White City Research Articles

Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800–1920 by Stanley K. Schultz

448 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE intracity Los Angeles Railway prospered. He reinvested profits in new technology which made travel faster and cheaper. Meanwhile, he profited from natural gas piped from Kern County and hydroelectric power he produced for his cars. Huntington was also a collector, and it was George Ellery Hale who persuaded him to bring his books and paintings to San Marino and set up a trust for their future use by the public and scholars. Character­ istically, Huntington collected books, manuscripts, and paintings in ways similar to his business methods. He bought whole libraries, hired the best agents to find what he wanted, spent lavishly, and shrewdly timed his successful acquisitions. In researching the achievements of this remarkable pioneer, Friedricks used the recently opened Huntington business papers at the world-famous library as well as other primary materials. Other books, most notably Spencer Crump’s Ride the Big Red Cars, have covered the Pacific Electric story, but this is the first work to cover in detail the full scope of Huntington’s development of the region. The book includes several interpretive maps, charts, and photographs, indispensable for a subject tied to local geography and technology. John E. Baur Dr. Baur is professor of history at California State University, Northridge. He has published four books and numerous articles on California and the West. Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800— 1920. By Stanley K. Schultz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Pp. xviii + 275; illustrations, notes, index. $34.95. In Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800—1920, Stanley Schultz stands the traditional interpretation of the origins of American city planning on its head. He argues that, long before Burnham and Olmstead laid out the plans for Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, sanitarians, landscape archi­ tects, municipal engineers, novelists, and others had established the conceptual foundations of the planning movement and had begun engaging in the activities of the planning profession intended to rationalize, humanize, and rehabilitate cities. Rather than represent­ ing the start of something new, the White City was the culmination of existing ideas and techniques, an event that marked the maturity of planning as an approach to dealing with the long-term problems associated with industrialization and city growth. Schultz traces the origins of planning back to the utopian writers and secular and religious utopian community builders who, as early as 1802, began exploring the possibilities of perfecting human society in response to industrial and technological development. Following an overview of the development of the city’s police powers and other TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 449 aspects of municipal law, Schultz argues that the sanitary reform movement set in motion the conceptual and institutional forces that would ultimately produce modern planning organizations. By the late 1840s, sanitarians were agitating for a range of improvements in the urban landscape closely identified with modern city planning, such as street cleaning, pure water supply, and sewerage. Sanitarianism in turn gave rise to the municipal engineering and public health professions. As they entered city government to construct public works and otherwise improve living conditions during the second half of the 19th century, municipal engineers and public health profes­ sionals created the legal, institutional, and philosophical apparatuses that would form the foundations of the city planning bureaucracy of the 20th century. This brief summary of Constructing Urban Culture does not dojustice to it. Schultz has packed the book with interesting, thought-provoking material. His revisionist interpretation of the origins of planning makes the book an important addition to the literature on the history of city planning. But his contribution to the literature is much greater than this. Schultz has succeeded in synthesizing an enormous amount of original research with ideas and concepts drawn from recently published historians, like Hendrik Hartog, Joel Tarr, and Jon Peter­ son, whose work has illuminated aspects of the history of city planning, like the role of the law, municipal engineering, and public works development in the development of the urban environment, that have only recently begun to command the attention they deserve. With its wealth of citations of original 19th-century primary sources, as well as of this...

Waking up from Akbar's Dream: The Literary Prefiguration of Chicago's 1893 World's Parliament of Religions

Previous articleNext article No AccessWaking up from Akbar's Dream: The Literary Prefiguration of Chicago's 1893 World's Parliament of ReligionsEric J. ZiolkowskiEric J. Ziolkowski Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 73, Number 1Jan., 1993 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/489053 Views: 5Total views on this site Copyright 1993 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Blacks and Asians in a White City: Japanese Americans and African Americans in Seattle, 1890-1940

In 1909, against a backdrop of rising racial tension in Seattle, a Japanese restaurant that previously accepted black customers refused servce to city residents Powell and Katherine Barnett. Powell Barnett described the incident in an interview thirty years later: We went into this place and were told that management had changed their [sic] policy and we couldn't be served because we were colored. I never went back.

