Aging in the Postwar City: Black Senior Citizens as Movement Actors

In November 1971, several weeks before the White House held its decennial Conference on Aging, 700 aging African Americans met at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church to strategize ways to center their demands at the conference. Those who attended the meeting, which had been organized by the National Caucus on the Black Aged, were concerned about the high rates of poverty and the lack of access to adequate housing among elderly Black Americans. According to one reporter, “If the president fails to encourage appropriate legislation along those lines, the group said, he should consider their ultimatum an ‘eviction notice from our White House.’”

“Youth belongs to the young,” and as urban history suggests, so does the American city. While urban historians have masterfully uncovered Black coming-of-age experiences in postwar urban spaces, those who had grown into old age in cities remain on the margins of history. But how did older African Americans navigate social transformations like deindustrialization and the dismantling of the social safety net? Using the records of gerontological associations, local movement histories, and analytical frameworks from radical gerontology, this paper offers a methodological consideration of how a return to Civil Rights and Black Power scholarship might render legible Black senior citizens’ work in organizations like the National Caucus on the Black Aged and the Gray Panthers.