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in the United States has been profound. They are critical to understanding how “constructions of race and manifestations of racism” are tied to community formation (Gotham 2000, 629). But in racially tense urban environments, especially northern cities in the 1920s and 1950s after the great migrations of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north and south, homeowners’ associations were focused mostly on racial exclusion rather than community formation (Plotkin 2001). With the origins of the Cold War and initial civil rights initiatives in the late 1940s, the extent of segregation in the 1950s did not change. As Loewen notes, “of 350,000 new homes built in northern California between 1946 and 1960 with FHA [Federal Housing Administration] support, fewer than 100 went to blacks. That same pattern holds for the whole state, and for the nation as well” (2005, 128–129; author’s emphasis). What changed was that in 1948, in Shelley v Kraemer, the U.S. Supreme Court, pushed by the NAACP, struck down racial restrictive covenants, which limited ownership and tenancy to “Caucasians and Whites only.” Given the great migration of African Americans to northern cities during the Second World War; given the postwar housing crunch in these cities in the 1950s, aided and abetted by federal housing policies; and given the emerging urban crisis that began in the 1950s, not the 1960s, massive conflicts erupted between largely white workingclass , Roman Catholic, single-family homeowners on the one side, and African Americans on the other. In Thomas Sugrue’s pioneering study of Detroit in these years, most white residents in the outer-city neighborhoods close to the auto plants thought their economic interests and communal identities were threatened by racial integration. They turned to homeowner associations to defend their interests and their world (Sugrue 1996). Federations of property owner associations formed in the city to challenge any property owners and real estate brokers who “breached restrictive covenants” (1996, 221). When legal and extralegal means failed, anti-communist rhetoric (it was, after all, the 1950s) and violence ensued. “White Detroiters instigated over two hundred incidents against blacks moving into formerly all-white neighborhoods, including harassment, mass demonstrations, picketing, effigy burning, window breaking, arson, vandalism, and physical attacks. Most incidents followed improvement association meetings” (1996, 233). Similar History Matters 63 conditions of competition for space, housing, and community as well as similar uses of homeowners’ and neighborhood associations were evident in Chicago (Seligman 2005) and other cities facing housing and economic pressures. In the post–World War II era, the conservative cold-war political economy stifled progressive forms of community action and encouraged more anti-progressive forms of community development, both at home and abroad. Community efforts such as homeowners’ and property associations have a long history. But conservative eras such as the 1950s tied this necessity for neighborhood associations to a reactionary politics. Segregationist goals were intertwined with community betterment, interconnecting the protection of property values with a politics of neighborhood exclusion and racism. This continued in the next reactionary political economy, the years since the late 1970s. Writing about Los Angeles, Mike Davis found affluent homeowner organizing to be not only the source of the anti-property tax initiatives in the late 1970s that foreshadowed Reaganomics, the most powerful social movement in southern California in the 1980s, but also a critical force behind the “deliberate shaping” of “fragmented and insular local sovereignties” that modeled suburban development throughout the United States (1990, 164). Conservative and right-wing uses of community continue in our current era. The anti-canon is not an historical artifact. But its past and present are filled with lessons. Among the most important is that community action is not inherently progressive. More specifically, in conservative eras, first, the dominant form of community action adopts a conservative and reactionary politics; second, liberal efforts are moderated and incorporated; third, left efforts are marginalized and often repressed; and fourth, reactionary community efforts are unleashed. post-1975. In the neoconservative decades after 1975, the impact of a conservative, arguably reactionary, global and national context on local organizing continued to be enormous. Other forms of organizing arose in the years since 1975, ones that were much more explicitly reactionary, focused on social rather than political/economic issues. Prominent examples could include groups such as Restore our Alienated Rights (ROAR) in Boston, opposing busing; anti-abortion groups C o n t e s t i n g C o m m u n i t y 64 [18.191...

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