black politicians in the time of the “new” urban politics

56 The Review of Black Political Economy

BLACK POLITICIANS IN THE TIME OF THE

"NEW" URBAN POLITICS

By Matthew Holden

I. Introduction

T years ago, had one addressed someone as "Mr. Mayor," one would almost surely have been addressing a white man. Today, it is not so, and it indicates something of why we really cannot treat " the minority ci ty" as some special museum piece to be examined in isolation.

The process is much broader. The "new" urban politics associated intimately with black people, and their relation to white people, even if the city is entirely white or entirely black or some mix in between. The new urban politics reflects, among other things, the world-wide revolt against white supremacy and the search for a new relationship.

In many ways, this is exhilarating and exciting. It is also awesome and anxiety-producing. At times, this leads to a fun-and-games politics. It leads to the unconscious use of politics as collective psychiatry, as a way of making people feel bet ter about themselves. It is not good for people to feel bad about themselves, and blacks surely have had enough of that.

Black Politicians 57

To make people feel better about themselves is a constructive enterprise. But there is some point at which collective psychiatry is self-defeating, at which it is essential to move beyond fun-and-games. That whole upsetting process is terribly important for black politicians, for it throws them into the power game in ways which they have seldom before experi~;nced.

II. Identifying the Power Points

The main question is what black politicians must think about more deeply in order to make a truly realistic contribution in the new situation. It is not enough to say that they must think about "power." That is true. The name of the political game is power. But to become infatuated with the language of power is often to mistake the word for its substance. Power is a mysterious relationship, not something one picks up in the palm of the hand-like a monkey wrench or a dollar bill. What they really have to think about is identifying the power points or the positions from which it is possible to exert some influence over somebody else.

At present, the great excitement is about the expected coming of many new black mayors in middle and large cities. This quest for the mayoralty is of great psychological value. It surely encourages vast numbers of people who need encouragement. It can be of great practical value. Yet greater sophistication is called for.

1. The title of "mayor" means different things in different places and circumstances. It is rather like calling someone "preacher." Martin Luther King, Jr., was indeed a preacher! But so was the late Senator Theodore G. Bilbo. So with mayors. In a manager plan city, if people adhere strictly to the idea that the councilmen should not "interfere" in "administration," then the mayoralty sometimes will not amount to much. Because there the mayor is really just another councilman. In those circumstances, he may have to try to make something out of nothing. But he should not delude himself or his supporters about how much the title means in the first place. It is a wholly different situation if the mayor has "pleasure" appointments and removals, particularly over a large number of employees.


2. Even if the mayoralty is important, not everyone is important. One of the most difficult circumstances arises when we see all kinds of factionalism because too many people want that one job. I don ' t know whether the issue of Ebony magazine which discusses this is correct or not, but i f it is, then Baltimore blacks are in for some trouble on precisely this score.

3. What is really important, therefore, is to keep in mind that the title cannot always indicate what is powerful, and everybody cannot have the same position at once. Thus, we come back to identifying other points of power. In urban local government, there are really three things which confer some power. One is the legal authority and practical ability to make decisions through the law enforcement system: police, prosecutors' offices, local courts. A second is control over appointments a n d removal of personnel and control over personnel expenditures. A third is control over capital budgets and capital expenditures. A lot of the opportunities for power comes - as the best practitioners of "machines" politics have k n o w n - f r o m controlling a lot of obscure offices. These offices often seem obscure, but may enable the holder to pinch somebody on the nerve that hurts! If these offices can be held by people who know what they want to do, and can work together, then the accretion of power begins!

Some Illustrations: In the State of Ohio, the county auditor is m a i n l y a "ministerial" functionary, but he has the responsibility to determine if the expenditure of funds is legal. In the same state there is long-standing legislation, quite apart from Federal policy, which calls for non-discrimination in the e x e c u t i o n o f p u b l i c c o n t r a c t s . Now we know that discrimination is so widespread that many public contractors must be practicing it. Can you imagine, then, the potential leverage of an auditor who might choose to forbid expenditures in payment of such contractors? In some places the county treasurer has the right and duty to invest short-term public funds or to decide in which banks they will be deposited. One can imagine the leverage of a sophisticated county treasurer who would make it clear to potential depositories that effective fair employment policies would be a prior condition to the


receiwt of such deposits. Nearly everywhere, the sheriff possesses legal authority in the whole county, including the centrall city. One can imagine the leverage of a sheriff who should undertake to investigate the lawlessness of police brutality. The same point can be made with respect to prosecutors and coroners who have nearly as much investigative authority as they wish to claim. Why have there been so few black contenders for these offices - particularly in those circumstances where the offices are less visible and less eagerly sought by those who want to have their names spread across the papers? I do not maintain that these are the offices to be sought, but merely that they are sometimes critical and worthy of much closer attention. (In this respect, the Alabamians who have gone after the sheriff's job show the profoundest realism.)

