Postwar Philadelphia Research Articles

The Ecology of Homicide: Race, Place, and Space in Postwar Philadelphia

The Ecology of Homicide: Race, Place, and Space in Postwar Philadelphia

The Ecology of Homicide: Race, Place, and Space in Postwar Philadelphia

To understand homicide in the postwar American city requires paying attention to the intersection of racism, segregation, and violence. Or, as the late Eric C. Schneider argues in the posthumously published The Ecology of Homicide, it means grappling “with the ecology of violence … the spacing and interdependence of people and institutions” (p. xxi). Because Schneider's manuscript was unfinished, Howard Gillette Jr. prepared the six completed chapters for publication and added contextualization. While incomplete—Schneider intended to write an additional chapter—The Ecology of Homicide is valuable for historians of violence, policing, cities, and the carceral state. Using 195 homicide trial transcripts from Philadelphia, Schneider explores why African American men were disproportionately represented in homicide cases between World War II and the early 1980s. Challenging interpretations of homicide as a function of violent subcultures, the “code of the streets,” or in relation to processes of modernization, Schneider is attentive to the role of social context driving homicide, including neighborhood insecurity, precarious masculinity, and police violence. In other words, Schneider provides a needed historicization of violence in the postwar American city.

Dirty Work: Police and Community Relations and the Limits of Liberalism in Postwar Philadelphia

Police abuse of African Americans was an immediate trigger for the urban uprisings of the 1960s, and civilian review of police actions became a central tenet of civil rights liberalism. The failure of Philadelphia’s Police Advisory Board (PAB), the nation’s first independent civilian review board (1958), to meliorate police–community tensions suggests the limitations of civil rights liberalism: an inability to confront the role of police as “dirty workers,” who performed the unacknowledged but widely demanded function of maintaining racial hierarchy in the postwar city. Working-class African Americans, the most frequent victims of police brutality, came to see civilian review as a charade and rejected the limited vision of civil rights liberals. The PAB’s failure shows that police reform is impossible without a broader commitment to overturning racial hierarchy.

Klezmer: Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia by Hankus Netsky

Reviewed by: Klezmer: Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia by Hankus Netsky Kenneth A. Kanter (bio) Klezmer: Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia. By Hankus Netsky. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. 175 pp. “Jewish music” is, for many, Irving Berlin or Debbie Friedman, George Gershwin or Leonard Bernstein. Musician, scholar and historian Hankus Netsky broadens this perspective by sharing the rich and fascinating story of a unique genre of Jewish folk music, klezmer, in a particular Jewish community, Philadelphia. He makes the case that this music is [End Page 450] more than entertainment or contemporary popular culture; it is the door to understanding a community’s history, ethnic identity and sociology. Netsky commences Klezmer- Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Jewish Philadelphia, with these words: ”There are many ways to uncover the story of a Jewish community” (1). Employing scholarly methodology, he presents the documentary sources used to research a community, from its synagogues and organizations to scientific statistics and studies. But Netsky does so much more: he writes an historical and musical love letter to his family as viewed through the lens of his and their personal stories, overlaid with socioeconomic studies of Jewish culture and musicology. With personal reminiscences, interviews, and just a bit of family gossip, Netsky creates a compelling and fascinating web of “meises” mixed with scholarship, seen through the colorful recollections and memories of his uncles, their friends and cronies, his bandmates and, ultimately, his musical colleagues and historians. At the same time, Netsky, Chair of Contemporary Improvisation at Boston’s New England Conservatory, provides his readers with socioeconomic and ethnohistorical studies of Jewish culture as interpreted through the history of Jewish musicology from seminal historian Abraham Idelson in 1929 to today’s contemporary scholars. One cannot read this book without recognizing that its author has, almost singlehandedly, inspired the revival of the klezmer musical genre, which for decades had been a distant memory of a few surviving elderly musicians or aficionados, turning it into a musical style appreciated by Jews and non-Jews, young and old. He became to klezmer music what his friend Aaron Lansky was to Yiddish books, two young men enthralled with their Jewish cultural identity and determined to make it vibrant, contemporary and attractive again for a new generation by honoring the past while creating something new. Why Philadelphia? In part, because this is the community best known to Netsky. His family had lived there for decades. In part, because it was not New York. Was he writing as favorite son of the Philadelphia klezmer music scene or as a nationally recognized historian and musician? Netsky recognized this potential conflict himself when he wrote “I must admit that, at various times when I was working on unearthing Philly’s klezmer scene, I found myself on slightly uneasy footing as a researcher. As ethnomusicologists are so fond of asking, was I an outsider or an insider?” (6) Fortunately for the reader, he is both. He brings the training of a scholar and musicologist, and combines it with the perspective of a participant and lover of the music which he himself did so much to revive and popularize sixty and seventy years after most of the genre had largely disappeared. [End Page 451] The book is structured from the universal to the specific, beginning with the definition and history of klezmer music in Eastern Europe to the twentieth-century history of the klezmorim (musicians) in Philadelphia. As might be expected, this story is divided into “before the Holocaust” and “after.” One might assume that the immediate post-World War II story was rife with tragedy and sadness, but, in fact, Netsky tells of the blossoming of Jewish music in postwar Philadelphia. With the enormous expansion of suburban life came the mixture of old world Eastern European musicianship with modern American trained musicians, filling the demands of social and cultural events, simchas of b’nai mitzvah and wedding receptions, at synagogues and venues around the Philadelphia area. The book focuses on the musicians themselves. Netsky shows obvious respect and affection for these professionals who laid the foundation on which he has built such an amazing composing and recording career. While most...

