Description: "In this classic and groundbreaking work of urban history, Arnold Hirsch argues that after the Depression, Chicago was a "pioneer in developing concepts and devices" for housing segregation. Moreover, Hirsch shows that the legal framework for the national urban renewal effort was forged in the heat generated by the racial struggles waged on Chicago's South Side. His chronicle of the strategies used by ethnic, political, and business interests in reaction to the great migration of southern blacks in the 1940s describes how the violent reaction of an emergent "white" population combined with public policy to segregate the city-and the nation. The new edition features a visionary afterword by N.D.B. Connolly"--
Brief description: N. D. B. Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. His first book, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida, which was published by the University of Chicago Press, received the 2014 Kenneth T. Jackson Book Award from the Urban History Association, the 2015 Liberty Legacy Foundation Book Award from the Organization of American Historians, and the 2016 Bennett H. Wall Book Award from the Southern Historical Association, among other awards. He was a cohost of the popular history podcast BackStory.
Review Quotes: "Arnold Hirsch's deeply transformational book lays out how a perfect storm of racism, redlining, and public policies formed Chicago and other American cities. If you want to understand what came after the 1960s, you have to understand what came before them. And today we're still dealing with the same issues Hirsch wrote about. Every sector of the city--its business interests, its government, its people, and sometimes even its churches--have employed particular weaponry to effect a single goal: the subjugation of black people. It hasn't changed."-- "Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of We Were Eight Years In Power and Between the World and Me"