Still another aspect o f urban political influence is mastery o f administration and o f the games o f expertise. Government depends, in the end, on the performance of details (administration) and on knowledge of the technicalities (expertise). It is clear that if black officials are to gain real control, they will have to learn themselves - and develop a back-stopping corps of persons who know - all about the whys and wherefores of budgeting, zoning, planning, hea l th administration, federal relations, etc.

III. Considering the Potential Ethnic Detente

The idea o f expertise leads directly into another subject which is critical. That is demography, or the composition, movement, distribution, and changes in population. Dem,agraphy is a fundamental fact of politics, and it is time to pay more careful attention to the demographic patterns of urban politics. Who is migrating outward? Who is coming inward? And what does that mean?

De~nography points us to the black-white "ethnic" mix in the cities. Even those cities with actual black majorities in their populations will have many whites remaining for asfar into the future as one can see. Black rulers will have the same problem that white rulers have. Nobody can govern for long if he has to be at irreconcilable odds with a large share of his population, unless he happens to have the sheer physical force to put them down. If he has the sheer physical force to put them down then


he can govern indefinitely. Mississippi or South Africa are a full testament to that. A city such as Newark cannot be governed with the Newark Italians in full cry any more than it can be governed with Newark blacks in full cry. This leaves the problem of managing somehow to bridge important issues between two sets of people who do not have any natural affinity for each other. But it is absolutely indispensable, at least in the large cities in the north, to begin to find terms on which two populations can each realistically comprehend the other's necessities. Social peace will not be achieved over the opposition of either black or white ethnics.

Black politicians must ready themselves to explore the potentialities o f a detente with the "'white ethnics. "" These groups have hitherto been represented to each other through intermediaries-mainly Democratic trade union and liberal leadership. This will no longer do. Direct exchange is necessary, in order to discover if it even is possible to carry on what Congressman John Conyers calls "melting hostilities."

. Most black people believe that the white "ethnics" are their worst enemies. This may be true. But do they know that, and had they better not find out directly? I think they had. At present, blacks believe this mainly because they are told this by the intermediaries-most of whom do not really know white "ethnic" communities any better than they know black communities. What blacks are told may actually be false. Louis Harris recently collected some public opinion data for the National Urban League which at least gives a hint. According to the Harris reports, the most negative responses toward black objectives and black progress did not come from the white "ethnics," but from Anglo-Protestants ("native white Protestants").

. Direct exchange is also necessary if blacks are going to understand-not accept- the white "ethnic" points of view. There is a lot of historical mythology which is confusing.

One of the more remarkable bits of social fiction, now floating about in the world of social comment, is that the "old" urban politics did such a great deal to smooth the way for


ethnic newcomers that it was a major instrument in providing mobility into " the affluent middle-class." Nonsense! The "old" urban politics was very much an ethnic politics, but it simply is not true that any existing set of politicians seemed ever to welcon~e any newcomers or to do much for them. The stronger the old party organizations were, the less need they had to pay any newcomers more than a minimum "price" for political support. Then, as now, a political organization which can be realistically sure of itself can also choose and pick amongst its supporters.

At every step of urban politics, those who were " in" did their best to hold their own against any newcomers. Anglo-Protestants (or "WASPS") did their best to fend off the Irish. Once the Irish were in, they did their best to fend off the Italians, Poles, Slovaks, Slovenes, Lithuanians, Hungarians, and so on. As the latter entered the more important political games, they have done their best to lend off the Afro-American entry.

