Urban Crisis Reconsidered: Racial Capitalism, Punishment, and Resistance in Postwar Philadelphia

AHA Session 70
Friday, January 6, 2023: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Commonwealth Hall C (Loews Philadelphia Hotel, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Matthew Jon Countryman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Papers:
“The Wheels of Justice Are Grinding to a Halt”: Harris v. Philadelphia and the Politics of Prison Overcrowding in 1990s Philadelphia
Charlotte Rosen, Northwestern University
Keep the Heat On: Resistance to Rising Utility Costs in Philadelphia
Alyssa Ribeiro, Allegheny College
“We Shall Have Real Justice in Our City”: Citizens’ Protest against Hyper-Policing, False Arrests, and Racial Capitalism in Philadelphia, 1970–78
Menika Dirkson, Morgan State University
Manufacturing Self-Determination: Cold War Electronics and Black Economic Development in Philadelphia
Sam Schirvar, University of Pennsylvania
Comment:
Matthew Jon Countryman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Session Abstract

Philadelphia between the 1960s and 1990s embodied the period historians have identified as urban crisis: a government that responded to painful economic restructuring in a heavily segregated city through privatization, policing and incarceration. These trends primarily impacted the city’s Black and brown residents who were increasingly rendered surplus and targeted as deviant within the late-postwar, deindustrializing urban political economy. These four papers detail how both residents and government officials launched efforts to push back against those powerful trends. Campaigns to reduce prison overcrowding, reveal racialized police abuses, put the “hard-core” unemployed to work, and resist spiraling utility costs all sought to ameliorate racial and class disparities and reverse the city’s racial capitalist politics of organized abandonment, extraction, and punishment. Many Philadelphians glimpsed greater freedom and/or prosperity, but secured only minimal and fleeting gains.
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