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149 5 The Ecology of Injustice Rats in the Civil Rights Era In the melodramatic first scene of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, Bigger Thomas’s day begins with a fight against a “huge black rat” in his family’s “tiny, one-room apartment.”1 His mother and sister huddle on a bed, screaming and “gaz[ing] open-mouthed at the trunk in the corner,” where the rat last appeared. Bigger orders his brother to block a “gaping hole in the molding” so the rat cannot escape. Meanwhile, Bigger corners it, wielding an iron skillet. The rodent “squealed and leaped at Bigger’s trouser-leg and snagged it in his teeth,” ripping a long gash before Bigger can shake it free. After a chase about the room, Bigger finally hurls the skillet, hitting his mark. He then “took a shoe and pounded the rat’s head, crushing it, cursing hysterically.” He dangles the body in front of his sister, who faints into her sobbing mother’s arms. Wright shows that mundane violence occupies the very walls of Bigger’s home and all of Bigger’s waking hours. Bigger himself lives in fear while his family—including two weak female characters—relies on him for protection. Wright drew parallels between rats and people in Chicago’s Black Belt. One literary scholar has noted that the “buildings of the ghetto produce an endless stream of hungry and fearful rats,” and Bigger stands for an “endless stream” of young black men shaped by racism in the slum environment. By the novel’s end, Bigger faces execution for rape and murder, viewed by authorities and society as a threat to be crushed.2 Over a decade later, rats still plagued low-income African-Americans in their homes, but in real life the story often played out differently from that 150 Resistance in the Age of Ecology in the Thomases’ fictional home. In late September 1957, Mrs. Eva Ray had had enough with the rats that shared her Harlem apartment. They sometimes chased her children about their flat on West 142nd Street. Finally, one of the children killed the most menacing rat. Harlem’s Amsterdam News ran a photo of Ray dangling the rat by its tail and staring defiantly at the camera. Unlike Bigger Thomas’s mother and sister, she declared: “I’m not afraid of any rat.”3 News editors knew that rats represented more than an individual problem; women and men struggled not only against rats but also against the political and ecological forces that supported rodents. In an era when new suburban homes, urban renewal, and miracle chemicals promised to usher in an era of modern living, rat-infested neighborhoods seemed to have been left behind. Low-income, central-city African-American communities in the late twentieth century became associated with rats in popular discourse and research about infestation, along with urban protest movements by communities themselves. Residents and activists in these communities, along with reformers from the outside, constructed ecological theories about the causes and cures for persistent rat infestation there. Black activists, journalists, and artists seldom, if ever, used the word “ecology.” Yet they, along with many residents of low-income neighborhoods of color, understood rats as part of a web that entangled the physical environment with racial injustice, urban politics, and even federal housing policy. Residents suffered material, immediate effects of living with rats, but they and community activists saw rats as symptoms and symbols of larger problems. Racial discrimination in the housing market still limited African-American families’ options as landlords of dilapidated buildings exploited their lack of choices. Substandard dwellings were so abundant in cities like New York that housing courts and city revolving funds could barely keep up with the need for rat-proofing. Federal funds for housing and community development largely flowed to new suburban communities , bypassing central cities where homes had languished for years without physical improvements. Insiders in infested communities saw rats as fleshy manifestations of the ecology of injustice and demanded that the benefits of American postwar prosperity be extended to their homes. In the face of persistent rats, communities resisted racism, stigma, and disinvestment . Many demanded support from government agencies to create healthy neighborhood environments.4 The Ecology of Injustice 151 Meanwhile, outsiders also hoped to modernize infested neighborhoods through rat control, but plans for doing so often divorced rats from the ecology of injustice. Some believed they could reduce the complexity of urban ecosystems by simply poisoning...

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