Remarkably enough, the time it has taken for these various groups to move from being mere newcomers, barely enfranchised but with no real political influence, to get to such influence as is represented by electing a mayor is very close in all the major cases. It took the Irish just about fifty years before they began to elect mayors in Boston and New York and Cleveland in the 1880's! It took the Italians just about the same time to do so, the first Italian mayors (with the notable exception of LaGuardia who was ten or fifteen years early) being elected around the early 1940's. In the cases of Cleveland and Gary, about the same time scale seems to have applied. Black peop le first became a significant proportion of the population in those cities around World War I, and it was just about fifty years to the elections of Mayor Hatcher (Gary) and of Mayor Stokes (Cleveland).

In most large cities, white ethnics are still on the very threshold of some local political power - in some places, such as Chicago, where there has been but one ethnic mayor, they have hardly approached the th reshold-and it is only realistic to recognize that they will fight over this. The question is: do blacks and white ethnics, neither of whom yet has very much, have to fight over scraps (or is there ever a potentiality of joint action and mutual benefit)? Maybe the union experience teaches a lesson here. If the trade union movement had assumed the utter incompatibility of these two groups, so to preclude


common action, the automobile, meat packing, and steel industr ies-to mention the obvious-would be open shop today.

IV. The "Old" Politics

Both the need for better.identification of the political power points in cities, and the need for understanding political demography, notably as it affects the relationship of black and white "ethnics," were factors in the practice of the "old" urban politics, as much as they remain factors in the "new" urban politics. They cannot be ignored, but black politicians cannot afford to become entrapped by the old politics. Some characteristics which distinguishes "old" politics are:

. In the Northern cities the old urban politics was more or less dominated by "professional" politicians. Sometimes, these politicians were organized into "machines" which had tight control over whole cities.

This was the case in Philadelphia for many years, and it was increasingly the case in Chicago from the Depression until recently. More often, professional politicians operated not through tight city-wide or county-wide machines, but through floating factions, alliances which were formed and broken up at need and convenience. This was very much the pattern of Chicago during the years of William Hale Thompson, and of Cleveland from the ve~/beginning of the century until the election of Mayor C~rl Stokes. Perhaps the one thing which can be said about the "old" urban politics was that citizens who did not fit into some grouping of professional politicians had very little chance of election to public office, and little more chance at influencing the policie~ of urban office-holders.

. Under the "old" urban politics, even the most influential local officials and politicians exercised power within rather restricted terms. Such officials and politicians could make decisions about which streets would be paved and which not. They could make decisions about whether the police would act vigorously against bookies, policy runners, prostitutes or after-hours joints - or whether they would be more


tolerant (ordinarily for a price). They could also make some decisions about the use of the licensing power, the inspection of construction projects, or the allocation of building permits or zoning variances.

From the standpoint of the poor citizen, the semi-literate citizen, or the immigrant who was not a citizen, and sometimes even ot" the educated, reasonably prosperous, but politically unconnected professional man, this could count as power. From the standpoint of the official or the politician, it was power. It permitted him to acquire supporters who would do his bidding, in return for money opportunities or exemption from some burden.,; o f the law, out of which a political organization could be constructed. It even permitted him, were he so inclined, to improve both his current consumption standard and his net worth.

On the other hand, there were some rather important constraints. These constraints arose out of the kind of bargain which John Gunther alluded to in his book Inside U.S.A., published more than twenty-five years ago. When Gunther asked, "Who runs Boston?" he was told, "State Street (the big business community) and the Irish." That is, each felt constrained to leave the other alone. Something like this must have been true in most large and middle-sized cities.

The big business community was interested in taxation policy, and desired to keep it low. Thus, city politicians probably were obliged to go easy on school building programs, hospital building programs, or other ventures which might move the tax rate upward but provide no obvious and immediate compensation to the large taxpayers. Prior to the massive union movement which came with New Deal blessing, city police forces almost certainly were adjuncts to the managers' private forces. The Memorial Day Massacre at the Republic Steel Plant in 1937, the use of police against auto union organizers, and Frank Hague's effort to keep the CIO out of Jersey City were probably not too unusual. (A colleague in political science, Michael Springer, maintains that James Michael Curley - a sort of Irish Adam Clayton Powell - got part of his bad reputation for reasons other than his troubles with the law. According to Springer, one of Curley's efforts, in his early days as Mayor of Boston, was precisely to try to change social policy - to make available a wider range of services, facilities, and opportunities


to the poor of Boston. If so, he was unusual.) Normally the restriction on the politicians' power was that they could not afford the controversies which would come with an effort to change social policy in a major way, and they did not try. Perhaps the big change in the "old" urban politics was that, once unionization became widespread, policemen stopped arresting strikers and started arresting strikebreakers.

