American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland(Politics and Society in Modern America)

About the Book

As the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. Robert Self tells the story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights and black power politics as well as the history of suburbanization and homeowner politics. Through an analysis of both, Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension. This volume demonstrates that the history of civil rights and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began in World War II and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership.

Table of Contents:
Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xv Introduction 1 PART I: URBAN AND SUBURBAN POLITICS AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM, 1945-1964 21 1. Industrial Garden 23 2. Working Class 61 3. Tax Dollar 96 PART II: RACE, URBAN TRANSFORMATION, AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SEGREGATION, 1954-1966 133 4. Redistribution 135 5. Opportunity Politics 177 PART III: BLACK LIBERATION AND SUBURBAN REVOLT, 1964-1978 215 6. Black Power 217 7. White Noose 256 8. Babylon 291 Conclusion 328 Appendix: Population, Housing, and Taxes 335 Notes 339 Index 379

About the Author :
Robert O. Self is Assistant Professor of History at Brown University.

Review :
[A]n original and complex explanation for the urban crisis that transformed Oakland, California, from 1945 to 1978... By placing the history of Oakland and its African American community in a new theoretical framework that emphasizes suburban growth, tax revolts, and battles over land, jobs, and political power, Self has challenged historians to reconsider the way that they study postwar black urban communities. -- Albert S. Broussard Journal of American History [M]eticulously researched... [A] compelling, complex, and original account of black and, to a lesser extent, white community politics in metropolitan Oakland California from 1945 to 1978. -- Cynthia Horan Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science By placing the history of Oakland and its African American community in a new theoretical framework that emphasizes suburban growth, tax revolts, and battles over land, jobs, and political power, Self has challenged historians to reconsider the way that they study postwar black urban communities. -- Albert S. Broussard Journal of American History If you are concerned with the postwar city, race, economics, and politics, get this book and read it. -- Kenneth Durr American Historical Review