Sanitation, segregation and the Natives (Urban Areas) Act: African exclusion from Johannesburg's Malay Location, 1897–1925

Before the First World War the Johannesburg Municipality failed to remove or upgrade insanitary slums occupied by blacks on the grounds that it lacked resources. The 1918 influenza epidemic, however, highlighted the acute sanitary crisis in the Malay Location, a slum abutting white working class suburbs, and underlined the imperative of providing adequate housing for the expanding African workforce of Johannesburg. Simultaneously opposition from the politically influential white working-class to proposed Malay Location improvements forced the Council to support segregation rather than upgrading of black housing as a means of sanitising white urban areas. Adopting organised white protest against African occupation of the Malay Location, the Council embarked on a broader campaign to redefine the role of local authorities in managing South African cities. The vehicle for these demands was the draft Natives (Urban Areas) legislation. The Johannesburg Council, along with municipal authorities across the country, called for African urban status to be made temporary, for greater municipal power over African urbanization and for improved finances to construct segregated locations. Despite opposition local authority and white working class demands for segregation and the controlled influx of Africans to Johannesburg prevailed. Eventually Africans were evicted, first from areas of the white city proclaimed under the Act, and finally from the racially integrated Malay Location.

White city toy library–a therapeutic group for mothers and children

Abstract This paper describes the origins and life of the White City Toy Library that was begun in an effort to reach the often unreachable depressed mothers of very young children who live on a large, run down inner city housing estate. The work involved the close and continuing co-operation of the different agencies concerned with the care of young children. The toy library was the vehicle for establishing two loosely parallel groups with flexible boundaries and a range of interventions: one group for the mothers and one for the children. Psychoanalytic concepts of projection, projective identification, transference, counter-transference, containment and interpretation underpin the work, and are found to be particularly useful in working with severe depression and envy in both mothers and children as reflected in individual and group interactions. The mixed range of interventions and styles of work seemed to enhance the usefulness of the group to women and their children from many different cultures.

Field Persistence Studies with the Herbicide Glufosinate‐Ammonium in Saskatchewan Soils

AbstractField plots on clay at Regina and Indian Head, and on clay loam at White City, Sask., were treated with glufosinate‐ammonium (the ammonium salt of DL‐homoalanin‐4‐ylmethylphosphinic acid) at a rate of about 1kg ha−1 during June or July 1988. At regular intervals, soil samples were taken from the 0‐ to 10‐cm and 10‐ to 20‐cm soil levels and extracted and analyzed gas chromatographically for glufosinate remaining. In addition, amounts of the soil metabolite MPPA [3‐(hydroxymethylphosphinyl)propionic acid] were also monitored. Providing there was adequate moisture, breakdown of the herbicide was rapid with no glufosinate detectable in any of the soils by the end of September 1988. In all soils the breakdown of MPPA was slower than that of glufosinate. Maximum amounts of the metabolite formed in the soils ranged from 0.26 kg ha−1 in the clay loam to 0.52 kg ha−1 in the clay at Regina. By the end of September there were 0.23, 0.06, and 0.17 kg ha−1 of MPPA in the 0‐ to 10‐cm soil level at Regina, White City, and Indian Head, respectively. There was no leaching of either glufosinate or MPPA to soil depths below 10 cm.

Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist , and: Studies in Black American Literature, Volume III: Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory , and: Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America , and: The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (review)