Dozens of black politicians have had to play the "old" political game. Some played it brilliantly, and some poorly, but they had, literally, no option. One thinks it only fair and honest to note that we all learned much, and benefited some, from such dissimilar practitioners of the old urban politics as the late Congressman Dawson and the former Congressman Powell. It is fatuous to "blame" them-unwilling and reluctant victims of the larger system-that black people did not get more out of the old urban politics. But urban politicians today, particularly black politicians, literally exist in the nutcracker of history.

The real problems facing black elected officials demand more talent, skill, and toughness than their predecessors even needed or showed. The earlier politicians had very little burden to carry. Compared to the tasks which face mayors today, the generation of Thompson and Cermak and LaGuardia, or even of Cleveland's Burke (in the 1940's to the early 1950"s) and Chicago's Kennelly (Mayor Daley's immediate predecessor) had it very easy. Doubtless, they thought their problems were hard. And those problems were hard. But city government, and thus the politicians who ran city government, did not have to deal with the social conflicts, the economic complexities, or the technological pressures which exist today.

V. The "New" Politics

The "new" urban politics must be oriented to social policy in two ways:

1. It must be oriented toward a vast improvement in social opportunity and social equalization. One simple example is this. If black students do not receive better school opportunities under black rule than under white,


then an enormous disi l lusionment-and reactivation of factional politics-wiU take place within the black population.

. It must be oriented toward "social peace." There is a terribly important short-term problem, with long-term consequences. Social peace must mean a realistic mutual expectation of physical safety. What does this imply? Among other things, it implies that in the urban North, black elected officials (and other political leaders)will have to give serious thought to the strategy and tactics of urban disarmament. Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy (of the New York City Police Department) recently made a speech in which he advocated disarmament for civilians, but rejected the idea that policemen should give up their normal sidearms. However, he has introduced only one ingredient of the necessary prescription. Blacks have too much experience with police action to believe that compliance with any civil disarmament program will be achieved, if every policemen is still to go about armed. Many police forces in the world operate without the full force being armed at all times, and there is no reason why the United States should be an exception. Without going into the details of a disarmament program, the basic point is simple: It will be a long time before blacks and whites are fully confident about each other. In that interim, one of the ways to enhance confidence is to make it realistic for each to recognize that the other cannot do much harm. That calls for disarmament.

Again, this is a major reason for trying to establish a sort of d e t e n t e - n o t even a "coalition" -be tween blacks and white ethnics. The borderline conflicts between black and white areas take place precisely between blacks and white ethnics, and it is precisely each that needs the assurance that the other cannot do much harm, even if it wishes. This is critical because blacks cannot survive many more years of feverish anxiety, without some bold and decisive gamble to break the escalating pattern.

The new urban politics pours demands upon City Hall with the intensity of lava flowing down a volcanic mountain. But the sources of the eruptions, and the proper responses to them, do


not lie entirely with the compass of City Hall alone. Practitioners of the new urban politics will increasingly have to adapt to the reality of the ever-more complex connections between City Hall and the rest of the world.

B. Technology

One of those connections is the insistent effect of technology and economics. Observe, for instance, the problem of ecology and environment. It may be true, as some suspect, that much of the furor of "ecology" and "environment" is manufactured for the purpose of distracting attention from more obviously human social issues. But it will be a decisive error to believe that that is all. If air pollution is dangerous to human health, then it will be simply irresponsible to ignore the fact that the cities most likely to be governed by blacks-because blacks are most concentrated in industrial cities-will also be air pollution centers. If the development of children and adolescents growing into adulthood is influenced by the availability of recreational facilities, it will be irresponsible to say that playing stickball in a dirty, glass-strewn alley is enough. No one is well off enough to become an official himself who wants that for his children, and it would be depressing were black officials to accept an implicit class doctrine that it is good enough for the children of blacks less well off than themselves.

There are still other matters associated with technology. The growth of cable-television is of enormous importance, since local governments still have something to say about the rights and uses thereof. There is money to be made there, and blacks should certainly foresee an effort to move all into the area governed by the Federal Communications Commission-which the present broadcasting industry controls. But black elected officials will not make an impact there unless and until they command simultaneously the engineering, legal, and economic knowledge to know what games are being played.

