1 Neighborhood Scout, “Neighborhood Scout’s Most Dangerous Cities—2015,” www.neighborhoodscout.com. Accessed March 1, 2015.
2 Erik Eckholm, “A City Celebrates a Brand New Stadium, but Not after 9 P.M. in Some Quarters,” New York Times, June 27, 2010.
3 Color blindness or race neutrality conceives of race exclusively as an individual identity construct and not as a category produced systematically and historically through exploitation and discrimination. Ideologically, it denies a group’s position within a racial hierarchy that influences access to resources and delineates social outcomes and replaces it with a depoliticized identity unrelated to systemic inequalities. This formal rejection of systemic racism suggests that race—as a social category and a marker of structured disadvantage—is no longer a basis for individual or group social or political standing. Contemporary charges of unresolved racism and racial inequalities, which tend to call for intervention on the part of states and social institutions, are eviscerated. See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009); Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David Dietrich, “The Sweet Enchantment of Color-Blind Racism in Obamerica,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 634, no. 1 (2011): 190–206; Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliot Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Shultz, and David Wellman, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); David J. Roberts and Minnele Mahtani, “Neoliberalizing Race, Racing Neoliberalism: Placing ‘Race’ in Neoliberal Discourses,” Antipode 42, no. 2 (2010): 248–257; Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics beyond the Age of Greed (London: Paradigm, 2008); Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003); Christopher Mele, “Neoliberalism, Race, and the Redefining of Urban Redevelopment,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 2 (2013): 598–617. Color-blind racial ideology strips the realities of contemporary urban poverty from their historical antecedents and structural causes, leaving nothing behind but the cultural characteristics of the affected individuals themselves as the focus of explanation. See Kenneth J. Neubeck and Noel A. Cazenave, Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card against America’s Poor (New York: Routledge, 2001).
4 Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, 2. See also David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
5 I use the terms “rhetoric,” “representations,” and “discourses” interchangeably to refer to various combinations of language, narratives, professional terminologies, and popular images that circulate in news articles, fiction, policies, and other forms of public documents and privilege and affirm ideological frameworks regarding race and racism. Discourses and representations endorsed by those with power and authority influence how “race” is talked and written about, experienced, and understood and thereby dominate privileged meanings while excluding others. See Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism (New York: Routledge, 2005).
6 The debate on whether and how much segregation has declined is largely a methodological one pertaining to questions of geographic scale and definitions of racial categories. See Robert Adelman and Christopher Mele, eds., Race, Space, and Exclusion: Segregation and Beyond in Metropolitan America (New York: Routledge, 2015); Nancy A. Denton, “Interpreting U.S. Segregation Trends: Two Perspectives,” City and Community 12, no. 2 (2013): 156–159; Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor, The End of the Segregated Century: Racial Separation in America’s Neighborhoods, 1890–2010, Civic Report no. 66 (New York: Manhattan Institute, 2012); Richard Alba and Steven Romalewski, The End of Segregation? Hardly (New York: CUNY Graduate Center, Center for Urban Research, 2012); John Logan and Brian Stults, The Persistence of Segregation in the Metropolis: New Findings from the 2010 Census, census brief prepared for Project US2010 (Providence, R.I.: US 2010, 2011).
7 Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Space,” in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, eds., Simmel on Culture (London: Sage, 1997 [1903]), 143.
8 New York Times, “Riots Mar Peace in Chester, PA,” April 26, 1964.
9 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “More Than Prejudice: Restatement, Reflections, and New Directions in Critical Race Theory,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (2015): 82.
10 See Arnold Hirsch, “With or without Jim Crow: Black Residential Segregation in the United States,” in Arnold Hirsch and Raymond H. Mohl, eds., Urban Policy in Twentieth-Century America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 65–99; Gregory Squires, Capital and Communities in Black and White: The Intersections of Race, Class, and Uneven Development (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Also see relevant sections in Joe R. Feagin and Robert Parker, Building American Cities: The Urban Real Estate Game, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1990).
11 Kevin Fox Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2000 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002).
1 John Ihlder, “How the War Came to Chester: A Study of the War’s Effect upon Living Conditions,” study prepared for the Philadelphia Housing Authority, MS, Delaware County Historical Society, Chester, Pa., 1918, 243. Chester was a stop for trains along the Pennsylvania Railroad’s New York-Washington route up to the late 1960s. Since 1976 Amtrak trains running along the Northeast Corridor have no longer stopped in Chester.
