Homeboy Came To Orange

"The story of a union organizer who found a second career in community organizing and helped a Jim Crow city become a a more equitable place."--Provided by the publisher.

The Georgia of the North is a historical narrative about Black women and the long civil rights movement in New Jersey from the Great Migration to 1954. Specifically, the critical role played by Black women in forging interracial, cross-class, and cross-gender alliances at the local and national level and their role in securing the passage of progressive civil rights legislation in the Garden State is at the core of this book. This narrative is largely defined by a central question: How and why did New Jersey’s Black leaders, community members, and women in particular, affect major civil rights legislation, legal equality, and integration a decade before the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas decision? In this analysis, the history of the early Black freedom struggle in New Jersey is predicated on the argument that the Civil Rights Movement began in New Jersey, and that Black women were central actors in this struggle.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, civil rights, black power, and antipoverty activists confronted both deeply rooted forms of inequality and new variants produced by the urban crisis. Recognizing the limits of liberal reform in the 1950s and 1960s, they devised new approaches that altered the relationship between urban civil society and the state and endured as neoliberal governing priorities took hold. This transformation is explored through the emergence of individual and organizational fixers.

Black Power at Work chronicles the history of direct action campaigns to open up the construction industry to black workers in the 1960s and 1970s. The book's case studies of local movements in Brooklyn, Newark, the Bay Area, Detroit, Chicago, and Seattle show how struggles against racism in the construction industry shaped the emergence of Black Power politics outside the U.S. South. In the process, "community control" of the construction industry--especially government War on Poverty and post-rebellion urban reconstruction projects-- became central to community organizing for black economic self-determination and political autonomy. The history of Black Power's community organizing tradition shines a light on more recent debates about job training and placement for unemployed, underemployed, and underrepresented workers. Politicians responded to Black Power protests at federal construction projects by creating modern affirmative action and minority set-aside programs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but these programs relied on "voluntary" compliance by contractors and unions, government enforcement was inadequate, and they were not connected to jobs programs. Forty years later, the struggle to have construction jobs serve as a pathway out of poverty for inner city residents remains an unfinished part of the struggle for racial justice and labor union reform in the United States.

The author uses nine family stories to illustrate the psychological importance of place.