Remaking Space, Shaping the Struggle: Urban Planning and the Civil Rights Movement in East St. Louis, Illinois, 1958-1974

摘要

This history of East St. Louis in the 1960s reveals how city leaders, civic boosters, and urban planners reacted and responded to structural economic change at a time when African Americans were organizing a social movement against racial discrimination and formulating political responses to racial inequality. Like cities across the urban North, East St. Louis acutely felt the flight of industrial capital, and, like many cities across the United States it experienced the loss of white residents to suburban areas. City officials became almost dizzied in their quest for redevelopment, and the height of these efforts to reinvent and reimagine East St. Louis coincided with the climax of the African American civil rights movement. The differences between African Americans experiences in urban space and the spatial imaginations of urban planners shaped the political contestations over the social and economic changes that impacted East St. Louis in the postwar era. As officials reimagined urban space by trying to remake some places and produce entirely new economic uses of urban space, African Americans highlighted racial inequalities by asserting their rightful place in a society where they existed as second-class citizens and by laying claim to their place in the city. African American citizens grew frustrated with the city's segregationist culture and its entrenched political machine, and civil rights battles in East St. Louis transformed into a struggle against racial, economic, and spatial inequality. When African Americans made concerted efforts to build up and better their neighborhoods, while demanding access to the jobs required to do so, they were proposing that social equality could be achieved through a more equitable production of urban space. By bringing together the history of the civil rights struggle in East St. Louis with the local history of urban planning amidst postwar civic revival, this thesis shows how deindustrialization and suburbanization spurred both planners and activists to mobilize in the attempt to chart an urban development agenda. The conflicting visions of redevelopment shaped the political confrontations that defined the civil rights era in East St. Louis.