2 Elliott M. Rudwick, Race Riot in East St. Louis, July 2, 1917 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 3.
3 John Morrison McLarnon III, “Ruling Suburbia: A Biography of the McClure Machine of Delaware County, Pennsylvania,” Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware (1997), 17.
4 Ibid., 46–49.
5 Ibid., 42.
6 Richard Harris, Politics and Prejudice: Small-Town Blacks Battle a Corrupt System (Media, Pa.: Changing Outlook, 2008), 20–48.
7 Martin Kilson, “Political Change in the Negro Ghetto, 1900–1940s,” in Nathan Irvin Huggins, Martin Kilson, Daniel M. Fox, and John Morton Blum, eds., Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 167–192.
8 Ihlder, “How the War Came to Chester,” 244. The population increase was short-lived, as the total population dropped to 58,000 in 1920.
9 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 82.
10 Ibid., 82–83; Ihlder, “How the War Came to Chester,” 244.
11 Ihlder, “How the War Came to Chester,” 244.
12 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 62.
13 Daniel R. Fusfeld and Timothy Bates, The Political Economy of the Urban Ghetto (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 17–23.
14 Ihlder, “How the War Came to Chester,” 243.
15 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 122.
16 Ibid.
17 Jennifer Leigh-Shatto Craighead, “Quest for Freedom: The Chester Race Riot of 1917,” MS, Millersville University, 1990. See also newspaper accounts of the riots in the Race Riots file at the Delaware County Historical Society, Chester, Pa., including Chester Times, July 26–31, 1917; Philadelphia North American, July 26–31, 1917; Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, July 26–31, 1917; New York Times, July 26–27, 29, 1917.
18 Philadelphia North American, “Chester Riots,” August 4, 1917, cited in McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 128–129.
19 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 129–132.
20 Harris, Politics and Prejudice, 30.
21 Ibid., 31.
22 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 292–293.
23 Ibid., 298.
24 Ibid., 300–330.
25 National Labor Review Board, “In the Matter of Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co. and Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America,” 38, no. 63 (January 15, 1942): 239–240. Hereafter cited as NLRB.
26 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 366; John Morrison McLarnon III, “Pie in the Sky vs. Meat and Potatoes: The Case of Sun Ship’s Yard No. 4,” Journal of American Studies 34, no. 1 (2000): 67–88.
27 NLRB, “In the Matter of Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co. and Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America,” 244.
28 Ibid., 264.
29 NLRB, “In the Matter of Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company and Pattern Makers’ League of America,” 14, no. 23 (August 7, 1939): 295.
30 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 369.
31 NLRB, “In the Matter of Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co. and Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America,” 236.
32 Ibid., 234; National Labor Relations Board v. Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co. (1943); Shipyard Worker, October 9, 1942; Shipyard Worker, April 2, 1943.
33 National Urban League, Summary and Recommendations of the Review of the Economic and Cultural Problems of the Negro Population of Chester, Media, and Darby Township: Survey of Race Relations and Negro Living Conditions in Delaware County, MS, Delaware County Historical Society, Chester, Pa., April–May 1946.
34 Herbert R. Northrup, “Negroes in a War Industry: The Case of Shipbuilding,” Journal of Business of the University of Chicago 16, no. 3 (July 1943): 160–172.
35 Chester Times, “Urban League Report: Employment,” April 11, 1947.
36 Chester Times, “35-Year-Old Sun Shipyard Reached Peak in World War II with 350 Vessels Built,” n.d., 1951.
37 Herbert R. Northrup, Organized Labor and the Negro (New York: Harper, 1944), 220–221; National Labor Relations Board v. Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co., 1371–1395.
38 Northrup, Organized Labor, 221.
39 Harris, Politics and Prejudice, 67.
40 Northrup, Organized Labor, 222.
41 Ibid., 221–223.
42 Ibid., 223–224.
43 Fusfeld and Bates, The Political Economy, 18.
44 Chester Times, “Urban League Report: Employment”; J. J. Joseph, “The Mobilization of Man-Power,” Science and Society 7, no. 1 (Winter 1943): 2–13.
1 Chester Times, “Urban League Report on Negro Conditions Bared,” April 9, 1947; Chester Times, “Urban League Report Seen as Significant by Dr. Aubrey,” April 10, 1947.
