10 magg 1960 anni - Kerner Commission founded

Descrizione:

Kerner COmmisiOn:The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which investigated the 1967 urban riots. Its 1968 report warned of the dangers of “two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.”

While middle-class whites flocked to the suburbs, an opposite stream of working-class migrants, many of them African Americans from the South, poured into the cities. In the 1950s, the nation’s twelve largest cities lost 3.6 million whites while gaining 4.5 million nonwhites. A new phase in the decades-long Great Migration had begun during the war and continued long after 1945. As in the earlier phase that began in World War I, jobs in northern cities and a desire to escape southern Jim Crow drove the exodus. A new factor contributed to the postwar migratory surge: the automation of southern cotton farms, which displaced hundreds of thousands of rural laborers across the South and Southwest. These urban newcomers, like generations of migrants before them, hoped the move from farm to city would revive their fortunes.

By the 1950s, however, cities in the nation’s industrial belt — from Chicago to New York — were struggling with declining urban economies and a decaying infrastructure. Surrounded by prosperous suburbs, the “inner city” was no longer the economic hub it had been in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New migrants, in search of jobs and opportunity, burdened it further. Urban areas had long been home to poverty, slum housing, and the struggles of new arrivals from overseas or rural areas. But in the postwar era, American cities, especially those in the industrial Northeast and Midwest, experienced these problems with new intensity. By the 1950s, the manufacturing sector was contracting, and mechanization was eliminating thousands upon thousands of unskilled and semiskilled jobs. The disappearing jobs were often the type filled by new urban arrivals, the work “in which [African Americans] are disproportionately concentrated,” noted the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin.

To those enjoying suburban prosperity, urban residents were an invisible “other America,” as the social critic Michael Harrington dubbed the nation’s urban poor. To those living in poverty, and isolated by racial segregation, suburban prosperity was all too visible, yet inaccessible. When a wave of destructive riots swept the country in the summer of 1967, President Johnson formed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (known as the Kerner Commission). The group’s report appeared in 1968 and warned that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.”


The intensification of poverty, the deterioration of older housing stock, and the persistence of racial segregation produced what many called the urban crisis. Mostly unwelcome in the shiny new suburbs, African Americans instead found low-paying work and substandard housing in inner cities. Despite a growing black middle class — larger than ever before — institutional racism frustrated African Americans at every turn: housing restrictions, increasingly segregated schools, and a decaying urban infrastructure that starved for tax support as whites left for the suburbs.

Housing and job discrimination were compounded by the frenzy of urban renewal that hit black neighborhoods in the 1950s and early 1960s. Seeking to revitalize declining city centers, politicians and private developers proposed razing “blighted” neighborhoods to make way for new construction aimed at the fleeing middle class. In San Francisco, some four thousand residents of the Western Addition, a predominantly black neighborhood, lost their homes to an urban renewal program that built luxury housing, a shopping center, and an express boulevard. Under Detroit’s urban renewal plans, twenty-five thousand housing units were destroyed and only fifteen thousand built. In Boston, almost one-third of the old city — including the historic Italian neighborhood in the West End — was demolished to make way for high-rise buildings and highways. Between 1949 and 1967, urban renewal demolished almost 400,000 buildings and displaced 1.4 million people nationwide.

In this photo of a Chicago neighborhood from 1963, a middle-class, high-rise apartment building looms over an older, low-income district. The contrast is emblematic of what many commentators in the 1960s came to call the “urban crisis,” the shift of investment, commerce, good jobs, and the middle class away from central cities to either neighboring suburbs or high-rent apartment districts. Racial segregation and continued racial discrimination played a significant role in limiting the economic options available to the black working class. That reality became a major spark to the black freedom struggle in many American cities.

