Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Family Life in a Federal Slum
“This book represents one analytical aspect of data obtained in a six-year study of a Federal housing project in St. Louis. There was a brief period of racial integration following a court ruling on the original separate-but-equal housing plan, but within a short time the thirty-three eleven-story buildings housed a totally Black community. In 1959, five years after it was opened for occupancy, the Pruitt-Igoe Development “had become a community scandal” and even the 10,000 residents in the the complex still left it with “the highest vacancy rate of any public housing complex in the country.””—M. Estellie Smith,American Anthropologist“Rainwater’s book represents the results of much that has been happening to social scientists in the field of race relations since the mid-1960s… This book is mandatory reading for students of race relations, has much to say to students of social policy, and is deserving of a place on reading lists for methodology courses.”—Robert S. Moore,The British Journal of Sociology“The research on which this book was based focuses upon the family lives of some 10,000 black children and adults living in the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis. The project has periodically received coverage from the national news media by virtue of its high incidence of crime, delinquency, tenant fear, illegitimacy, matrifocal families, welfare dependency, unemployment, poor school performance, racial problems, and widespread physical deterioration… The data, gained through participant observation and unstructured interviews, reveal ghetto life as entailing considerable deprivation and frustration as well as a community of people who think poorly of each other, who attack, exploit, and manipulate each other, and who give each other small comfort in a desperate world.”—James W. Vander Zanden,Contemporary Sociology“Although it is hardly unexpected, it is worth noting that the qualities which established Trans-action as an important policy-oriented magazine in the latter half of the 1960’s are particularly evident in the latest writing of its senior editor, Lee Rainwater. The freshness and honesty of his approach would have been surprising inBehind Ghetto Walls—a long summary of eight years of field work—had it not been for the success of the magazine… [A] most impressive achievement.”—Hannan Rose,Sociology--This text refers to thePaperbackedition.