The Politics of Remaking Urban Black Civil Society

Contrary to William J. Wilson who focuses on industrial changes and its
consequences for urban social structures, Cottingham examines the trajectory of
urban black civil society during its fitful transition out of a politically entrenched
racial/caste regime. In the 1930s, a vigorous, though severely segregated, urban
black society emerged as southern migrants arrived in New Jersey's small
industrial cities. As it was politically constructed, civil society was founded on a rigid
social hierarchy through communicative interactions organized through black
newspapers, churches, clubs and civic organizations.



With the race-based urban riots of the 1960s, this political order immediately
dissipated. As a consequence, the normative walls embedded in the interstices of
old black civil society immediately crumbled. In conjunction with economic changes,
mutuality within the political realm-the integration of racial, class, gender, and
ideological hierarchies-was politically reconfigured in the 1970s and 1980s.




Urban black civil society now existed on a remade political terrain and operated
outside the social norms previously embedded in the old regime. Powerful political
forces jolted the social realm and spawned alternative communicative discourses
embedded within urban black civil society.




In an effort to salvage civil society in the 1980s, New Jersey's administrative
agencies deployed policy regimes to arrest an unfolding urban social order. In the
face of surging black identities, interests, and social norms, state authority was
restructured in schools, hospitals, and juvenile courts to discipline a subaltern
social order. As the politics of national political incorporation advanced in the 1990s,
southern black migrants confronted entrenched barriers in their struggle for greater
justice and enhanced social equality.