Taking as the point of departure ethnic and economic cleavages between poor urban blacks and privileged whites in Oakland, Calif., American Babylon develops the idea that politicization of urban blacks came about in a context of white flight on one hand and ghettoization and impoverishment of inner cities on the other. His premise is that out of the dynamic of bad urban public policy and the Civil Rights Movement, there evolved the ethos of black empowerment, black power, and the Black Panther Party, which stressed the reality of and responses to racially based economic cleavages.
The Movement in the South demanded black dignity. In cities, white flight to metropolitan suburbs fostered industrialization there, inner cities becoming more segregated and economically deprived. White flight did not free urban space but created "urban renewal" public works rather than enlarging housing opportunities; nationally after World War II the USA had unprecedented prosperity. In cities like Oakland, minorities tried to claim political and social goods associated with development. These dynamics operated "side by side" (Self, 2003, p. 1), but the focus of Civil Rights history has been on the South. Political activism found a black voice seeking "to redistribute economic and political power within the increasingly divided metropolis" (p. 13).
Suburbanization created "new investment markets" in suburban areas (p. 131). White social and business interests were retrenching: moving further to the political right. Blacks were not passive but to mobilize politically. In Oakland immediately after the war African American and white business and labor interests perceived opportunities differently, with blacks excluded from white working-class activism.
White suburban objectives were subsidized by government even as government support was withdrawn from urban areas or confined to welfare, with the result that property-value and infrastructure differenc...