Reviewed by: Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist, and: Studies in Black American Literature, Volume III: Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory, and: Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America, and: The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition Edna L. Steeves Hazel V. Carby . Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. 223 pp. $19.95. Joe Weixlmann and Houston A. Baker, Jr. , eds. Studies in Black American Literature, Volume III: Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory. Greenwood: Penkevill, 1988. 202 pp. No price given. Richard L. Jackson . Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988. 166 pp. $23.00. Bernard W. Bell . The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987. 421 pp. $25.00. The title and subtitle of Hazel Carby's book provide the clue to its contents. Carby [End Page 310] argues that the image of the southern white woman—the wife of the plantation owner and the mistress of the plantation—formed the model for womanhood: woman is pious, pure, submissive, and domestic. When the Afro-American woman novelist appeared on the scene, that image of true womanhood had to be reconstructed. The southern belle may have been the model of noble womanhood, but her skin was always white. Carby examines the narratives of black women written between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the light such narratives throw upon the place and function of the novel in American culture. In May 1893, at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, the World's Congress of Representative Women was comprised overwhelmingly of white women delegates. Six black women, however, did address the Congress, all of them protesting the relatively small role American black women had been given in the women's suffrage and temperance movements. Widely regarded as the greatest fair in history, the locus of the exhibition was the "White City," built to house the exhibits in Jackson Park on Lake Michigan. It was literally and figuratively a white city to black Americans, for it symbolized the failure that the high hopes of emancipation and reconstruction had begun. Carby's book, which sets forth the contradictions experienced by black women who tried to establish a public presence in the nineteenth century, has four major concerns. First, black women had to confront the dominant domestic ideologies of womanhood from which they were excluded by the definition of "woman." Second, this book questions contemporary feminist historiography and literary criticism that presupposes sisterhood between black and white women. Third, although Afro-American literary and cultural history tends to marginalize the political importance of black women, the nineteenth century witnessed the beginning of black women's autonomous organizations and the intellectual activity and productivity of such organizations. Fourth, the book presents a history of the emerging black woman novelist. As a first step toward assessing black feminist theory, Carby considers its history and major tendencies. "Reconstructing Womanhood," states Carby, "embodies a feminist critical practice that pays particular attention to the articulation of gender, race, and class. . . . This book works within the theoretical premises of societies 'structured in dominance' by class, by race, and by gender, and is a materialist account of the cultural production of black women intellectuals within the social relations that inscribed them." A revision of contemporary feminist historiography must investigate how racist ideologies have operated under different historical conditions. Carby claims that her book is a contribution to such a revision, a revision that examines the boundaries of sisterhood. The publisher's jacket describes Carby's book as "the first book to interpret and provide a cultural history of black American women's writing from slave narratives to the early twentieth century." This book deserves a respected place in what has become today a burgeoning literature dealing with Afro-American writers. Studies in Black American Literature, Volume III: Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory contains six essays devoted to the field. The first, Abena P. B. Busia's "Words Whispered over Voids: A Context for Black Women's Rebellious Voices in the Novel of the African Diaspora," examines the emphasis on the spoken voice in...

Journeys among Women: Feminism in Five Italian Cities

The political and social context the struggle for women's rights and the parties of the left Turin - women's struggles in a workers' Milan - feminism in a cosmopolitan Reggio Emilia - feminism comes to a red city women's movements in a white city - from Catholic dissent to feminism Caserta - women's struggle in the deep south Conclusion.

Invisible Houston: The Black Experience in Boom and Bust.

Houston was Boomtown USA in the 1970s, growing through tremendous immigration of people and through frequent annexation of outlying areas. But in the shadow of the high-rise petropolis was another city ignored by and invisible to Houston municipal boosters and the national media. Black Houston, the largest black community in the South, remained largely untouched by the benefits of the boom but bore many of the burdens. Robert D. Bullard systematically explores major demographic, social, economic, and political factors that helped make Houston the golden buckle of the Sunbelt. He then chronicles the rise of Houston's black neighborhoods and analyzes the problems that have accrued to the black community over the years, concentrating on the boom era of the 1970s and the dwindling of the economy and of government commitment to affirmative action in the late 1980s. Case studies conducted in Houston's Third Ward--a microcosm of the larger black community--provide data on housing patterns, discrimination, pollution, law enforcement, and leadership, issues that the author discusses and relates to the larger ones of institutional racism, poverty, and politics. During Houston's rapid growth, freeways were built over black neighborhoods and municipal services were stretched away from the inner city and poverty pockets to the new, far-flung, and mostly white city limits. Businesses thrived, but many jobs called for advanced education and skills, while black youth still suffered from inadequate schools, inexperienced teachers, and, later, unemployment rates nearly double those of whites. When the oil-based economy collapsed in the early eighties, many blacks again bore a heavier share of the burdens. Invisible Houston describes the rich cultural history of the South's largest black community and analyzes the contemporary issues that offer the chance for black Houston to become visible to itself, to the larger community, and to the nation.

