role of the street as a space for labor and power that changes dynamically over time.