Urban Rebellions Research Articles

The New Urban Rebellions: A Review Article

Abstract Mark R. Beissinger's The Revolutionary City is a tour de force that will interest a wide range of readers. It charts both the decline of social revolutions and the rise of a new kind of rebellion, what Beissinger calls the urban civic revolt. Beissinger also analyzes the many ways in which these revolts differ from previous ones. These new rebellions have been minimalist in character, aiming to overthrow despotic regimes but eschewing any effort to redistribute wealth on a large scale or transform class relations. Beissinger's “spatial theory of revolution,” however, only partially illuminates these new urban rebellions, and it leads him to the premature conclusion that social revolutions will never occur again.

The Dialectics of Abolition

The Dialectics of Abolition Lisa Lowe (bio) Ruth Wilson Gilmore has devoted decades to the study of the prison-industrial complex and to organizing for its abolition, and her profound contributions have become cornerstones of carceral studies and the prison abolition movement owing to their compelling explanatory power. Her famous formulations that "capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it"1 and that "racism is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death"2 have become indispensable for scholars, students, and activists. Now, three decades of her essays are available to inspire new generations, meticulously collected and introduced by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano. It is a daunting task to attempt to briefly highlight Gilmore's contributions to our understanding of the conditions that lead to prison expansion and the abolition imperative, but I trust that collectively, this forum may highlight a range of them. In my comment, I emphasize the profoundly dialectical thinking and practice that underlie Gilmore's invaluable work on the buildup of US prisons in the 1980s, and the significance of her situating this expansion both within the contradictions of neoliberal globalization and in relation to the political struggles of people on the ground responding to these increasingly violent conditions. Gilmore's commitment to thinking and acting dialectically means that she always approaches prisons systematically within the conditions of globalizing racial capitalism. Situating the buildup of US prisons in the 1980s within contradictions of neoliberal globalization, she analyzes this historical shift as a transition from "military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism."3 Significantly, she draws attention to how this entails the US postwar racial state's structural adjustment from "the welfare-warfare state to the workfare-warfare state"4 as well as the "organized abandonment" and "organized violence" of the "anti-state state."5 Yet Gilmore has emphasized repeatedly that "the prison fix" is not an isolated phenomenon: the decisions to build prisons—and to invest in industrial punishment, policing, and military rather than in public welfare, health care, roads or schools—have been central to a structural reorganization of the US postwar "landscape of accumulation and dispossession."6 [End Page 371] In other words, Gilmore emphasizes the ways that US prison expansion cannot be separated from the multiple crises of racial capitalism as it expanded globally in the second half of the twentieth century and thus, dialectically, that prisons cannot be countered as a single institution and that abolition cannot be understood or fought without consideration of this global imperial context. Racial capitalism is inherently unstable, and it comes into crisis when the contradiction between accumulation and exploitation reaches a level that is unsustainable, expressed in the United States by overproduction, diminishing profits, and unemployment, on the one hand, and widening wealth gaps, racial segregation, and increasing impoverishment of communities of color, on the other. These crises manifested internationally as foreign investment, flexible accumulation, and export processing, which rearticulated the colonial divisions between the first and third worlds and was secured by overt and covert US imperial wars in countries where socialism or left-leaning independence movements gained significant footholds: in Africa, Central America, Northeast and Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Meanwhile, these crises of globalizing racial capitalism were expressed domestically as deindustrialization, state withdrawal from social welfare, deepened economic divides, criminalization of racialized gendered poverty, and the militarization of the border. Yet while some may have declared that globalization meant the "end of the nation-state," Gilmore has always stressed that even as the traditional role of the state changes, the state does not become less powerful. To the contrary, the state expands and fortifies as it reorganizes, and it is precisely in prison buildup that we observe the apotheosis of the state's means to restructure both criminal justice and the political economy in order to safeguard capital and exerting social control. With increasing intensity since the 1960s–1970s, these contradictions of racial capitalism dialectically produced antagonisms that erupted in radical Black, Brown, Yellow, and Red Power movements, labor strikes, urban rebellions, and social movements, from antiwar to women of color feminist to anti-apartheid movements. The US state responded to these political challenges...