Or consider airports. Decisions about where to place a n airport have more fundamental influence on land use than almost any decision a city planning commission will ever make. Consider New York City, and the environs of Jamaica Bay - an area of great importance to Brooklyn and Queens and an area in which there is a virtually inevitable confrontation between blacks and certain white groups as both search for space. Thus,


consider John F. Kennedy Airport - which is the decisive unit in tha! area. Airports obviously generate noise. There are people who specialize in measuring noise and in measuring its effects on human activities. Within the orbit of JFK, there are many, many public schools which should not be there from the point of view of noise effects on running a school. But the schools are there, and the airport is there. You may well believe that, in due course, this will become a rather serious political (and possibly legal) problem. New York City cannot be remade. But this little example makes the essential point. The decisions about an airport will come not from urban local government but from the jo_i_nt activities of the Federal aviation people, the airline industr37, and the airport operators. Yet it is unquestionably the local politician who will take the heat when people become excited.

This is but one example of a technological (and economic) consideration which sets limits on what an urban politician can do. He is in a very bad way if those limits do not allow him to satisfy the demands and needs of his constituents. This is not merely a New York City problem, but the kind of technological problem which will affect every city in which black people live in large numbers, and in which black politicians are acquiring new roles.

The author has chosen to emphasize these technological demensions-and there are many technological elements by-passed - because they are dimensions which black politicians and community activists, under the extreme pressure of their situations, have thus far not usually noticed. If blacks do nolL notice them soon, the chances are that the now-heralded black control of the cities will turn out to be more form than substance.

C St~te and National

These issues lead to a restatement of the point: the most important options in urban policy will frequently lie not with City Hall but with "higher" governments. This is one reason to be less anxious about metropolitan government, t t is possible that, in the North, some metropolitan governments will be created with the idea of diluting influence of blacks in the central city. But this dilution strategy will really not work. If a black population is large enough to control a central city, it will

68 The Review of Black Political Eeonomy

be so large a minority in the metropolitan government that it will frequently have veto power. Since i t will remember its former position, and the reasons for creating a "metro" government, it will also be active, hostile and reasonably cohesive. As a result, metropolitan officials and political leaders will find themselves under greater, not less, pressure from blacks - whom, under the prior circumstances of separate governments, they could have ignored. Once this lesson is learned through practical experience, white politicians who advocate dilution strategies will fast lose their audiences and their credibility.

The real political threat comes from Dillon's Rule plus "one-man, one-vote." Dillon's Rule means that state governments have, if they choose to exercise it, unlimited power over local governments-except where state constitutions provide the contrary. One-man, one-vote means, as is now belatedly recognized, an important increase in the suburb's influence in state legislative politics. That is simply because seats follow people.

Naturally, many suburban interests will be different. Thus, the more serious threats are threefold. (1) In writing formulas for such things as state support of public education, suburban interests will tend to be given a considerable advantage. (2) In proposing various regional coordination schedules, central city decision makers will often be at a disadvantage relative to their suburban counterparts. Transportation planning will be particularly affected this way as already has occurred in the development o f the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York. This will be even more acute in such matters as health planning or in state allocation of block grant (general) revenues from the Federal Government. (3) Finally, there will be the threat of outright "ripper" legislation by which critical functions are simply taken away from the city government. This has occurred again and again in American municipal economic history. The city of Boston only regained administrative control of its police force in the year 1965, having lost it in 1882! At the time, the Irish-Catholic Democrats were first coming to local political power-Mayor Patrick Collins was elected in 1902-and the Yankee-Protestant Republicans simply did not trust the Irish to run the police force! State politics is much more of a threat than metropolitan government.

Finally, the "new" urban politics is national politics. It is not


only that welfare caseloads rise with a fall in employment, but that the real solutions to welfare caseloads depend on national income maintenance policies, national income redistribution policies, and national economic growth policies. The airports problem, mentioned before, really depends on Federal transportation policy. Housing depends on the Federal housing policy; and even law enforcement is no longer a local government preserve.

D. Institutional Reform

Consequently, black politicians must give more thought to the substantive national policies they prefer. Generally speaking, one would believe that the present tendency toward urban "decentralization" leads away from black power, not toward it, even though that is a controversial position. What institutional changes should black politicians collectively lobby for?

