The Politics of Public Housing
Subtitle: Black Women's Struggles Against Urban Inequality (Transgressing Boundaries)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Oxford University Press
Published: September 9, 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780195158908
First sentence: In the small isolated farm town of Winfall, North Carolina, on Virginia's border, Clara Perry Gordon's parents, Bolson and the elder Clara Perry, planted cotton.
Description: "In this collective biography, Rhonda Y. Williams takes us behind, and beyond, politically expedient labels to provide an incisive and intimate portrait of poor black women in urban America. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Williams challenges the notion that low-income housing was a resounding failure that doomed three consecutive generations of postwar Americans to entrenched poverty. Instead, she recovers a history of grassroots activism, of political awakening, and of class mobility, all facilitated by the creation of affordable public housing. The stereotyping of black women, especially mothers, has obscured a complicated and nuanced reality too often warped by the political agendas of both the Left and the Right and has prevented an accurate understanding of the successes and failures of government antipoverty policy."--BOOK JACKET.