Beliefs among Black and White Adults about Causes and Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease: The Minnesota Heart Survey

We assessed beliefs about the symptoms, causes, and prevention of cardiovascular disease in population-based surveys of black and white Twin Cities adults in 1985-86. Whites had a generally higher awareness of heart attack symptoms than did blacks; 72% of blacks and 85% of whites mentioned chest pain as a likely symptom. Sixty-five percent of blacks and 76% of whites correctly offered at least one of the three major, modifiable risk factors (smoking, hypertension, and high cholesterol in blood or diet) as likely causes of cardiovascular disease. However, less than 5% of respondents mentioned all three major risk factors. The most frequent response offered as a cause was stress/worry (54% of blacks, 51% of whites). Individuals with higher educational levels generally responded more correctly than those with less education. After accounting for differences in educational level, blacks demonstrated a higher awareness of hypertension as a risk factor, whereas whites were more knowledgeable about smoking and cholesterol. In light of the high percentage of adults still lacking awareness about cardiovascular risk, public education about prevention should continue. Such efforts are broadly desirable but may be most effectively targeted toward minorities and groups with less education, in whom awareness is low and risk of disease is high.

DISPLACED URBANIZATION: SOUTH AFRICA'S RURAL SLUMS*

Colin Murray, a British anthropologist, has done extensive research on rural social conditions in the Orange Free State/Lesotho region. When he wrote this article in 1987, South Africa was experiencing a state of heightened social crisis and seeming political deadlock. On the one hand, apartheid was manifestly beginning to unravel in the face of massive popular resistance and unsustainable internal contradictions. On the other hand, the imposition of a draconian State of Emergency in June 1986 suggested that the apartheid state was determined to resist loss of power with all the means at its disposal. Murray begins by drawing attention to the repeal of the pass laws in 1986 and their replacement by an inchoate strategy of ‘orderly urbanization’. In the light of this confusion over the government’s intentions, Murray draws attention to the phenomenon of ‘displaced urbanization’, a phrase that neatly captures the contradictory effects of apartheid policies in respect to continued white reliance on African labour within the context of the development of notionally independent African ‘Bantustans’. In his case study examination of two rural population concentrations in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, Murray demonstrates how African urbanization has been diverted from the white cities, leading to the rapid creation of massive rural slums in the countryside. Of the economically active inhabitants of these ghettoes, most spend a great deal of time and money commuting daily to jobs in the white metropolitan areas; but the majority of the population are unemployed and live a marginal existence, having been evicted from white farms and cities on the grounds that they are surplus to economic requirements. Murray’s article powerfully captures the endemic confusions and contradictions characteristic of late apartheid. And, in the case of KwaNdebele, he highlights the volatilepolitics of popular resistance directed against the Bantustan authorities responsible for its administration.

The Use of a Multidisciplinary Committee To Manage the Risk of Suicide in a VA Domiciliary

The White City Domiciliary in Virginia created a multidisciplinary committee to provide immediate assessment and management of patients with suicidal and violent behavior. The study concludes that the committee effectively participated in crisis evaluation and intervention and has been accepted as a valuable quality assurance clinical and management tool.

Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction for Infill Drilling, White City Penn-South Carlsbad Field Areas, Eddy County, New Mexico: ABSTRACT