Book Review: Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia

Book Review: Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia

Stanley Keith Arnold.Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia’s Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930–1970.Abigail Perkiss.Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia.

Stanley Keith Arnold.<i>Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia’s Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930–1970</i>.Abigail Perkiss.<i>Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia</i>.

Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia (review)

Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia (review)

Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia

Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia

Making good neighbors: civil rights, liberalism, and integration in postwar Philadelphia

Making good neighbors: civil rights, liberalism, and integration in postwar Philadelphia

Women and Welfare in the United States

Women and Welfare in the United States Miriam Cohen (bio) Gunja SenGupta. From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840–1918. New York: New York University Press, 2009. xiv + 333 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-8147-4061-3 (cl); 978-0-8147-4107-8 (pb). Lisa Levenstein. A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xvi + 300 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-8078-3272-1 (cl); 978-0-8078-7164-5 (pb). Marisa Chappell. The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty and Politics in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. xi + 345 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-8122-4204-1 (cl); 978-0-8122-2154-1 (pb). Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer. Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom of the Low-Wage Labor Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. xiii + 219 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-2261-1405-7 (cl); 978-0-2261-1406-4 (pb). Sixteen years after President Bill Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWOA), which ended “welfare as we know it,” scholars can better understand the history that led to the law’s enactment as well as its effects. The books under review in this essay reaffirm both the importance of a feminist perspective for understanding the history of American welfare and the importance of race to understanding this feminist history. These studies also provide ample evidence that social justice in the twenty-first century requires public policy support for all citizens, as workers and as caregivers. Beginning in antebellum New York City, Gunja SenGupta focuses on five institutions that exemplify the “range of charitable and reform institutions that constituted New York’s interlocking network of private benevolence and public relief” (3). By 1840, New York was a bustling city of commerce and manufacturing which boasted great wealth, a growing middle class, and, in lower Manhattan, plebian neighborhoods of immigrants and African Americans. The panic of 1837 and subsequent depression encouraged “respectable” society to confront growing poverty. Faith in the free market and the Second Great Awakening, with its emphasis on free [End Page 180] will and perfectibility, contributed to the zeal with which reformers sought to rehabilitate the poor. If poverty was the result of character flaws and not lack of jobs, reformers argued, the reformation of paupers required their institutionalization rather than direct relief. The New York Alms House added a Work House on Blackwell’s Island to employ able-bodied paupers, now segregated from the aged and infirm who were considered worthy of relief. In the vanguard of the scientific charity movement, volunteers from the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor set up an elaborate system for investigating applications for aid, separating the deserving from the undeserving, and sending them to appropriate agencies. For antebellum New Yorkers, the problem of pauperism was intertwined with the “immigration problem” and, in particular, the large number of poor Irish. While nativists portrayed the Irish as a threat to the white republic, a more optimistic view won out among New York’s elite. By promoting work discipline and temperance, reformers believed they could help the Irish become capable of self-governance and, hence, full citizens of the republic. African Americans were perceived differently than impoverished whites. This was expressed in the 1855 census, which used the term “color” to categorize blacks and mulattos while the Irish were described as white, like all people of European origin. According to this logic, African Americans were inherently different from whites and thus neither acculturation nor the attainment of citizenship rights was possible. Reformers’ attitude about difference, SenGupta shows, was critical to understanding the social service practices of public and private institutions throughout the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1840s, the Alms House segregated poor blacks from native-born and immigrant whites. Black adults were placed in the privately run Colored Home and black orphans in the Colored Orphan Asylum. The wealthy white women supervising the Colored Home approached their work on behalf of indigent blacks with great sympathy. Like many activists from “respectable” society, these...

The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia

The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia

A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia

A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia

African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia

African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia

Making Philadelphia Safe for “WFIL-adelphia”

This article examines television and housing as sites of struggle over segregation in postwar Philadelphia. WFIL-TV, which was part of Walter Annenberg’s media empire, broadcast to a four state region it called “WFIL-adelphia,” and emphasized the station’s ability to help advertisers reach millions of these regional consumers in parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. At the same time, however, the racial tensions around WFIL’s West Philadelphia studio threatened to scare off advertisers. Just steps from the station’s front door, for example, black families seeking to move into West Philadelphia faced organized resistance from white homeowners associations. Scared of offending local and regional viewers and advertisers, WFIL implemented racial discriminatory admissions policies in its most popular show, the teenage dance program Bandstand (which became American Bandstand). I argue that, in working to maintain segregated spaces, both WFIL-TV and white homeowners associations practiced overlapping and reinforcing versions of defensive localism.

A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia

A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia

Stanger-Ross, Jordan. Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia

Stanger-Ross, Jordan. <i>Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia</i>

Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia

Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia

Lisa Levenstein . A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia . (John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press . 2009 . Pp. xvi, 300. $45.00.

Lisa Levenstein . A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia . (John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture.) Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press . 2009 . Pp. xvi, 300. $45.00.

Book ReviewA Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia. By Lisa Levenstein. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Review A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia. By Lisa Levenstein. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.Patrick McDonaldPatrick McDonaldUniversity at Buffalo, SUNY Search for more articles by this author University at Buffalo, SUNYPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 36, Number 2Winter 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/655942 Views: 53Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia

Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia