Race, Culture, Politics, and Urban Renewal

Abstract

When historians refer to “urban renewal,” they are not describing one singular policy. After 1945, as Andrew Highsmith, Irene Holliman, and Guian McKee show, leaders of renewal efforts in Flint, Atlanta, and Philadelphia assumed that a combination of slum clearance, office towers, and expressways would bring white, middle-class people back to downtown. Surprisingly, African American leaders in Flint and Atlanta often cooperated in these plans. In Philadelphia, however, Mayor Frank Rizzo, known as a racist, used renewal funds to create jobs for African American and Puerto Rican women. Federal officials also financed suburbanization, thus channeling resources away from the nation's inner cities and leaving behind a wake of dilapidated infrastructure and racialized poverty. White Americans attributed renewal and suburbanization to the work of markets, overlooking the decisive hand of politicians and public policy. The skewed effects of these renewal and suburbanization programs denote a time “when affirmative action was white.”