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3 books match the query 'Grand Rapids (Mich.)'

cover of A City within a City: The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan

A City within a City

The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Todd E Robinson

Temple University Press, 2012

A City within a City examines the civil rights movement in the North by concentrating on the struggles for equality in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Historian Todd Robinson studies the issues surrounding school integration and bureaucratic reforms as well as the role of black youth activism to detail the diversity of black resistance. He focuses on respectability within the African American community as a way of understanding how the movement was formed and held together. And he elucidates the oppositional role of northern conservatives regarding racial progress.
 
A City within a City cogently argues that the post-war political reform championed by local Republicans transformed the city's racial geography, creating a racialized "city within a city," featuring a system of "managerial racism" designed to keep blacks in declining inner-city areas. As Robinson indicates, this bold, provocative framework for understanding race relations in Grand Rapids has broader implications for illuminating the twentieth-century African American urban experience in secondary cities.

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cover of African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids

African Americans in the Furniture City

The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids

Randal Maurice Jelks

University of Illinois Press, 2006

African Americans in the Furniture City is unique not only in terms of its subject, but also for its framing of the African American struggle for survival, civil rights, and community inside a discussion of the larger white community. Examining the African-American community of Grand Rapids, Michigan between 1850 and 1954, Randal Maurice Jelks uncovers the ways in which its members faced urbanization, responded to structural racism, developed in terms of occupations, and shaped their communal identities.

Focusing on the intersection of African Americans' nineteenth-century cultural values and the changing social and political conditions in the first half of the twentieth century, Jelks pays particularly close attention to the religious community's influence during their struggle toward a respectable social identity and fair treatment under the law. He explores how these competing values defined the community's politics as it struggled to expand its freedoms and change its status as a subjugated racial minority.

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cover of Making the MexiRican City: Migration, Placemaking, and Activism in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Making the MexiRican City

Migration, Placemaking, and Activism in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Delia Fernández-Jones

University of Illinois Press, 2023

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2023

Large numbers of Latino migrants began to arrive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1950s. They joined a small but established Spanish-speaking community of people from Texas, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Delia Fernández-Jones merges storytelling with historical analysis to recapture the placemaking practices that these Mexicans, Tejanos, and Puerto Ricans used to create a new home for themselves. Faced with entrenched white racism and hostility, Latinos of different backgrounds formed powerful relationships to better secure material needs like houses and jobs and to recreate community cultural practices. Their pan-Latino solidarity crossed ethnic and racial boundaries and shaped activist efforts that emphasized working within the system to advocate for social change. In time, this interethnic Latino alliance exploited cracks in both overt and structural racism and attracted white and Black partners to fight for equality in social welfare programs, policing, and education.

Groundbreaking and revelatory, Making the MexiRican City details how disparate Latino communities came together to respond to social, racial, and economic challenges.

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