Uptown Chicago: The origins and emergence of a movement against displacement, 1947--1972 (Illinois)

The emergence of the movement against displacement by urban renewal in Uptown is a window upon a rich and complex history in contrast to the tendency to view the inner city poor as politically inert but enmeshed in social pathologies. Arnold Hirsch has uncovered the relationships between elite-driven urban renewal, public housing policy, and the entrenchment of state-organized racial segregation in postwar Chicago. Hirsch and others have tended to focus primarily upon the actions and ideology of elites, and secondarily on those working to middle class whites who supported Chicago's segregation. This study builds upon that work and investigates the "grass roots" traditions of opposition that developed among those who were displaced by the construction of a segregated postwar order.; Beginning in the late 1960s, those traditions among racially diverse poor and working class people in Chicago, which had often been submerged beneath the level of formal organization, began converging in Uptown where a growing poor and working class community struggled for stability. There, the traditions "crystallized" into a movement against displacement. The study finds that Uptown's seemingly anomalous racial diversity and its equally unusual history of interracial movements were a direct outgrowth of the segregation and polarization that characterized the city as a whole. Cross sections of all those who could not or would not fit into the postwar order of elite revitalization, the "second ghetto," and white home-owning enclaves were pushed northward through the city's "migration zone" into Uptown as "Loop"-centered urban renewal worked its creative destruction upon the niches they tried to establish. Those who formed Uptown's poor and working class community had in many cases been displaced to Chicago by postwar economic and political dislocations. When they faced displacement yet again in Uptown, an organized movement, destined to persist for many years, ensued.