The White City field and the southern part of the South Carlsbad field are located on the Northwest shelf in central Eddy County, approximately 15 mi south of Carlsbad and 4 mi east of White City, New Mexico. The field is a structural-stratigraphic reservoir producing predominately from a thick section of Pennsylvanian (Morrow, Atoka, Strawn) clastics and carbonates that were deposited on a shallow shelf edge. The older Morrowan clastics comprise most of the production in this area. Paleoenvironmental reconstruction and petrographic analyses characterize the lower half of the Morrowan as an overall prograding fluvial-deltaic sequence of channels, point bars, and channel mouth bars sourced from the northwest. This sequence trends toward the southeast, normal to depositional strike. The uppermost sand units are capped by shoal-water carbonate biograinstones. These strandling deposits are eventually overlain by a thick interval of transgressive Morrowan limestones. Although the study area involves a significant structural overprint, important stratigraphic traps are created in the sandstones by variations in cementation and depositional patterns. Because of the variable nature of deltaic deposition, the Morrow clastics were sliced into several correlatable genetic sand packages, and the lateral variability within each package was mapped using electric log signatures and assigningmore » the associated environmental interpretations. This process helped define the size, geometry, and orientation of sands at each interval, thus allowing the workers to establish reservoir limits and to understand the porosity and permeability behavior and facies changes within each slice. When these slices are vertically stacked, a three-dimensional attitude is realized for the entire reservoir, and detailed paleoenvironmental reconstruction is possible.« less

To Run a Marathon: The Evolution of a Folk Tradition

AbstractIn the year 490 B. c., Persia invaded Greece. The two armies met in pitched battle upon the Plain of Marathon in north-east Attica. Although the lesser force, the Athenians out-manoeuvred their enemy and won an overwhelming victory. According to legend, news of this great triumph was carried to Athens by Pheidippides, who said with his dying gasp ‘Rejoice, we conquer’. He had run all the way, a distance of some twenty miles. Thus the concept of the marathon run was born, but it was not until the holding of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 that the marathon race came into being. Appropriately, those Games were held in Athens, and the marathon was won by a Greek athlete. In 1908, when the Olympic Games came to London, it was decided that the marathon should start at Windsor Castle and finish at the White City Stadium, precisely in front of the Royal Box. The measured distance was 26 miles 385 yards. This distance was eventually adopted as the standard for all marathons throughout the world.

Perceived Sources of Electoral Support for Black and White City Council Members

Using data from a random national sample of nearly 1,000 members of city councils, the authors analyze racial differences in the perceptions that city council members have of which groups supported them in their election campaigns. On the whole, racial differences in these perceptions were few. Black incumbent council members receive more support than black non-incumbents, but even members of the latter group perceive a similar amount of group support as do white council candidates. A variety of explanations for these findings is discussed.

Tai-Me, Christ, and the Machine: Affirmation Through Mythic Pluralism in House Made of Dawn

TAI-ME, CHRIST, AND THE MACHINE: AFFIRMATION THROUGH MYTHIC PLURALISM IN HOUSE MADE OF DAWN Michael W. Raymond* Many critics interpret N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn as depicting disharmony, alienation, and the need for spiritual redemption in a squalid, hellish, temporal world.1 Martha Scott Trimble , for example, sees it as a story of how differences in "language and culture tend through their own territorial imperatives to encompass one, sometimes to a point of isolation."2 Even those critics not advocating themes of alienation see House Made of Dawn as an insider's novel. To them, it portrays "the orderly continuum of interrelated events that constitute the Indian universe"3 and "warns native Americans that they may lose more than they gain if they assimilate into the American mix."4 With its alternative to Christianity and to a modern civilization based on secular, technological structures,5 House Made of Dawn's optimism has to be inappropriate for an outsider. Neither of these approaches accounts for the full richness of Momaday's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Rather than denying the possibility of affirmation or suggesting that affirmation can come only through a monolithic cultural identity, House Made of Dawn focuses on the pluralism of ordinary contemporary life and the possibility of finding meaning in it. Depicting a pervasive cultural diversity in even remote, seemingly culturally isolated areas, the novel suggests that meaning in contemporary life comes when one finds his sense of place by recognizing and living within that large and diverse context. At the end of House Made of Dawn, Abel is "running on the rise of the song."9 By seeing and going among the runners, Abel unmistakably associates himself with the dawn runners of eternity: They were whole and indispensable in what they did; everything in creation referred to them. Because of them, perspective, proportion, design in the universe. Meaning because of them. They ran with great dignity and calm, not in the hope of anything, but hopelessly; neither in fear nor hatred nor despair of evil, but simply in recognition and with respect. Evil was. Evil was abroad in the night; they must venture out to the confrontation; they must reckon dues and divide the world (p. 96). "Michael W. Raymond is Nell Carlton Professor of English at Stetson University. He has published widely in the scholarly journals and is currently working on a book on the landscapes of the contemporary American novel. 62Michael W. Raymond Abel saves himself when he identifies with the dawn runners, sees them as a part of the whole, becomes a part of them, and feels significant. But Abel's path to the beginnings of salvation is not easy. Abel's story is one of a journey through and from placelessness.7 It is a sordid and seemingly chaotic journey through a self-conscious and reflective uninvolvement , an alienation from people and places, homelessness, a sense of the unreality of the world and of not belonging. Abel's choices and their outcome are neither simple nor clear-cut. It is more than just the matter of returning to the fulfilling pueblo from the nasty white man's world. Abel's tribulations involve all the complexities inherent in contemporary life. He is forced to face the army, the legal system, and the social service agencies of a society almost totally alien to him. He must deal with such personal tragedies as the deaths of his mother and brother and his own alcoholism. He is torn between personal pride and the necessity for survival in a hostile environment. Swirling around him are the complicated and often obscure promises of value systems inherent in at least three Native American cultures, in Christianity, and in modern technology. Clearly this journey through placelessness is not restricted to the white man's army, city, or values. He experiences the twentiethcentury sense of alienation before ever leaving the pueblo. At WaIatowa , Abel's father was an outsider of an undetermined tribe. His family is considered foreign and strange (p. 15). As an adolescent, Abel unexplainably strangles an eagle he captures during a ceremonial Eagle Watchers Society hunt. On his return to Walatowa in 1945, Abel is...