2 National Urban League, Summary and Recommendations.
3 Chester Times, “Urban League Report: Housing,” April 12, 1947; National Urban League, Summary and Recommendations.
4 New York Times, “War Houses at Auction,” March 12, 1922.
5 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 531–532.
6 Papers of the NAACP, Part 5, The Campaign against Residential Segregation, 1914–1955.
7 Ibid.
8 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 532.
9 John Morrison McLarnon III, “‘Old Scratchhead’ Reconsidered: George Raymond and Civil Rights in Chester, Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 69, no. 3 (1999): 297–341.
10 McLarnon, “Pie in the Sky,” 68.
11 Ibid.
12 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 528.
13 Ibid., 529.
14 King began his studies at Crozer Theological Seminary on September 14, 1948 and graduated on May 8, 1951 with a bachelor of divinity degree. Barbour often invited King to his home for dinner and conversation. King lived at Crozer and spent much of his free time on its campus. But when he did venture out in Chester, he experienced discrimination in restaurants and other public spaces. See Clayborne Carson, “Martin Luther King Jr.: The Crozer Seminary Years,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 16 (Summer 1997): 123–128.
15 Chester Times, “Urban League Report: Housing.”
16 Not until the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 were restrictive covenants deemed invalid and their practice illegal (as opposed to simply unenforceable, as indicated in the 1948 Supreme Court ruling). See Kevin Fox Gotham, “Urban Space, Restrictive Covenants, and the Origins of Racial Residential Segregation in a U.S. City, 1900–1950,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24, no. 3 (2000): 616–633.
17 Chester Times, “Wissler Criticizes PHA Reporting,” November 6, 1956.
18 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 355.
19 Ibid., 531.
20 Chester Times, “Wholesale Evictions of High Income Families Planned in Home Projects,” May 15, 1947.
21 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 532.
22 Chester Times, “Negro Housing Still Critical Report Shows,” March 19, 1948; McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 532.
23 Chester Times, “Wissler Resigns as Head of CHA, Cites Meddling,” September 25, 1957.
24 Chester Times, “CHA Desegregation Policy Given Court Confirmation,” March 8, 1957.
25 Chester Times, “Wissler Resigns.”
26 Chester Times, “Housing Authority Moves to Expand Integration Plan,” February 5, 1957.
27 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 533.
28 Delaware County Daily Times, “CHA Ordered to Desegregate Public Housing,” May 5, 1972.
29 Chester Times, “Chester’s Suburbs Have Grown Up Along with the City,” September 7, 1951.
30 Chester City Planning Commission, Comprehensive Plan, MS, Delaware County Historical Society, Chester, Pa., 1965, 3.
31 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 425.
32 Health and Welfare Council of Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties, The City of Chester: Its Population and Housing (n.p.: n.p., 1963).
33 Papers of the NAACP, Part 27, Selected Branch Files, 1956–1965, Series B, The Northeast.
34 Brent Staples, Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 61.
35 Ibid., 73.
36 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 171.
37 Ibid., 437.
38 Ibid., 443.
39 Ibid., 173.
40 G. Edward Janosik, “Suburban Balance of Power,” American Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1955): 133–134.
41 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 425.
42 Ibid., 173.
43 Ibid., 431–432.
44 Quoted in Sue Carroll Edwards, “Housing Desegregation in a Small Town,” Friends Journal, February 15, 2012, www.friendsjournal.org.
45 Stanley Keith Arnold, Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia’s Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930–1970 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014).
46 Chester Times, “1st Negro Home in Rutledge Burns, 2-Pronged Arson Probe Launched,” May 26, 1958; Chester Times, “Police Press Search for Rutledge Clues,” May 27, 1958; Chester Times, “Arson Probe Upsets Rutledge, but Nobody Points a Finger,” May 28, 1958; Chester Times, “Way Cleared to Rebuild Burned Home Negro Owns,” March 5, 1959; Chester Times, “Raymond Rebuilding Burned Rutledge Home,” March 6, 1959.
47 Glenn A. McCurdy, “The Folcroft Incident,” Negro Digest 14, no. 2 (December 1964): 88.
48 Ibid., 91.
49 Ibid., 93–94.
50 Delaware County Daily Times, “Crowd Jeers Negroes,” August 29, 1963; Delaware County Daily Times, “Race Crisis Boils in Folcroft,” August 30, 1963; Delaware County Daily Times, “Police Enforce Racial Peace,” August 31, 1963; Delaware County Daily Times, “Folcroft Action Mapped,” September 13, 1963.