The New Dread, Part I: The Judicial Overthrow of the Reasonableness Standard in Police Shooting Cases

This Article series argues that the U.S. Supreme Court’s excessive force jurisprudence from Graham v. Connor to the present has undermined the objectivity of the reasonableness standard. In its place, the Court has erected a standard that reflects modern conservative political ideology, including race conservatism, law-and-order, increased police discretion, and the deconstruction of the Warren Court’s expansion of civil rights and civil liberties. Indeed, the Court, dominated by law-and-order conservatives, is one of the greatest triumphs of modern conservatism, which developed as a backlash against various social movements like the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the spontaneous urban rebellions that characterized the decade.Part I of this Article series examines fear from a biological, political, and sociological perspective. It highlights how most Americans impute reasonability to statistically unjustifiable perceptions of danger. Part I also examines the concept of reasonableness and analyzes the native and inevitable partiality of the standard. Finally, Part I explores the relationship between the social value of unarmed victims of deadly force and the perceived reasonableness of an officer’s use of such force. It posits an inverse relationship between the perceived social status of the victim and the degree of statistical unreasonableness the law is willing to tolerate.The lower the victim’s rank on America’s racial hierarchy—the hierarchy created by nineteenth century pseudo-scientist Samuel Morton to justify slavery—the more likely decisionmakers are to find a statistically unjustifiable fear to be reasonable. African Americans are ranked the lowest. The same presumption of Black inferiority that Taney so boldly proclaimed in Dred Scott lies covertly beneath the contemporary Court’s decisions involving unarmed police killings.Part II of this Article series discusses the sea change in excessive force standards from the common law’s reasonableness standard to the current “rationalized fear” or “new dread” standard. Part II chronicles the change from different social, institutional, and legal perspectives, which have been factors influencing the sea change. These factors include: (1) the erosion of the common law right to resist an unlawful arrest; (2) the evolution of the modern police force; (3) the development of the law-and-order Supreme Court after the social tumult in the 1960s and the simultaneous development of radical social conservatism; (4) the Court’s holding in Graham v. Connor which was the first to express the shift legally; (5) the culture of police accountability encouraged by the law-and-order Supreme Court; and (6) the judicial creation and expansion of the qualified immunity doctrine. Part II exposes how the new dread standard operates by providing evidence that distills the current, amorphous excessive force rule into an articulable legal standard reflecting its true effect and intent.

Translating Race on the French Stage

Translating Race on the French Stage

Black Lives Matter in Historical Perspective

This review examines the Black Lives Matter movement. Despite a growing body of literature focused on explaining the formation and activities of the present Black Lives Matter movement, less attention is given to the historical antecedents. What are earlier Black-led movements centered on ending state-sanctioned violence? This article situates Black Lives Matter in a much longer lens and examines the long struggle to protect Black lives from state-sanctioned violence. We draw from existing research to provide a historical genealogy of the movement that traces the beginnings of a movement to protect Black lives to the work of Ida B. Wells and follows it up to the work of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the urban rebellions that have followed.

'Public order is the first business of government': The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and the making of a liberal counterinsurgent police-industrial complex

ABSTRACT Recent studies of post-1968 U.S. policing have situated the neoliberal carceral state and the concomitant rise of mass incarceration within a liberal capitulation to conservative law-and-order ‘militarization’. At the putative domestic center of this story, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), established in 1968 by Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson and greatly expanded under Republican Richard Nixon, has often served as a useful, if underacknowledged, subject of police and criminal justice buildup. Instead of viewing Johnson and his administration as misled or miscalculated actors, however, this essay recontextualizes the bipartisan consensus of LEAA through a particularly liberal counterinsurgency project that synthesized police-military hardware and community software. As the state’s go-to response to the political-economic and racial-colonial crises brought on by urban rebellions, LEAA’s brand of liberal counterinsurgency was instrumental in mobilizing a police-industrial complex through partnerships between police, military, academia, and industry. Drawing on archival research into police periodicals, agency publications, and project reports, I consider how a revived analysis of LEAA’s police-industrial complex can help abolitionist scholars and organizers rethink this origin moment of mass incarceration and police ‘militarization’ as representative of a conjunctural fix to the fundamental counterinsurgent project of U.S. policing and state power.

Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State

American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 142–144 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.10 Book Review Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020) Spencer Dew Wittenberg University, Springfield, USA and Ohio State University, Columbus, USA When, in the late 1990s, I taught college courses on religion to Chicago cops, my students would occasionally gift me their old, dog-eared copies of the glossy “Intelligence Report” magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Center. These sources helped shape their sense of who the “bad guys” were: extremists, terrorists , sovereign citizens, hate groups. These cops—like the cops and prison officials described in Those Who Know Don’t Say—were actively seeking out and exchanging knowledge about religious movements, and, in the process, perpetuating fantasies of dehumanized villains dead set on irrationally disrupting a society predicated on “law and order.” This memory recurred, with new poignancy, as I read Garrett Felber’s essential book on the Nation of Islam (NOI), one intervention of which is attention to how police and carceral officials read—and shared—C. Eric Lincoln’s 1961 The Black Muslims in America. Lincoln himself volunteered to consult with police departments and cooperated with prison officials interested in his research. Following Lincoln, agents of the state could insist that the NOI was not authentically Islamic or “legitimately” religious, that it eschewed political engagement Spencer Dew 143 for eschatology, that it was an insular group unaware of and unlinked to global trends and networks, and that it was inherently violent. Lincoln’s work did not just misinform; it helped maintain a fantasy of innocence . His scholarship simultaneously provided law enforcement and prison officials with a narrative in which the NOI “was a subversive hate group masquerading under the guise of religion” while ignoring the fundamental violence of their own work and the ways that the NOI offered a critique of and response to that violence (48). Such logic reads Malcolm X’s assassination as an instance of “‘Black-on-Black’ violence,” while remaining silent about law enforcement interventions which stoked internecine conflict within the NOI (180). Lincoln’s work on the NOI contributed to a broader narrative that, while emphasizing “violence, nihilism, and political naiveté in Black communities,” framed state violence as exceptional—whether in relation to the NOI, the urban rebellions of the late 1960s, or the prison uprisings at Tombs, Folsom, and Attica (170). Lincoln’s “Black Muslim” label, flagging a supposed division between NOI and global forms of Islam, served as replacement for earlier descriptions of the NOI as a primitive “jungle cult” (20). Yet like the term “New Religious Movement” employed as a fashionable replacement today for the word “cult,” the echo of earlier hierarchies remained. Indeed, Lincoln’s scholarship itself served as a replacement for actual activity by and actual law enforcement knowledge of the NOI—a useful reduction, a conceptual tool for the law enforcement / incarceration industry. Felber’s central argument is that the NOI played an essential role in the growth of this industry, in the rise of the modern carceral state. Through what he terms the “dialectics of discipline,” NOI organization and protest was met with “new modes of surveillance, punishment, and ideological knowledge production ” (2). Attention to the “ground up” dynamic of policymaking—with interpretations of information collected and shared by police officers and wardens ultimately reaching officials on the federal level—is paired with attention to the NOI’s legal work, including “the first major organized prison litigation movement in the country’s history” (49, 7). Felber insists—rightly—on reading prisons and courts as “sites of activism,” where the legitimacy of the state was challenged, locating litigation alongside hunger strikes, sit-ins, takeovers of solitary confinement , street protests, and prison uprisings as acts of resistance within a broader Black Freedom struggle—acts to which the state responded, often with crushing force (81, 5). Felber describes “the revanchist violence of the state” both in individual terms (the torture and rape of Muslim prisoners after the Attica revolt) and on a national...

Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics by Timothy J. Lombardo

Reviewed by: Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics by Timothy J. Lombardo Ian Toller-Clark Timothy J. Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 328 pp. $37.50 (cloth). Donald Trump’s electoral college victory in the 2016 presidential election achieved in part through wins in the so-called Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania shocked seasoned political observers and everyday Americans. However, the political culture of all three states has been shifting for well over two decades. Journalist Dan Kaufman’s The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics (2018) argues that Trump’s Wisconsin victory “merely heralded the final stage of Wisconsin’s dramatic transformation from a pioneering beacon of progressive, democratic politics to the embodiment of that legacy’s unraveling” (4). Meanwhile, political scientist [End Page 183] Katherine J. Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (2016) contends that a “rural consciousness” among Wisconsinites forged a politics of resentment that powered both Walker and Trump to electoral success. She defines “rural consciousness” as “a perspective that is at its core rooted in place and class” and imbued with “a sense that rural folks don’t get their fair share” (12). Cramer’s work underscores an important part of contemporary politics that influences both Rust Belt and national politics: the polarization between rural and urban communities. Still, the focus on rural or even White middle-class suburban politics has obscured the crucial role of urban politics and the “urban crisis” in conservatism’s resurgence across the Midwest and the nation. Historian Timothy Lombardo’s deeply researched and insightful Blue-Collar Conservatism offers a powerful intervention to our understanding of contemporary political culture and the popularity of Trumpism in the city of Philadelphia. Blue-Collar Conservatism traces the political transformation of White working-and middle-class Philadelphians from blue-collar Whites to blue-collar conservatives between the 1950s and 1980s. White working-and middle-class Philadelphians of the 1950s had been foundational members of the city’s postwar reform coalition. Along with African American voters, White working-and middle-class voters powered the rise of Democratic mayors Joseph S. Clark and Richardson Dilworth, who promised to bring the prosperity of the postwar United States to Philadelphia through urban and industrial renewal projects. These projects, however, could not reverse the structural changes to Philadelphia’s economy. Moreover, they reified the racial and class inequalities of that segregated city. These inequalities produced tensions, especially between the predominantly White police force and the city’s burgeoning African American population. The result was a three-day urban rebellion during the summer of 1964. Lombardo, however, is careful to show that Whites did not engage in a simple backlash against the failures of postwar liberalism. From the mid-to-late 1960s, White working-and middle-class Philadelphians, who included police officers and their families, crafted a colorblind argument that “differentiated the right to entitlements by making the clear distinction between hard work and handouts” (132). In their telling, opposition to public housing, school integration, and even “law and order” liberalism was not about keeping African Americans and other minorities out of their neighborhoods but rather about preserving what they had earned for themselves. [End Page 184] This argument obscured the ways that “Blue-collar whites benefited from and cheered liberal plans like urban renewal and federal spending for construction” (131). Meanwhile, Philadelphia police commissioner Frank Rizzo effectively used the argument to win the mayoralty in 1971. As mayor, Rizzo became the champion of Philadelphia’s blue-collar Whites. He made their causes his own, including state funding for parochial schooling and preventing the construction of public housing in Whitman Park. In these ways, Rizzo reflected blue-collar Whites’ selective rejection of postwar liberalism. That rejection was based on a colorblind, racially obfuscating ideology—one divisive to Philadelphians and Americans more broadly—that pitted people who saw themselves as hardworking against those who accepted so-called handouts. As Lombardo provocatively concludes, “Blue-collar conservatives did not view the liberal governance of...

“Not So Much Orwellian as Kafkaesque”: The War on Crime, Information Sharing Systems, and the Limits of Criminal Justice Modernization and Surveillance in Los Angeles County

In response to the increasing frequency of urban rebellions and rising crime rates, President Lyndon Johnson announced a War on Crime in 1965, inaugurating the modernization of criminal justice systems nationwide. Buoyed by federal monetary support from the newly formed Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), Los Angeles County attempted to develop a massive information sharing system to efficiently track suspects and expedite criminal record file-sharing within the county’s criminal justice bureaucracy. However, both projects failed. The failure of the Regional Justice Information System (RJIS) and the Optimum Records Automation for Courts and Law Enforcement (ORACLE) reveals the contingency surrounding the development of massive surveillance systems during the War on Crime and shows that the modern criminal justice surveillance state was not inevitable. Ultimately, it exposes the limits of criminal justice modernization and surveillance during the largest federal investment in local crime control in U.S. history.

A Behavioral Interpretation of the Origins of African American Family Structure

1960 to 1980 doubling (21% to 41%) of black children in one-parent families emerged from 1940-to-1970 urbanization converging population toward urbanized blacks’ historically stable high rate, not post-1960 welfare liberalization or deindustrialization. Urban and rural child socializations structured different Jim Crow Era black family formations. Agrarian economic enclaves socialized conformity to Jim Crow and two-parent families; urban enclaves rebellion, male joblessness, and destabilized families. Proxying urban/rural residence at age 16 for socialization location, logistic regressions on sixties census data confirm the hypothesis. Racialized urban socialization negatively affected two-parent family formation and poverty status of blacks but not whites.

Crossed Wires in the Motor City: A Genealogy and Analysis of the 1967 Riots and the 1968 Strike Wave in Detroit

Abstract In the years 1967 and 1968 the city of Detroit was the site of two waves of rebellion. The riot of 1967 was one of the largest and most costly urban rebellions in U.S. history. And in the ashes of the ‘67 insurrection a wave of strikes began shutting down the sprawling factories of the auto industry. These strikes were organized by militant Black workers who later founded the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, an organization that characterized itself as the “ideological inheritor” of the riot. This article situates the League within the global moment of 1968, discusses the relationship of work stoppages to circulation struggles, and examines how the participants’ experience in riots, both on the streets of Detroit and in the prisons around the state, informed the praxis and politics of the League.

Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools by Michelle A. Purdy, and: Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League by Stefan Bradley

Reviewed by: Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools by Michelle A. Purdy, and: Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League by Stefan Bradley Jon N. Hale Michelle A. Purdy. Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2018. 258 pp. $29.95. Stefan Bradley. Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League. New York: New York UP, 2018. 480 pp. $35.00. As the history of education and our public schools are increasingly scrutinized in the wake of privatization, presidential debates, and the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, it is easy to succumb to easy generalizations that dismiss the productive tensions of our troubled past. Particularly in regard to privatization and student agency, history provides the tools to deepen our understanding of education and the freedom struggle—and the recently published texts, Michelle Purdy’s Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools and Stefan Bradley’s Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League, are critical to this larger project. Together, Purdy and Bradley provide a stunning analysis of elite white private schools in the United States. These texts jointly remind us that private spaces are historically and racially exclusive, part of a national project that perpetuated racist discourse and white supremacy across the country. As these authors skillfully demonstrate, private institutions must be included in our analysis as they are instructive in expounding the role of student activism and the complexity of the Black freedom struggle while illuminating the nuances of school desegregation. [End Page 246] Michelle Purdy, in Transforming the Elite, examines the desegregation of the Westminster Schools, a historically elite white private, independent school, and one not founded on strong religious affiliation. By examining this school with impressive detail and precision, Purdy effectively compels the reader to understand the structural position of independent schools as “catalysts for the creation and maintenance of social and cultural capital and are the harbingers of middle- and upper-class white ethos” (5). In her analysis, Purdy provides a fresh view of desegregation through Westminster, differentiating it from the popular perception of Southern private schools that were for the most part established to avoid federal desegregation mandates across the South. Today, Westminster maintains an explicit commitment to diversity and thirty-one percent of students identify as students of color (2). Purdy provides a layered analysis, examining a “constellation of factors” and showing how the history of desegregation at Westminster “blurred notions of public and private as they responded to multiple historical political, social and economic factors.” At the same time, Purdy examines this history with close attention to student voices and culture, arguing that youth “courageously navigated such schools, drawing on their experiences in southern black segregated communities and in southern black segregated schools” (3). In so doing, she places private independent schools on the larger desegregation plotline in the United States, necessarily complicating our understandings of this history and moving beyond the canonical work of Richard Kluger, Michael Klarman, James Patterson, and others who have crafted a metanarrative surrounding Brown. Stefan Bradley, in Upending the Ivory Tower, examines the history of the students who transformed the quintessential institutions of white America, the Ivy League universities, or the “Ancient Eight.” Bradley astutely tracks a Black history of the Ivies, guiding readers through a history that covers the lives and experiences of Black students during the first decades of the freedom struggle, students who attended the Ivies during the mid-1960s and urban rebellion, and saw the birth of Black studies there. By focusing on the lives of Black students in the Ivy League and how they transformed the culture, Upending the Ivory Tower builds upon the work of Ibram X. Kendi (formerly Ibram Rogers), Martha Biondi, and Joy Ann Williamson-Lott, among other scholars, who have documented the role of Black college student activism. By providing a history of these highly regarded institutions, Bradley gives us a history of the Ivy League through the lens of students of color—pupils for whom these institutions...

Kerner @ 50 Looking Forward; Looking Back

In March 1968, following a year of violent urban rebellions, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders concluded that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one Black, one White—separate and unequal.” With a team of researchers, the 11-member Kerner Commission, named for its chairman Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, had spent a year studying the causes of the “1967 riots” in 23 cities. Segregation and discrimination had long been part of American life, and the resulting poverty had created urban ghettos completely unknown to most Americans, the Kerner Report said. Though the commission’s work had been comprehensive in examining causes, it would lay blame for national ignorance at the feet of the news media for their unbalanced coverage and hiring practices. This article focuses on media reactions to the report’s publication, as well as media attention related to the present day 50th anniversary of the its release to assess its historical impact as well as its relevance today and tomorrow in light of political, social and other shifts. Among the issues that arose in the original reporting was the stance that President Lyndon B. Johnson took toward the findings by the commission he had appointed.