Explaining Racial Differences

Although black city-to-suburb residential mobility increased markedly during the 1970s, the rate of outmovement by whites was still much higher. In this article we examine empirically three explanations for this continuing racial difference in suburbanization: (1) socioeconomic differences between the white and black central city populations, (2) racially motivated outmovement by whites (white flight), and (3) abnormally low outmovement by blacks (black retention). Using 1974-1976 Annual Housing Survey data from 35 large SMSAs, we begin by replicating Frey's (1979) analysis of white outmovement during the late 1960s. We then modify the model and apply it to black outmovement. We conclude from our analysis that black retention, attributable to actual or anticipated racial discrimination against blacks, is responsible for most of the white-black gap in rates of city-to-suburb movement. The other two explanations play only secondary roles.

Federal mortgage insurance and the characteristics of intraurban movers in the United States

This paper examines the social, economic, demographic and locational characteristics of the clients of the Federal Housing Administration's mortgage insurance program. The program has been accused of fostering the development of white middle class suburbs and nonwhite central cities. The data used in this analysis are from 1976 and 1977, and indicate that the mortgage insurance program is less suburb oriented than private financing of houses in the same price range. White homebuyers under the program are more likely to purchase suburban homes than nonwhite, however. This is a result of a variety of actors in the housing market of which the Federal Housing Administration is one. The paper concludes with comments on what kinds of people use the program and ways to ensure that the users benefit from the insurance.

A regression analysis of differential validity in intellectual assessment for black and for white inner city children

Abstract Differential predictive validity of the WISC‐R for academic achievement was investigated across race for 36 Black and 36 White children referred to a private mental health clinic due to a variety of learning problems. Correlations between the WISC‐R Verbal, Performance, and Full Scale IQs and achievement test scores in Reading and Arithmetic were contrasted across groups in addition to comparisons of regression equations (regression coefficients and intercept constants) between the independent and dependent variables across race. No significant differences occurred between correlations or regression equations for Blacks and for Whites. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Race, Representation, and Trust: Changes in Attitudes After the Election of a Black Mayor

This article addresses the general proposition that changes in leadership images precipitate changes in public opinion. Specifically, the purpose of this research is to determine if changes in the levels of political trust expressed by black and white city residents can be attributed to the election of a city's first black mayor. The attitudes of black and white residents of the City of Atlanta before and after the election of a black mayor are compared, and changes occurring during the study period are compared to similar national data. Alternate explanations for the changes observed are explored. The data examined suggest that increased identification with city government among blacks is stimulated by the election of a black mayor.