Description
Book SynopsisIn 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.
Trade ReviewIn 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 YorkThis 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 LiberalismAn 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 *