The first is an introduction o f cultural pluralism into the Federal bureaucracy. Urban political decisions require a fundamental reorganization in Federal bureaucracy. But Federal official~ do not speak of their agency's program with respect to black liberation or social peace. Agencies need a strategic objective, something specific to do and a time within which to do it. Issues of black and white are as important as the Cold War was fifteen or twenty years ago. At that time, almost every Federal agency, no matter what its responsibility, had a whole set of people at the top of the agency whose responsibility was to ask how does this proposal for this agency service the particular foreign policy purpose we have in mind. This principle should be applied in the bureaucracy.

Everybody knows what the unemployment problem is in urban ghettos. But has anyone yet heard the Council of Economic Advisors say in the year 1980 or 1975 or 1973 its objective is to reduce that to the standard measure of full employment which is 4 percent? I think not. If we were obliged to adopt such a criterion, then its policies would almost surely be quite different. This is just as true for the Department of Transportation, Department of Health, Education and Welfare, or the Tax Policy Analysis unit in the Treasury Department. Black elected officials might lobby to persuade the President to exercise a very simple kind of power toward this end. He does


not need new legislation. He does not need new constitutional authorization. He does not even need new appropriations. What he needs is a new political incentive and this would be true for any president.

The second is that some new constitutional status for cities, sufficient to improve their political representation in Congress, is essential. A practical intent is to create the basis for a coherent Congressional bloc which has a vested interest in urban investment as a primary Federal policy. Norman Mailer did a great disservice by running for Mayor of New York, since he made a joke of what ought to be a very serious idea: urban statehood. One needs to return to the conception which was relevant when the Constitution was first adopted, namely that a state was not merely a set of lines on a map, but an actual political communi ty with some central needs. That is precisely the condition of the cities, but these political communities cannot achieve adequate political representation under present conditions.

. One should not be troubled by questions as to economic viability. Most large cities are, in fact, economically viable - although they are not fiscally viable under present taxation systems. Moreover, it would not mat ter if they were not economically viable. Neither is Arizona without Federal subsidies, and the purpose o f the Arizona congressional delegation is to siphon into the state those subsidies which are required.

. A population criterion is probably necessary. One view is that any population unit which exceeds Arizona, Alaska, or Hawaii is probably at least as much entitled - on rational grounds - to autonomous representation as are those states. Somewhat arbitrarily we might put the minimum population at about 500,000 people. This would create twenty-one additional states, and the number seventy-one is quite as rational as the number fifty, forty-eight, thirty-seven, or any o f those numbers which have existed in the past. (Politically, this should also make sense to the existing states, for their new suburban-oriented legislatures ought to be pleased to have nothing to do with the central cities).


. Out of the twenty-one new city-states, probably ten or so would be more or less under black control. The difference is that they would not be electing merely mayors - with little real power - but congressmen and senators. Ten times two (senators) equals twenty. Twenty senators bound by a common interest and a common necessity are a bloc likely to carry great weight, which is precisely the purpose of the proposal.

This idea has actually floated about in textbook form for many years, but it has been neglected because of an excessively narrow view of what is "practical." It cannot be practical to have ~t governmental arrangement under which essential decisions-decisions essential to the future stability of the republic-cannot be made. For that idea of "practical" merely says that whatever has been done in the past is the test of practical: an apotheosis of mental laziness and received prejudice.

The idea is part of a whole pattern which is slowly developing. It is the need for a new political agreement about the conduct of the United States: a new "constitution" in the social sense. Governor Ogilvie has proposed a constitutional amendment for revenue-sharing; many have proposed an amendment to mitigate "one-man, one-vote"; the question of public subsidy of non-public schools must arise; and the relationship of Puerto Rico to the United States Government may become such an issue.

Yet the idea of a new Constitution frightens many. Somehow they fear that the "wool hats" will control that process. But this is by no means self-evident. Black politicians will make a serious error if they draw back timidly, or if they accept unthinkingly the automatic liberal fears of what a remaking of the American Constitution might entail. Particularly, they cannot draw back timidly if they really believe - what both they and many white politicians say - that the United States is in mortal danger, that the present politics does not "work," and that the only options are toward the street politics of the last few years. For the latter clearly leads to the substitution of the military planners for the social planners. I myself do not believe that at all inevitable, but maintain that its avoidance requires a more serious approach to the problems of the new urban politics.

black politicians in the time of the “new” urban politics

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