Urban Uprisings Research Articles

EEOC vs. the Times-Picayune: Blue-Collar Complaint Precedes Colorized Newsroom

A 1968 complaint by a black, blue-collar worker, Wendall A. Payne, at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, led to a federal appeals court in 1976 issuing a consent decree that required the newspaper, one of the major dailies in the South, to hire more black employees including journalists. At other dailies nationally in the late 1960s to early 1970s, racial integration occurred in the newsroom because newspapers were affected by provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the need for black reporters to cover urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission report, and/or a “moral imperative.” Notwithstanding, litigation was not necessary to induce the dailies to hire black full-time reporters. The Picayune, however, required pressure from Payne’s complaint that led to an EEOC employment discrimination lawsuit against the paper. Subsequently, the Picayune diverted from its white-centered trajectory and traveled on a path leading to racial inclusiveness.

Rebecca K. Marchiel. After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation.

After Redlining is an important contribution to the robust literature on twentieth century US housing policy and divestment from America’s cities. Focusing on the period between the late 1960s and mid-1980s—between the urban uprisings and the triumph of financial deregulation—Rebecca K. Marchiel explores how the National People’s Action (NPA), a loose federation of neighborhood organizations composed of white, Black, and Latinx working- and middle-class residents, sought “better versions” of federal housing programs (89), first through base-building, power-mapping, and social movement campaigns, and later by lobbying their allies in Congress. The book is also about the changing banking landscape in post-1970s America. Marchiel traces the development of “financial common sense,” the belief that because banks were different from “typical for-profit firms” (5), they had an obligation to extend credit to communities in which they did business. Inculcated by the New Deal and reinforced by postwar popular culture, by the late 1960s, this financial common sense ran up against the vanishing act of local banks and their unwillingness to issue new mortgages. As neighborhoods began to “transition,” a euphemism for the arrival of Black and brown residents in white urban enclaves, local savings and loan associations either reneged on their obligation or decided that since access to “their services … hinged on whiteness,” the compact had been broken by the settlement of clients they were never intended to serve (42, 45).

Art for People's Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975 by Rebecca Zorach

Art for People's Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975 by Rebecca Zorach

Infrastructures of dissensus: repartitioning the sensible and articulating the political through the occupation of Greece’s public broadcasting service

This article engages with contemporary debates around the politics of space and the spatiality of politics by exploring how the fabrication of emancipatory infrastructures shapes the articulation and reconfiguration of the (urban) political. Moving beyond the prevailing emphasis on urban uprisings, the article focuses on the occupation and self-management of Greece’s Public Broadcasting Service (ERT) in response to New Democracy’s government decision to dismantle it in June 2013. In this juncture, ERT workers and multiple movements and activists in solidarity occupied the Service’s buildings across the country and recuperated its infrastructures to broadcast TV and Radio programmes. ERT’s buildings became key political spaces and nodal political infrastructures in the struggle against austerity. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s conceptualization of politics as a world-making activity, the article reads these occupations as the opening of new spatialities for politics through the fabrication of infrastructures of dissensus. In this, it foregrounds the spatial and infrastructural dimensions of urban politics, explores how such infrastructure spaces reconfigure the partition of the urban sensible and traces the challenges and limitations that emerge from their encounters with the police order.

Riot Platforms: Protest, Police, Planet

AbstractA wave of urban uprisings swept the planet from 2018 to 2021, throwing protesters into violent collisions with police, confrontations fought out both in the streets and on digital platforms. This paper proposes successive cycles of digitally‐mediated social unrest are passing into a phase marked by protesters’ assemblage of “riot platforms”. It examines the development of such platforms by movements in France, Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, Ecuador and elsewhere, and the responses of a police power which is itself increasingly digitalised, examines how these contending dynamics played out in 2020 Black Lives Matter rising, discusses the alt‐right’s Capitol Hill seizure as a digitally‐organised reactionary counter‐riot, and concludes by situating “riot platforms” in planet‐wide processes of political recomposition.

