Dangerous or Endangered?: Race and the Politics of Youth in Urban America

1. Back in the Day

| 25 1 Back in the Day Linda Jackson had never wanted to be involved in politics. As “a preacher’s kid,” she was in church seven days a week doing community work. When she left home she swore, “I was never going to participate in anything else. That’s the end of it.” But she got “thrown back into” community work as white flight and economic decline hit Elmhurst hard in the 1970s and ‘80s, and she watched her neighborhood struggle with crime and blight that erased the precarious distinctions between middle-class and poor in East Oakland. Over twenty years later, when I first visited her home, Linda Jackson was frustrated by the city’s failed promises, fed up with ongoing problems of drug dealing and violence, and angry at “this generation of kids that’s out here shooting up people.” Linda Jackson spoke with the rhythmic cadences and broad vowels of Arkansas. “I’m just a simple little country girl,” she’d say in community meetings , before her voice took on a steely tone, her impatience with city officials shining through an otherwise polite southern demeanor. An African American woman in her mid-sixties, she had attended a state college in Arkansas soon after it was integrated, retired from administrative work at a local hospital , and now ran a small family construction company with her husband out of their home. Mrs. and Mr. Jackson raised two children, and they now watched anxiously as their two grandchildren negotiated the transition through their teenage years in East Oakland. Their ample 1940s bungalow nestled into a low hill in Toler Heights, a predominantly black middle-class community where many neighbors worked in professional or government jobs, but others lived below the poverty line. Only one block away lay the run-down 1970s apartment buildings, liquor stores, and mostly empty store fronts that cluster along MacArthur Boulevard in the sprawling and much poorer flatlands of Elmhurst. Mrs. Jackson first joined her homeowners’ association in the 1970s after a series of robberies in her neighborhood. They created a neighborhood patrol 26 | Back in the Day and built a close relationship with the police department. One meeting and committee seemed to lead to another, until soon she was spending evenings and most vacations working with the association, the Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council, and neighborhood redevelopment efforts. As her grandkids began to go to the neighborhood public schools, she was drawn towards working with the schools as well. By the time we sat down in her home to talk, Mrs. Jackson had long been a leader in neighborhood politics. She regularly spoke in front of the city council, gave interviews to newspapers, and organized with a strong network of neighbors to crack down on cruising, drug dealing, and violence throughout East Oakland. “All of us that are participating own our homes. We have chosen to stay here. We could have left but we decided not to. We decided we’re no longer going to be ignored.” She described East Oakland as the city’s “forgotten stepchild.” “People will come out and give us a lot of lip service, canned speeches. You know how many plans they’ve had out here?” She was fed up with watching those plans pile up, unfunded and never implemented. “What people seem to forget is that we all have a stake in this. I heard the most ridiculous crazy man on the radio. He said he wasn’t interested in eduFigure 3. Map of Elmhurst: In the Flatlands. (Mark Kumler and Diana Sinton, University of Redlands) Back in the Day | 27 cation because he had no kids. This man better be interested.” She knew the effects of public disinvestment. “These kids that you’re leaving behind without education will be your worst nightmare in the future. The have-nots are going to be coming up robbing you.” She looked back at the massive budget cuts to cities “during Reagan’s time” and saw the results all around her neighborhood . “All of us have paid a price for it.” Mrs. Jackson had grown up in a strict southern household and worried that parents today weren’t instilling the proper discipline in children. Her parents had raised five “strong-willed” children back in Arkansas and taught them that “you had to earn what you get.” Growing up poor, she remembered picking cotton to pay for her own school clothes. “Not...