Safety, Security, and Systems of Reciprocity: African American’s Internal Community Organization in the Early Freedom Movement

AHA Session 191
Saturday, January 7, 2017: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Room 503 (Colorado Convention Center, Meeting Room Level)
Chair:
Martha Biondi, Northwestern University
Papers:
“They Don’t Care What Happens to the Colored People”: Black Criminality and the Politics of Safety in Interwar New York
Shannon King, College of Wooster
In Search of Home and Community: Addie Wyatt and Black Organizing in the Altgeld Gardens Housing Project, 1944–55
Marcia Walker-McWilliams, independent scholar
Regulars and Respectables: African American Systems of Reciprocity on the Streets of Pittsburgh
Jessica D. Klanderud, Tabor College
Comment:
Joe W. Trotter, Carnegie Mellon University

Session Abstract

This panel addresses some of the ways that African Americans negotiated intra-racial relationships within the boundaries of their own communities. In the urban north, black residents of New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh worked to secure their own safety from police brutality and crime, struggled to organize as a community, and relied on systems of informal power to create their own space within the city as a whole. In the early years following WWII, African American citizens in the urban north developed informal methods of organizing that would challenge formal inequality, police brutality, and housing segregation within the space of the community.
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