Urban uprisings between revolutionary openings and reactionary outcomes: making sense of the 2013 “June Days” in Brazil

ABSTRACT Through a Rancièrian reading of the political as a performative staging of egalitarian dissent, this article conducts an event analysis of the 2013 Brazilian “June Days” uprisings. It identifies and challenges two broad narratives on these uprisings’ emergence and significance: a narrative of June’s “Revolutionary Openings” that views June as a sociopolitical opening that brought new actors and imaginaries into being, and a narrative of June’s “Reactionary Outcomes” that foregrounds June as paving the way for the rise of a revived, authoritarian right in Brazilian politics. Through an in-depth case study of one demonstration originating in Rio’s largest favela, the article provides much-needed empirical depth to interpretations of the June uprisings. It shows how these events fruitfully can continue to be framed as an open source of emancipatory politics, even in current political circumstances marked by an authoritarian, right-wing leadership. The article introduces three main lessons with relevance for broader debates in the urban studies literature: (i) a Rancièrian lens is fruitful for capturing the political dynamics of urban uprisings, however, (ii) a contextually embedded analysis of his abstract political logics is necessary, and (iii) the temporal dimension must be considered when assessing the transformative political potential of urban uprisings.

Publicity as a Factor in the Formation of City Authority in England in the 14th — 15th Centuries (Based on London)

In the 14—15th Centuries the city community of London becomes an active participant in the public socio-political space in England, acting as a new social subject of power relations. The formation of the city community of Freemen took place in the 12—13th Centuries in the context of the institutionalization of social and political processes in London. It is one of the most important characteristics of publicity authority. The city community of Freemen was a social institution consisting exclusively of citizens who were allowed to enjoy city privileges, including the right to participate in city government and the election of city officials. Exactly they were not just included in the publicity space of power, but also became its active actors. Municipal government was in the hands of the Aldermen and elected from among their other officials, including the highest — the Mayor and Sheriffs. The Aldermen constituted the wealthiest and most influential part of the Freemen, and they were part of the merchant top of the livery of the "Twelve Great Livery Companies" of London. The publicity of authority is most clearly manifested in the electoral principles in relation to the highest officials of the city magistrate. The City officials had to act on behalf of the community of citizens within their delegated authority based on the principle of electability. However the principle of electability had limitations that reflected the contradictoriness of the publicity space of authority in the period under review. In electing Aldermen the last and decisive word was actually left to the Aldermen themselves, who in practice elected the Mayor and Sheriffs. The Community of London was removed from the election. Urban uprisings that shook the capital in the 14—15th Centuries and directed against the government are a sign of the expansion of participants in the publicity space of authority. Representatives of the London ruling elite not only had to represent the interests of the Freeman's upper class of the city community, but also acted as a kind of channel of the connection between a certain part of the capital's society and the Royal authority. The Mayor and Sheriffs were elected by the townspeople, though a limited part of them, and from among the townspeople, but at the same time they officially considered as Royal officials. Some of the Aldermen were directly in the service of the King. The King could interfere in the electoral process at any time and remove even the Mayor from his office. Representatives of citizens, all the same Aldermen, took part in the discussion of the most important issues of state life in the Parliament, which is evidence of the expansion of the field for publicity dialogue between the government and society.

Moving From Multiculturalism to Critical Race Theory Within a School of Social Work

The continued presence of racism and white supremacy has risen to a crisis level as today’s global pandemic, police abuse targeting Black, Indigenous and other people of color (BIPOC) communities, and mass urban uprisings rock the nation. This article presents a case study of a West Coast school of social work that has carried out a five-year systematic campaign to move all levels of the program beyond a multicultural orientation towards critical race theory. This study reveals the results of a self-organized cross-racial committee within a school of social work, motivated by an ambitious goal to implement a racial justice orientation throughout the school’s personnel, practices, policies, and curricula. The committee has been further characterized by its commitment to engage across the power-laden divisions of field faculty, tenure track faculty, and administrative staff. The article offers documented stages of development, narratives from across differences of identity and professional role, and thick descriptions of strategies that led to the adoption and infusion of an intersectional critical race analysis throughout the school’s curricula. The organic development of the campaign and the leveraging of opportunities throughout the campus and across campuses offer important lessons for other schools of social work undergoing transformational change.

War-on-Crime Fiction

AbstractThis essay tells the story of how the War on Crime helped remake American crime fiction in the 1960s and 1970s. Amid starkly racialized public anxieties about rising crime rates and urban uprisings, Lyndon B. Johnson officially launched the War on Crime in 1965. The cultural logic of Johnson's crime war infiltrated various kinds of crime writing in the ensuing decade. Tracking the crime war's influence on the police procedurals of Joseph Wambaugh; the Black radical novels of Sam Greenlee, John A. Williams, and John Edgar Wideman; and the vigilante fiction of Donald Goines and Brian Garfield, I argue that crime fiction in the War-on-Crime era emerged as a key cultural site for managing divergent political responses to a regime of social control that worked by criminalizing both race and revolt. By studying how novelists responded to the formative years of the War on Crime, we can begin to understand the complex role that literature played in alternately contesting and abetting the postwar transformation of the United States into a carceral state.

Policing Black Film: Racism, Black Resistance and the Applicational Dexterity of Race Relations inBabylon

The racial unrests permeating across Britain in the late 1970s resulted in a set of political agendas responding to racism to be brought into being though legislation, culminating in the passing of the 1976 Race Relations Act. Crucial to such agendas were strategies for the prevention of black urban uprisings against state authority and the politicisation of black youths against racism. The emergence of politicised black British film during the late 1970s offered a crucial counter-hegemonic exploration and re-enactment of an extra-filmic reality of police violence and popular racism within the British body social. However, these texts were subjected to forms of political censorship through a number of state organisations who identified radical black cinema as a political threat with the potential to incite violent responses from black youths. This article will offer a detailed analysis of Babylon (1980) and seeks to investigate the ideological processes leading to its X certification and the moral panic located in its representations of black youths within the crisis of race vis-a-vis the political, social and cultural authority of race relations, situating Babylon’s controversial X certification as an exemplar of the ‘applicational dexterity’ of the race relations discipline.

Multiethnic Uprisings in Urban America and their Implications for Progress.

In this article, the authors make a distinction between urban uprisings of earlier eras and the upheaval that has unfolded in the streets of America since the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by police officers in Louisville, Kentucky and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The authors wonder whether or not there is a correlation between these multiethnic/racial uprisings and non-Black residents’ commitment to eradicating racism, especially when it comes to tackling problems that disproportionately impact African Americans.

Mischaracterization of the Urban Uprising, and why it matters

This work argues the importance of distinguishing between riots and urban uprisings. As this article demonstrates, riots and uprisings are two very different animals with their origins grounded in and amid very different circumstances. The failure to acknowledge this difference impacts the way in which rebels are portrayed, how history is told and written, as well as the basis upon which public policy decisions are made.

Introduction

Introduction

The Dynamics of Repression and Insurgent Practice in the Black Liberation Struggle

When authorities repress insurgents, does it quell their rebellion? Classic approaches to this question yielded inconsistent results because they sought to generalize repressive effects without accounting for the practices repressed. This article proposes that insurgent practices that draw allied support in a given historic context evade the de-escalatory capacity of repression. The article assesses the effects of repression on odds of remobilization for various forms of Black insurgent practice in the postwar United States, comparing the impact on civil rights protests and urban uprisings between 1954 and 1992, before checking final models on out-of-sample data. Generalizing the dynamics of practice better accounts for the evidence, transcending invariant models to explain social process without devolving to ideographic analysis.