From the River to the Sea to Every Mountain Top: Solidarity as Worldmaking

This essay questions a key takeaway from the Ferguson/Gaza convergence that catalyzed the current wave of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity: the idea that “equivalence,” or a politics of analogy based on racial or national identity, or racialized or colonial experience, is the sole or primary grounds for solidarity. By revisiting three recent spectacular moments involving Black intellectuals advocating for Palestine—Michelle Alexander's op-ed in the New York Times criticizing Israeli policies, CNN's firing of Marc Lamont Hill, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute's initial decision to deny Angela Davis its highest honor—this paper suggests that their controversial positions must be traced back to the post-1967 moment. The convergence of Black urban rebellions and the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war birthed the first significant wave of Black-Palestinian solidarity; at the same time, solidarities rooted in anti-imperialism and Left internationalism rivaled the “Black-Jewish alliance,” founded on analogy of oppression rather than shared principles of liberation. Third World insurgencies and anti-imperialist movements, not just events in the United States and Palestine, created the conditions for radically reordering political alliances: rather than adopting a politics of analogy or identity, the Black and Palestinian Left embraced a vision of “worldmaking” that was a catalyst for imagining revolution as opposed to plotting coalition.

True South: Henry Hampton and Eyes on the Prize, the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement by Jon Else

Reviewed by: True South: Henry Hampton and Eyes on the Prize, the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement by Jon Else Allison Perlman True South: Henry Hampton and Eyes on the Prize, the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement. By Jon Else. (New York: Viking, 2017. Pp. xii, 404. Paper, $18.00, ISBN 978-1-101-98094-1; cloth, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-101-98093-4.) Jon Else's True South: Henry Hampton and Eyes on the Prize, the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement offers three intertwined histories. A producer and cinematographer on Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965 (1987–1990), a documentary series that charts the history of the black freedom struggle, Else illuminates the ambitions, limitations, processes, and personalities involved in creating the first six episodes of the series. Else, a close friend of and collaborator with Henry Hampton, founder of Blackside, Incorporated and creator of Eyes on the Prize, offers a portrait of Hampton as a fighter for racial justice in his own right. Hampton produced the signature documentary series on the civil rights movement, and his company, Blackside, was committed to employing African Americans in significant positions behind and in front of the camera. Having been a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Else also provides a firsthand account of the everyday lives of activists working for racial justice in the first half of the 1960s. True South is a loosely chronological narrative that begins with Hampton's childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, and ends with his tragic death from complications related to lung cancer in 1998. While Else reminds his readers that the final decisions on Eyes on the Prize were ultimately Hampton's, the book importantly details the work of producers and crew members who conducted the interviews, tracked down archival footage, battled over how to organize material, and painstakingly edited and re-edited individual episodes. Throughout his narrative, Else draws comparisons between the filmmakers and the activists whose struggles the films would chart. In so doing, he [End Page 510] underscores not only the material and psychological costs to Hampton's crew—compensation was erratic and work schedules were punishing—but also how the political work of the films was comparable to that of the civil rights movement. By privileging the voices of participants rather than experts, by refusing Manichean binaries and embracing the complexities of civil rights activism, and by emphasizing the triumphant battles against injustice waged by ordinary people, Eyes on the Prize affirmed the possibilities of participatory democracy and the power of protest to effect social change. Else primarily worked on the first six episodes on Eyes on the Prize, which cover key battles in the southern civil rights campaigns. He was an adviser to Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads, 1965–1985, the final eight episodes of the series, but was not as involved in their production. As a result, Eyes on the Prize II—which covers topics such as Black Power, black nationalism, urban rebellions, and affirmative action—receives substantially less attention in his narrative; True South capably covers the main themes of these episodes and includes a few colorful anecdotes about their production, but its treatment of them is cursory. While this emphasis on Eyes on the Prize's first six episodes is congruent with most of the scholarship on the series, it unfortunately replicates the prominence accorded the temporal and spatial borders of popular civil rights history—the South between 1954 and 1965—that historians of the black freedom struggle have long sought to dislodge. While there is a prodigious literature that explores how the black freedom struggle is remembered in sites of popular history, few texts offer an as analogously detailed account of how and why these sites were created as Else's True South. His account of the making of Eyes on the Prize underscores the myriad possibilities and constraints—such as financing struggles, copyright concerns, and failed interviews—involved in producing the series. In emphasizing the labor of the crew who assembled the series with Hampton, True South furthers the political project...

