num_pages: 408
description: As the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. Robert Self tells the story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights and black power politics as well as the history of suburbanization and homeowner politics. Through an analysis of both, Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension. liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began in World War II and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership.
language: English
title: American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland
titlecomplete: American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Politics and Society in Modern America, 37)
genres: Grad School, Politics, Cities, The Americas, Nonfiction, American History, Urban Studies, Urban, Race, History
ratings_count: 354
places: Oakland, California
awards: awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: James A. Rawley Prize
publisher: Princeton University Press