Scholarship Behind "Ghetto, The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea"

In the April 17, 2016 issue of the New York Times Book Review, Dr, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture reviews the new book, Ghetto, The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea, by Dr. Mitchell Duneier, Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. Dr. Muhammad describes the book as "a stunningly detailed and timely survey of scholarly work on the topic." As I read through the review, I was struck by how much of this scholarship, mostly written by African Americans,  is housed here at the Schomburg Center. Below is a list of some of these primary sources, which are at the heart of this new book.

Black Metropolis; a Study of Negro Life in a Northern City by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, with an introduction by Richard Wright.  New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company [1945].  

"a seminal and devastating critique of Northern racism in ­migration-era Chicago" —K. Muhammad

St. Clair Drake Papers, 1935-1990. Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Born in 1911, St. Clair Drake was an educator and social anthropologist who taught sociology at Roosevelt and Stanford Universities and at the Universities of Liberia and Ghana. His study of social life in the Caribbean and West Africa and in the black communities of Chicago and Great Britain spanned the 1930s to the 1980. His major study of Blacks in Chicago, Black Metropolis, written in collaboration with Horace Cayton, was published in 1945. A prolific lecturer and author, his many articles and essays appeared in books and in scholarly and non-scholarly journals in the United States and in Africa.

Horace R. Cayton Papers, 1866-2007.  Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago Public Library.  Sociologist, writer and academician Horace Roscoe Cayton was born in Seattle on April 12, 1903. In 1936, Cayton returned to Chicago to work on a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. The project was charged with studying the structure of the African American family and juvenile delinquency for three years, until 1939. St. Clair Drake, an anthropology instructor at the University of Chicago, joined the project. In 1941, funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fund enabled Drake and Cayton to organize their findings from the WPA project and supplement it with additional findings from the early 1940s. The result was one of the most seminal works on the life and culture of African Americans in Chicago— Black Metropolis . (1945).

American Dilemma; the Negro Problem and Modern Democracyby Gunnar Myrdal, with the assistance of Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose. New York, London, Harper & Brothers  [1944].

"Myrdal’s bible of mid-20th-century race-relations policy — a book so influential it was cited in the Brown v. Board of Education decision — left a gaping hole in the scholarship." K. Muhammad

Carnegie-Myrdal Study of the Negro in America research memoranda collection, 1935-1948. The Carnegie Corporation of New York hired Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish social scientist to organize and direct the project. He put together a team of African-American and white social scientists working in the field of race relations who prepared reports, also known as memoranda, on all aspects of life in the African-American community. These memoranda served as working documents to assist Myrdal in the preparation of his report, published as An American Dilemma.

Dark Ghetto; Dilemmas of Social Power by Kenneth B. Clark; foreword by Gunnar Myrdal. New York, Harper & Row [1965].

Metropolitan Applied Research Center (MARC). Kenneth Bancroft Clark (1914-2005) founded and directed the Metropolitan Applied Research Center, a non-profit research corporation concerned with the problems of American urban society.  The collection contains drafts of Roy Wilkins' and Ramsey Clark's book, "Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panthers and the Police. Search and Destroy: a Report, 1973 concerning the police raid of the Black Panther headquarters in Chicago on December 4, 1969, resulting in the deaths of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. The reports of the Grand Jury which conducted the investigation as well as the Commission's findings are included. Additionally, there are reports from the Metropolitan Applied Research Center, 1967-1975; and minutes of the New York State Urban Development Corporation.
 

The Negro Family, the Case for National Action. (the "Moynihan report."). United States. Department of Labor. Office of Policy Planning and Research.  Washington, U.S. Govt. Print. Office [1965].  Digital scan from Stanford University.
 

The Declining Significance of Race : Blacks and Changing American Institutions by William Julius Wilson. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [1978].

"And the black ghetto remains for many people a product of what Myrdal called “certain characteristics of the Negro population,” rather than, as Duneier concludes and the history attests, “a phenomenon of ongoing external domination and neglect.” —K. Muhammad

See other books written by Mitchell Duneier available at the New York Public Library.