Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis by Keona K Ervin

Author:Keona K Ervin [Ervin, Keona K]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Women, American, Minority Studies, Civil Rights, Social Science, African American & Black Studies, Political Science, Economic History, History, Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780813169866
Google: F0EoDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 35464236
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2017-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

6

“Jobs and Homes . . . Freedom”

Working-Class Struggles against Postwar Urban Inequality

St. Louis Argus staff members silenced Sarah Wallace’s voice in their story about her living conditions and the squalor that defined the neighborhood and residences of the city’s poor and working-class black population. Instead of providing Wallace with a platform from which to speak about her lived reality in her own words and on her own terms, they just presented a vivid description of her living quarters to depict life in St. Louis’s most notorious slums. A widow and a welfare recipient, Sarah Wallace was also unemployed and the sole breadwinner of her household, but this critical dimension the writers omitted. Writing in the tradition of some journalists who in the 1950s used sensationalism to raise awareness about the need for urban renewal, the Argus writers rendered Wallace mute and her breadwinning status illegible. The fact that she was an economic actor, albeit a marginalized one within the scope of St. Louis’s paid labor landscape, failed to make it to the record. Although Wallace’s voice did not find a place in the newspaper, voices like hers found expression through the alternative channels that emerging forms of activism opened in post-1945 St. Louis.1

Shifting the lens to black working-class women’s lives and political labors in a city better known for its postwar failures, this chapter rewrites the history of urban decline. Black working-class women were situated and situated themselves at the center of the overlapping battles that constituted St. Louis’s contribution to the debate over the long-term vitality of American cities. Caught between municipal officials who wished to drum up public support for “slum clearance” and black community leaders who had been advocating for years for safe, affordable, and quality housing, black working-class women became the face of urban poverty. They were not only symbols, however; they also reshaped postwar American cities into arenas of struggle for economic dignity. Refusing to accept outsider status or to be cast as victims of the fallen American city, these women threw light on the many challenges they faced as low-income black urbanites and became active participants in challenging the deep structural problems that threatened the Gateway City’s postwar progress. The cluster of economic issues that their working-class politics made public anticipated and marked the core elements of the city’s decline.2

During the 1950s and early 1960s, public housing, urban renewal, economic opportunity through welfare reform and jobs, and trade union leadership emerged as key battlegrounds. In this era, black working-class women measured economic dignity in terms of the quality of life of low-income residents in St. Louis city proper. For public-housing tenants, jobs and homes were interconnected; they made no easy divisions between access to decent public housing and acceptable employment, rent and a living wage, or clean and safe buildings and working conditions that mirrored their self-respect. Housing matters were deeply crucial to black women’s economic experience and working-class activism because women determined through their politics that the fight for affordable and decent public housing was a critical component of a workers’ rights political agenda.

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