Versing the Ghetto: African American Writers and the Urban Crisis By Malcolm Tariq A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2018 Doctoral Committee: Professor Michael Awkward, Co-Chair Associate Professor Megan Sweeney, Co-Chair Associate Professor Matthew Countryman Professor Susan Scotti Parrish Malcolm Tariq [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0001-8908-544X © Malcolm Tariq 2018 This dissertation is dedicated to my grandmother —Marilyn T. Furman— who brought us up at the end of a street. ii Acknowledgements I could not have completed graduate school or this dissertation without the light of my family and friends. I’m most thankful for my parents for giving me the tools to conquer all and the rest of my family whose love and support continue to drive me forward. I wouldn’t have survived the University of Michigan or Ann Arbor were it not for the House (Gabriel Sarpy, Michael Pascual, Faithe Day, Cassius Adair, and Meryem Kamil). I will forever remember house parties and sleepovers and potlucks and Taco Bell and Popeyes and running the town into complete chaos. Ann Arbor didn’t know what to do with us. Thank you for inspiring my crazy and feeding my soul those dark Midwestern years. I am, as always, profoundly indebted to the Goon Squad (Marissa, Jayme, Tyler, Ish, Hanna, Shriya, Bianca, Amaad, Nikki, Ankita, and Rahul), to whom I owe too much. You have taught me lightyears beyond what the classrooms of Emory University gave us. Thank you for making space. Thank you for the memories. Meizi Li, Kyera Singleton, Faithe Day, and Ashley Jackson Easley. I will miss our bougie happy hours, but I’m excited for the levels of bourgeois we will reach in the coming years. Thanks for clowning and supporting my lottery habit and for the year of the fuckboys (may they rest in peace). You lift me up! Thank you to my committee (Micheal Awkward, Meg Sweeney, Scotti Parish, and Matthew Countryman) for your comments and suggestions throughout this journey. Special thanks to Scotti, whose calming spirit nurtured me. Lastly, thanks to Cave Canem, the Horizon Theatre Company, and Working Title Playwrights for the feeding my creative growth for reasons the academy could not. You are love and loved and cherish. There are countless friends who are responsible for the completion of this project and this era in my life. I cannot name you all, but know that I appreciate every small and large thing you’ve done. iii Table of Contents Dedication……………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………..iii Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………….…v Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter One: Richard Writes Bigger Reading the Ghetto……………………………………20 Chapter Two: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Ghetto Girl……………………………………….65 Chapter Three: Donald Goines and the Post-Uprising Ghetto………………………………..104 Chapter Four: A No Limit (Ghetto) Culture…………………………………………………..146 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….....185 Coda: Ghetto Gold………………………………………………………………………….....191 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………..….198 iv Abstract In this dissertation, I investigate how African American writers respond to the post-World War II urban crisis through their literary representations of black urban space in the ghetto. While the urban crisis has generally been covered by historians, cultural critics, and social scientists, I argue that analyzing how the work of creative writers fits into these discourses uncovers the critical ways that black working class communities imagine their space and simultaneously critique systems that perpetuate socioeconomic and racial inequality. I add to existing African American literary and cultural criticism by discerning how writer Richard Wright, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, street lit novelist Donald Goines, and rapper Master P resist notions of social pathology, the study of societal problems such as poverty and crime that reinforce disorganization, that was used by social scientists to study black urban life in the early twentieth century. If solely pathology is used to assess black urban life, the urban crisis can only be discussed in terms of how African Americans bear the brunt of these conditions. I contend that a turn to writers working during the urban crisis offers a literary history that reveals how ghetto dwellers have consistently used their own knowledge production to contend with the realities of their social, economic, and political disenfranchisement. Lastly, I argue that like the urban crisis, literary representations of black urban space have rendered how the ghetto has transformed from a place to leave, to a nesting place of potential, to a space to defend against external manipulation, and finally as a culture. In charting a literary history of ghetto representations in twentieth century Africa American literature, Versing the Ghetto: African American Writers and the Urban Crisis debunks popular notions that the ghetto is simply an intellectually immobile space. v Introduction In September 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the American Psychological Association (APA). In his talk, titled “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement,” King calls for social scientists to contribute to black liberation efforts by providing solutions to the problems of black leadership, by participating in political action, and by probing the psychological development of blacks who have been subjected to multigenerational forms of oppression. He mentions some of the dangers that social scientists pose, citing as an example sociologist Charles P. Loomis, who in 1967 suggested that black Americans relocate to find an all-black community in South America. Still, King is steadfast in noting that policy makers should be as adamant in following the rules in black communities as blacks have to be in abiding by the law in public spaces. He states: The policy makers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. (181) King’s comments appear in a subsection of his speech that focuses on the urban riots that erupted in black communities throughout the 1960s. In the wake of these social uprisings, social scientists scrutinized black communities through the lens of pathology—a branch of sociology that attempts to uncover the cause of social troubles rather than how societal problems are 1 overcome—in order to discover the root causes of the black unrest that was causing people to destroy their residential spaces. The “darkness” that King is calling attention to is the tension between the black working class and the state, but more importantly, it represents the way in which the state and social scientists do not take into account the systematic factors—racial discrimination chief among them—that influence black unrest and social disturbances. He recognizes that these actions, which he calls crimes, are predicated on state offences of civil neglect and socioeconomic and sociopolitical disenfranchisement. The crux of King’s argument is that the black working class should have as much control over its own residential space as possible, that blacks are capable of maintaining the political reigns required to govern their communities. By attributing agency to the ghetto, King not only suggests that white society provide more nuanced ways for blacks to participate in the body politic of the nation, but more importantly, he is highlighting that blacks should have the political and economic capital to sustain their own communities in the same way afforded to white communities. According to King, these riots must be recognized “as durable social phenomena. […] Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest” (181). In connecting housing reform to riots, King is underscoring that the need for black autonomous residential communities is a chief concern for the civil rights and liberties of black Americans. In its entirety, King’s APA address hints at what scholars have identified as the urban crisis for the speech’s emphasis on locating the disparities in housing, employment, and education among other civil liberties in black communities. The post-World War II urban crisis is defined by increases of intense poverty, the collapse of certain labor economies, high rates of 2 unemployment, the infrastructural decline of cities, and anti-black state and federal policy changes. While scholars agree on the scope of the urban crisis, they have differing opinions on when it begins in American history. Like any historical concept, the concept of urban crisis has undergone constant transformation, mostly associated with the sociopolitical climate. Tim Weaver argues that the concept emerged in the 1950s when scholars working with a liberal framework indicated that structural problems such as housing conditions and inadequate civic services could be remedied with government intervention. The 1960s saw the failures