Teaching the Military and Revolutions: Simulating Civil–Military Relations during Mass Uprisings

ABSTRACTDuring revolutions, strategic interactions among civilian policy makers, armed forces, and opposition groups shape political outcomes—most important, whether a regime stands or falls. Students from advanced industrial democracies frequently find these dynamics counterintuitive, even after completing readings and engaging in traditional instruction methods. We therefore sought to improve pedagogical outcomes by designing a simulation based on scenarios similar to those witnessed during the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution. We divided students into four teams representing the regime, the armed forces, and two distinct groups of anti-regime dissidents. Rules were designed to incorporate the best recent scholarship on each category of actors’ behavior, such as the probability of military units defecting to protesters and the ability of riot police to repress urban uprisings. By forcing student teams to make decisions under time pressure, we obliged them to wrestle with the uncertainties and fears of betrayal inherent in complex civil–military emergencies.

Engaging political histories of urban uprisings with young people: The Liverpool riots, 1981 and 2011

Based on a participatory research project which involved academics and young people at KCC Live, a community radio station in Merseyside, exploring the 1981 and 2011 riots in Liverpool, UK, this paper argues that co-produced research involving young people and radio provides an under-utilised avenue for research on historical and political geographies. Working together for a year in 2012–13, the academic and non-academic participants produced a radio documentary exploring how and why the 1981 riots in Liverpool occurred, and what we could learn from those historical events to help understand the more recent 2011 riots. Young people’s capacities to engage with past events that took place before they were born, in order to reflect on and understand the political present, are seldom explored in research. The research that this paper is based on therefore provides an original and significant contribution to debates on conducting research with young people, in particular developing approaches to thinking through how young people engage with, and make sense of, politics and political activity, especially disruptive or insurgent activities like riots/urban uprisings. As a result, the paper makes an important contribution to work being done on the political capacities of young people; collective histories and memories in young people’s understandings of politics, place, and space; and knowledges of urban uprisings. We argue that bringing children’s/youth geographies into dialogue with political and historical geographies such as those discussed here is a useful avenue for future research.

Urban Uprisings: The Troubled Relationship Between Citizens and Police in France, the UK, and the USA

AbstractViolent outbursts in Paris (2005), London (2011), and Ferguson (2014) illustrate the problematic and disturbing relationship between citizens and police in the ‘West’. While these episodes are often portrayed as ‘apolitical’ and ‘criminal’ in media and political debates, they are in the academic literature predominantly seen as (unarticulated) forms of political protests against structural inequalities. Building on this political perspective, I will first argue that the interplay between structural, police, and ‘private’ violence is at the core of these urban uprisings. Subsequently, I will identify four common factors that contributed to the onset and legitimization of collective violence in Paris, London, and Ferguson: an emotive and symbolically significant incident, often with a young inhabitant of a marginalized neighbourhood as protagonist; police involvement; unclarity and pre-violence rumours; and pre-existing us-them divides. In the conclusion, I will emphasize the importance and need of a systemic approach towards police reform.

Network television writers and the ‘race problems’ of 1968

This article examines the development of television scripts in the crime drama genre within the context of US commercial broadcasting in the network era. In 1968, public discourse around race relations, civil rights and violence reached a height following the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert F. Kennedy, and the release of a government study on urban uprisings by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Ironside (1967–75, NBC) and N.Y.P.D. (1967–69, ABC) are two crime dramas that drew on recent events related to black militants and white supremacy in order to appeal to viewers with socially relevant entertainment during this time. The archival records of screenwriters Sy Salkowitz and Lonne Elder make it possible to trace the development of one episode from each series over the course of multiple drafts. This analysis of the script development process explores the relationship between public discourse, industrial context, commercial agendas and creative priorities. Ironside and N.Y.P.D. are both crime dramas, but an examination of both series yields points of divergence which help to illustrate the norms of the network system in terms of act structure, genre tropes, and the oversight of standards and practices.

Analyzing Urban Uprisings in the Global West: Recent Interpretive Challenges

Analyzing Urban Uprisings in the Global West: Recent Interpretive Challenges

Book Review: Black Power Encyclopedia: From “Black Is Beautiful” to Urban Uprisings.

The Black Power Movement was largely a youth-led effort that broke from past thinking and methods of confronting American society and marked an important evolution in how African Americans continued their struggle in the wake of hard-fought landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. There is no shortage of reference works on the Civil Rights Movement and African American history in general that include entries on facets of the Black Power Movement.