How Congress, the U.S. Sentencing Commission and Federal Judges Contribute to Mass Incarceration

This article argues that each of the major decision-makers in the federal sentencing process, Congress, the United States Sentencing Commission and the federal judiciary contribute substantially to mass incarceration. The article first discusses how, beginning in the 1960s and continuing for the next three decades, Congress enacted a series of increasingly punitive anti-crime laws. Congress’s focus on crime was inextricably connected to the urban rebellion of the 1960s, and members of both political parties played important roles in passing the harsh legislation. Probably the worst of the laws that Congress enacted, and the one that contributed most to mass incarceration, was the mis-named Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 which abolished federal parole and established a commission to promulgate mandatory sentencing guidelines. The commission proceeded to enact extremely harsh guidelines and virtually preclude sentences of probation. The article laments how, even after the Supreme Court struck down the mandatory feature of the guidelines, federal judges continue to adhere closely to the guidelines when sentencing defendants. Finally, the article argues that one of the fundamental problems plaguing federal sentencing is the widespread misconception that the most important indicator of an effective and credible sentencing system is the absence of inter-judge disparity rather than the exercise of informed discretion.

Beyond the Right to the City: Territorial Autogestion and the Take over the City Movement in 1970s Italy

AbstractThe cry and demand for the Right to the City (RttC) risks becoming a cliché, merely signifying urban rebellion rather than proving its practical content on the ground. I explore the limits of the thesis via its fraught entanglement with private property rights and the state‐form; and through Lefebvre's radical critique of the state, political economy and rights elsewhere. Rights claims, I contend, unintentionally reify the uneven power relations they aim to overcome, while routinely cauterising the hard‐fought collective social force that forces social gains. As a counter to the RttC thesis, I explore the autonomous Take over the City (TotC) movements of 1970s Italy, arguing that these largely neglected eminently immanent forms of territorial community activism, brought here into dialogue with Lefebvre's conception of territorial autogestion, surpassed the RttC thesis in praxis. The experience of “Laboratory Italy” thus provides highly suggestive lessons for a contemporary politics of urban space.

A marginal man and his central contributions: The creative spaces of William (‘Wild Bill’) Bunge and American geography

The aim of the paper is to develop a geographical account of creativity by drawing on Arthur Koestler’s work. For Koestler creativity is sparked by the clash of two incompatible frames of meaning, and resolved by a new act of creation. Missing from Koestler’s account is geography, however. To show how geography might be brought into Koestler’s scheme the paper works through a detailed case study within the recent history of geography: the writing and publication of two very different but equally creative books by the well-known American geographer, William Bunge (1928–2013). In the late 1950s at the University of Washington, Seattle, Bunge wrote Theoretical Geography (1962), a meticulously executed hymn to the mathematics of abstract space, and which helped transform the discipline of geography into spatial science. Then during the late 1960s in inner-city Detroit Bunge wrote Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution (1971), and quite a different hymn. It was a paean to urban rebellion, to grassroots neighbourhood insurrection. It focussed not on abstract space, but a very concrete place: the one mile square that formed the Detroit inner city neighbourhood of Fitzgerald. In this case, Bunge’s book was a forerunner to radical geography. Catalytic to both of Bunge’s acts of creation, the paper argues, were the marginal spaces in which he wrote, marginal in the sense that they were distant from mainstream American academic geography. Incorporating them provides not only an explanation creativity within geography, but also geography’s own geography.

The Long, Hot Summer of 1967: Urban Rebellion in America

The Long, Hot Summer of 1967: Urban Rebellion in America

Reading the Stockholm riots – a moment for social justice?

This article examines the 2013 riots in Stockholm in the context of other urban rebellions across disadvantaged metropolitan neighbourhoods in the North-Atlantic region over the past three decades of neoliberal transformation. The authors discuss the consequences of securitisation and police repression, institutional racism, the corrosion of citizenship and the structuring of inequality in Swedish cities. Beyond the violence of the recent riots, contemporary Sweden reveals the emergence of an autonomous, non-violent and organisationally embedded movement for social justice among young people contesting urban degradation and reclaiming the nation in terms of an inclusive citizenship, social welfare and democracy. The article asks whether the Stockholm uprising could possibly be read as a sobering moment of self-examination in Swedish politics that could open space up for new political voices.