Battle for Bed-Stuy: The Long War on Poverty in New York City

Michael Woodsworth

Published by Harvard University Press 2016

Battle for Bed-Stuy

The Long War on Poverty in New York City

Michael Woodsworth

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674970403

Overview
Contents

About this book

In the 1960s Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood was labeled America’s largest ghetto. But its brownstones housed a coterie of black professionals intent on bringing order and hope to the community. In telling their story Michael Woodsworth reinterprets the War on Poverty by revealing its roots in local activism and policy experiments.

Author / Editor information

Woodsworth Michael :

Michael Woodsworth teaches history at Bard High School Early College, Queens.

Reviews

In this engaging and powerful book, Michael Woodsworth recasts the War on Poverty as the fruit of a long community-based struggle against urban disinvestment and racism. By showing just how much of 1960s urban reform percolated up from the grassroots, Battle for Bed-Stuy offers fresh insight into the relationship between activism and policy and the promises and perils of place-based politics.
-- Mason B. Williams, author of City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York

This original and well-written account of postwar community activism makes an excellent and provocative case that Bed-Stuy, long overshadowed by Harlem, is a key site for understanding postwar African American history.
-- Karen Ferguson, author of Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism

An impressive work that shows how local bureaucracies and energized political activists—in this case innovative African American residents and property owners—made the War on Poverty do what it was intended to do: reflect the interests of local people who knew Bed-Stuy was a community, not a so-called slum.
-- Kent B. Germany, University of South Carolina

[This book] will especially interest readers who want to understand the political economy of the war on poverty. Moreover, though Woodsworth’s book focuses on a single American neighborhood, it gives readers a look at the forces that led to failures, and successes, in combating poverty in many American cities during the post-war period. The book is very well written…Battle for Bed-Stuy is an excellent introduction to how the war on poverty played out in the largest ghetto in American's largest city.
-- F. H. Smith Choice

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
Introduction: The Senator and the Secretary Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. A Suitcase Full of Knives Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	16
2. Mobilizing the Forces Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
3. From the Club house to the White House Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	82
4. War and Rumors of War Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	122
5. Maximum Feasible Bureaucratization Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	161
6. The Power to Act Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	200
7. Whose Community, What Action? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	236
8. From the Ground Up Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	265
Epilogue: Gloom and Boom Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	305
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	323
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	397
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	401

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: General/trade;College/higher education;Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 424
Illustrations
- Other: 24 halftones

eBook

Published: June 6, 2016
ISBN: 9780674970403