Many of those dislocated by urban renewal were moved to federally funded housing projects, a vast expansion of New Deal housing policy. However well intended, these projects too often took the form of grim, cheaply built high-rises that isolated their inhabitants from surrounding neighborhoods. The problems of public housing were especially challenging for African Americans, who often found that public housing increased racial segregation and created concentrated pockets of poverty, disconnected from jobs and thriving neighborhoods. The Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, with twenty-eight buildings of sixteen stories each, housed twenty thousand residents, almost all of them black. The planners had imagined a huge complex of decent, affordable apartments, but instead the Taylor Homes were overcrowded, maintenance and upkeep was underfunded, and with few available jobs in close proximity residents remained poor and socially marginalized.

Despite the evident urban crisis, cities continued to attract immigrants from abroad. U.S. immigration policy had long aimed to limit “undesirable” arrivals, culminating in the overtly discriminatory National Origins Act of 1924 (see “Nativism” in Chapter 21). But World War II and the Cold War brought about a gradual change in the government’s stance on immigration. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 permitted the entry of approximately 415,000 Europeans, many of them Jewish refugees. In a gesture to an important war ally, the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943. More far-reaching was the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which ended the exclusion of Japanese, Koreans, and Southeast Asians.

After the national-origins quota system went into effect in 1924, Mexico replaced Eastern and Southern Europe as the nation’s labor reservoir. During World War II, the federal government introduced the Bracero Program to ease wartime labor shortages and then revived it in 1951, during the Korean War. However, the federal government lacked an effective mechanism to compel workers to return home. The Mexican immigrant population continued to grow, and by the time the Bracero Program ended in 1964, many of that group — an estimated 350,000 — had settled permanently in the United States. Braceros were joined by other Mexicans who immigrated to the United States to escape rural poverty or to earn money to return home and purchase land for farming.

Like generations of immigrants before them, Mexicans gravitated to major metropolitan areas. They primarily settled in Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Jose, El Paso, and other southwestern cities. But many also went north, joining well-established Mexican American communities in Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, and Denver. Mexican Americans remained a key part of the agricultural workforce, and also became a significant presence in industrial and service work by 1960.


Another major influx of Spanish-speaking migrants came from Puerto Rico. American citizens since 1917, Puerto Ricans had an unrestricted right to move to the mainland United States. Migration increased dramatically after World War II, when mechanization of the island’s sugarcane agriculture put thousands of Puerto Rican laborers out of work. Airlines began to offer low-cost direct flights between San Juan and New York City. With the fare at about $50 (two weeks’ wages), Puerto Ricans became America’s first migrants to arrive en masse by air. Most settled in New York, where they clustered first in East (“Spanish”) Harlem and then scattered in neighborhoods across the city’s five boroughs. This massive migration, which increased New York City’s Puerto Rican population to 613,000 by 1960, transformed the ethnic composition of the city. More Puerto Ricans now lived in New York City than in San Juan.

Cuban refugees constituted the third largest group of Spanish-speaking immigrants. In the six years after Fidel Castro’s seizure of power in 1959 an estimated 180,000 people fled Cuba for the United States. The Cuban refugee community grew so quickly that it turned Miami into a bilingual, cosmopolitan city almost overnight. Unlike other urban migrants, Miami’s Cubans quickly prospered, in large part because many had arrived with middle-class skills and education.

The vast majority of the nearly ten million Spanish-speaking residents of the United States in the 1960s were Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban, but Latino/a communities drew immigrants from a diverse array of countries and cultures in the Americas. They gathered in urban centers, creating barrios (neighborhoods) where bilingualism flourished, the Catholic Church shaped religious life, and families sought a stake in the postwar affluence. Even as they pursued a place in mainstream economic life, these Spanish-speaking Latino/a communities remained largely segregated from white, or Anglo, areas as well as from African American districts. Though not quite 5 percent of all Americans in 1970 — in comparison, African Americans constituted 11 percent in 1970 — Latino/a populations would continue to grow over the subsequent decades, through natural increase and immigration, and in the twenty-first century would reach 18 percent of the total U.S. population.

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