Very well stated Elias. Would many of these communities simply completed their own life cycle and died a natural death, only to be replaced by whatever came next anyway? We'll never know. In any case, there were accelerants. Having lived through it and witnessed it, the disintegration of black communities in the aftermath of the MLK assassination cannot be overstated. I consider it the watershed event in our nation's urban history, at least in my lifetime. You can also point to mobility and large scale retailing. People get in cars and drive out of the neighborhood to buy stuff. That's a killer. Especially when you throw in plenty of free parking. But you touched on it by talking about Studebaker. Neighborhood roots grow deepest when they are mixed use. When entire sections are all residential or all commercial/industrial, vulnerabilities reveal themselves over time. BTW, the Avanti. Coolest car ever. All that I wanted when I was a kid.
You pull together the loss of blue-collar work and communities, small-town communities, farm communities, and urban, mostly Black, communities. I’ve been reading about the centrality of exile in the thought of Vine Deloria, Jr. and Gershom Scholem—strange bedfellows, unless one considers the displacement and genocide of their respective peoples. Those who have lived in community, whose lives and identities are bound up in those communities, and have subsequently lost those communities are shaking apart the more prosperous classes’ comfortable politics as they did during the first half of the last century. I look forward to the next steps in your series.
Very well stated Elias. Would many of these communities simply completed their own life cycle and died a natural death, only to be replaced by whatever came next anyway? We'll never know. In any case, there were accelerants. Having lived through it and witnessed it, the disintegration of black communities in the aftermath of the MLK assassination cannot be overstated. I consider it the watershed event in our nation's urban history, at least in my lifetime. You can also point to mobility and large scale retailing. People get in cars and drive out of the neighborhood to buy stuff. That's a killer. Especially when you throw in plenty of free parking. But you touched on it by talking about Studebaker. Neighborhood roots grow deepest when they are mixed use. When entire sections are all residential or all commercial/industrial, vulnerabilities reveal themselves over time. BTW, the Avanti. Coolest car ever. All that I wanted when I was a kid.
When I saw the "concept cars" in the Studebaker Museum, my palms practically started sweating.
You pull together the loss of blue-collar work and communities, small-town communities, farm communities, and urban, mostly Black, communities. I’ve been reading about the centrality of exile in the thought of Vine Deloria, Jr. and Gershom Scholem—strange bedfellows, unless one considers the displacement and genocide of their respective peoples. Those who have lived in community, whose lives and identities are bound up in those communities, and have subsequently lost those communities are shaking apart the more prosperous classes’ comfortable politics as they did during the first half of the last century. I look forward to the next steps in your series.
Thanks and I'm eager to read your posts on Scholem, Benjamin, Deloria!