Description

Arnold Hirsch argues that in the postdepression years Chicago was a "pioneer in developing concepts and devices" for housing segregation and that the legal framework for the national urban renewal effort was forged in the heat generated by the racial struggles on Chicago's South Side. In chronicling the strategies used by ethnic, political, and business interests threatened by the great migration of southern blacks in the 1940s, Hirsch reveals how the violent reaction of an emergent "white" population combined with public policy to segregate the city.