Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles This Page Intentionally Left Blank Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles

Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles This page intentionally left blank Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles Janet L. Abu-Lughod 1 2007 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright ß 2007 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Race, space, and riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles / by Janet L. Abu-Lughod. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-532875-2 1. Race riots—United States—History—20th century. 2. African Americans— Social conditions—20th century. 3. United States—Race relations. I. Title. HV6477.A38 2007 305.896’073—dc22 2006102002 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Remembering my mother’s tolerance for difference; my husband’s commitment to social justice This page intentionally left blank Preface ny researcher who has spent long years writing a book is always ambivalent A when it is done: happy to see it published but disappointed that its results must be engraved in stone (now digitized)—just as the processes of research and writing have led to a new level of understanding. In an ideal world, perhaps attainable in hyperspace, writers could revise continuously, integrating their new insights and interpretations, asking and answering new questions, in endless iterations and revisions. But that utopia would actually be a nightmare for both writers and readers. Instead, this book revisits some of the historical questions I posed in my too lengthy and ambitious comparative study of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles as global cities within four hundred years of America’s evolving economic, political, spatial, and demographic patterns and the role of the U. S. in the world system. This book is a sequel. It explores the ‘‘race question’’ in greater detail by comparing the types of major race riots each city experienced in the twentieth century, placing these events in the context of their histories but also incorporating insights that have continued to mature since the first book appeared in 1999. In this book I ask in more systematic fashion why the racial and ethnic relations in the three cities have been so different—despite being based in the shared racist premises of American society—and to what extent these differences can be explained by the historical, geographic/spatial, and political characteristics of the cities themselves. There are many fruitful ways these questions might be approached, and I encourage other scholars to pursue them. My strategy, however, has been to focus on race riots as ‘‘disasters’’ (following the example of Kai Erickson), that is, as moments in historical time when the veneers of civility and the illusions of continuity are shattered, whether from natural or human social causes (or from both, as in New Orleans). Such events often lay bare fissures in the taken-for-granted social structure, thus revealing agonizing conflicts and pain. Eventually, some healing takes place, as the skin grows back over the viii Preface wounds, albeit leaving scars over a changed structure. For Americans, the World Trade Center disaster is the most dramatic recent case of human origin, in response to which we are witnessing only the first stages of aftershock and widening repercussions. Disasters, by their nature, take place in ‘‘abnormal time,’’ the experience bracketed in memory by sudden beginnings and more drawn-out endings. Race riots clearly take place in ‘‘abnormal’’ time. But it would be a terrible mistake to either overinterpret their violence as symptoms of unbridgeable difference or to dismiss them as ‘‘uncaused’’ emotional responses. In this book I use these events as ways to understand more deeply what Gunnar Myrdal and his associates called an ‘‘American dilemma.’’ Although I have tried to reconstruct the order of events and to describe how the levels of violence developed over time and spread in space, I have also sought to avoid sensational- ism, the almost hysterical approach that journalistic accounts exploit to dramatize race riots as ‘‘crimes.’’ I have intentionally not included photographs. Rather, I am particularly interested in tracing the various ways that the actors engaged in or observing these struggles interpret them, and particularly how the ‘‘forces of law and order’’ (the police and key municipal officials) respond to the events. In short, my approach views riots as a revealing instance of ‘‘social structure in action,’’ when the behaviors of each of the parties to the conflict not only act, react, and adjust to the situational crisis itself but are also guided by local precedents for handling them. A word of caution is needed. My analysis depends largely on data drawn from existing case studies of the six major riots selected for closer study. This has inevitably resulted in a certain unevenness of treatment. The richest sources deal with the 1919 Chicago riot and with the 1965 and 1992 Los Angeles riots. At least two good studies exist that describe the New York riots of 1935 and 1943, but a definitive study of the 1964 New York riot has yet to be written. Lacking that, my analysis of New York’s political system and its demographic changes has benefited from the twenty years I have spent living in and studying that city since 1987.To my despair, no synthetic account of the Chicago riot of 1968 yet exists, and I have therefore had to construct one from archival data and public reports. Fortunately, these sources could be supplemented by my 25 years of living in and studying Chicago and by my own observations during the riot itself. This book, defective as it may be, is the first to compare major riots in the three cities. I hope that it will encourage others to flesh out the missing accounts and to revise and correct the errors for which I must take full responsibility. Acknowledgments bviously, in the course of the decades in which I have been trying to O understand cities and more specifically to research and write this book, I have accumulated too many debts to teachers, fellow scholars, friends and students (not mutually exclusive), to critical and constructive readers, to libraries, granting institutions, and supportive universities to even begin to enumerate them. They know who they are, and I bow to acknowledge them. However, I want particularly to single out the anonymous reviewers for the Press who called my attention to additional sources, to Michael J. Rosenfeld, Amanda Seligman, and Michael Flamm who read individual chapters and/or provided useful primary documents, and to Jeffrey Morenoff, Willlam Bowen, and Donna Genzmer for making available original computer-generated maps. My chief debts, however, are to the authors of books and articles I have absorbed and pondered ever since, as a high school student growing up in Newark, New Jersey, I wrote my senior thesis on the ‘‘Negro Novel’’ more than sixty years ago. That was my first attempt to make sense out of what I call the ‘‘American disease’’ of racial oppression, against which I have marched and protested, although this is the first time I dare to add my published voice to the vast dialogue on race relations in the United States. Truly, we all stand on the shoulders of giants: many of their names can be found hidden in the endnotes. There is, however, my special debt to the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foun- dation, which, even as my book on New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities was on its long road to publication at the University of Minnesota Press, awarded me a research grant in 1997–98 to begin a project tentatively titled ‘‘Race/Ethnicity, Space, and Political Culture: A Comparative Study of Collective Violence in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.’’ It is with embarrassment that I realize that a decade has elapsed since then, but I hope they will accept this belated fruit from the seed they helped to plant. At Oxford University Press, I have been blessed. I am grateful to editor James Cook for shepherding the manuscript through the complex intellectual, x Acknowledgments technical, and bureaucratic processes that publishing now entails, but even more, for his patience and, indeed, indulgence, as he allayed my anxieties and reassured me that publication schedules would be met. Copy editor Martha Ramsey called my attention to inconsistencies I needed to fix or missing information I needed to provide. But I am most indebted to production editor Robert Milks whose contributions are evident at every stage; it was his incredibly dedicated hands and mind that literally guided the black box details of converting computer files into an actual book. I am awed

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