Jim Crow from the Harbor
Black Freedom Struggle and Downtown Baltimore, 1945–1980
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Temple University Press,U.S.
Published:16th Oct '26
Should be back in stock very soon
How do poor Black communities co-exist with downtown revitalization? How do Black social movements respond to urban renewal to ensure access to better housing and city spaces? John Tilghman investigates these interlocking questions in Jim Crow from the Harbor. Looking at Baltimore, Maryland's redevelopment in the post-war era of deindustrialization and population decline through white flight, Tilghman tells the story of how Black activists clashed with urban regimes.
Tilghman follows the money—redevelopment profits—which created tensions that prompted anti-freeway campaigns and affirmative action efforts. Through grassroots activism, protests, and community building, participants in the Black Freedom Struggle undermined downtown interests' efforts to reinforce racial segregation as well as other civil, political, and economic inequalities.
While their efforts met with both success and limitations, Tilghman emphasizes the strengths of this minority majority population as they strove for urban equality. Jim Crow from the Harbor provides a new perspective that helps explain what has provoked today's struggles in Baltimore for Black Americans.
"For anyone interested in how Baltimore came to look like the troubled city portrayed in HBO's The Wire, John Tilghman's Jim Crow from the Harbor is a good starting point. Tilghman insightfully discusses key events, including urban renewal in the 1950s, highway construction in the 1960s, and the 1970s development of Baltimore's celebrated Inner Harbor revitalization. He offers a compelling account of how persistent segregation and downtown-focused policies neglected and undermined Baltimore's predominantly Black neighborhoods, and how Black activists, with varying success, tried to shape and resist these policies. Jim Crow from the Harbor is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the forces that shaped Baltimore and cities like it." - Marc V. Levine, Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for Economic Development and author of The Reconquest of Montreal: Language Policy and Social Change in a Bilingual City
"Jim Crow from the Harbor recounts how civil rights activists challenged civic boosters on the terrain of urban downtown development, highway construction, and neighborhood gentrification that displaced and degraded Black communities. Tilghman's deep research and attention to race, class, population shifts, and lawmakers' disregard for fairness in urban policy make this work not only true to the story of cities in the twentieth century but also poignantly relevant to our contemporary moment." - Clarence Lang, Susan Welch Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts and Professor of Africana Studies at Penn State University and author of Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–75
ISBN: 9781439927762
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
212 pages