51 McCurdy, “The Folcroft Incident,” 95. See also Philadelphia Inquirer, “Folcroft Home Fired by ‘Molotov Cocktail’ Despite Police Cordon,” August 30, 1963; Philadelphia Inquirer, “Police Battle 1500 in Folcroft as Negroes Huddle in Cellar,” August 31, 1963; Philadelphia Inquirer, “Uneasy Folcroft Is Placed under Tight Police Guard,” September 1, 1963.
52 McCurdy, “The Folcroft Incident,” 95.
53 Ibid.
54 Philadelphia Bulletin, “Bakers Put Home Up for Sale, Will Move from Folcroft,” April 1, 1966.
55 See a similar argument in William N. Piggot, “The Geography of Exclusion: Race and Suburbanization in Postwar Philadelphia,” MA thesis, Ohio State University (2002), 45–46.
56 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 540.
57 Chester City Planning Commission, Comprehensive Plan, MS, Delaware County Historical Society, Chester, Pa., 1964; Chester City Planning Commission, Comprehensive Plan, 1965.
1 New York Times, “Riots Mar Peace.”
2 Chester City Planning Commission, Comprehensive Plan, 1964, 10–14.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.; Chester City Planning Commission, Comprehensive Plan, 1965; McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 545–546.
5 Health and Welfare Council, The City of Chester, 12.
6 Harris, Politics and Prejudice, 50–51.
7 Chester NAACP Scrapbook 1963–1964, courtesy of the family of George Raymond. Wolfgram Library, Widener University.
8 Papers of the NAACP, Part 23, Legal Department Case Files, 1957–1965, Series B, The Northeast.
9 Governor’s Commission Investigating Recent Events in Chester, Pennsylvania, Report of the Commission Appointed by the Governor to Investigate Charges of Excessive Use of Force by Police in Chester, Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, Pa.: n.p., 1964), 10–11.
10 Papers of the NAACP, Part 23.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., Chester School District v. Chester Branch of the NAACP and CFFN.
13 Papers of the NAACP, Part 25, Series B, 1956–1965.
14 Paul Bender, Police Brutality in Chester, Pennsylvania, March–April 1964: Report Prepared for the Greater Philadelphia Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, June 30, 1964, 3.
15 Danny Pope, Alain Jehlen, Evan Metcalf, and Cathy Wilkerson, “Chester, PA: A Case Study in Community Organization,” Students for a Democratic Society working paper, 1964, 2.
16 In March 1963 Branche and eight others were arrested for attempting to block the eviction of a thirty-seven-year-old tenant from the Ruth L. Bennett Homes public housing project. The CHA claimed that the single-mother tenant had violated the Richmond Agreement, a 1957 ruling barring single mothers from having additional children out of wedlock while residing in public housing. As CHA workers emptied the apartment of its furniture and other contents, Branche and his fellow demonstrators formed a human chain to block the moving van. Shortly after they were arrested and charged with misdemeanor obstruction, the NAACP posted bail for them. Much to the chagrin of NAACP leaders, the Delaware County Daily Times identified Branche as “the local executive director of the NAACP”: Delaware County Daily Times, “Chester NAACP Official Is Arrested,” March 2, 1963. Five days after his arrest, Branche organized a group of fifteen protesters, including some local suburban college students, to picket the CHA for its policies that supervised the morality of its minority tenants. See Delaware County Daily Times, “Pickets Walk, Stand, Sit in Eviction Protest,” March 7, 1963; Papers of the NAACP, Part 1, Meetings of the Board of Directors, Records of Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and Special Reports, 1909–1950, Supplement to Part 1, Minutes of the Board of Directors, Secretary’s Reports, Records of Annual Conventions, and Annual Business Meetings, 1961–1965, 1963.
17 Bender, Police Brutality in Chester, 3; Delaware County Daily Times, “Merchants Threatened by NAACP,” April 19, 1963.
18 Delaware County Daily Times, “NAACP Offered Outside Aid,” June 15, 1963.
19 Delaware County Daily Times, “Human Relations Meeting Called Off,” July 18, 1963.
20 Delaware County Daily Times, “Will Schism Shatter Chester NAACP?” September 20, 1963.
21 Bender, Police Brutality in Chester, 4; Paul Lyons, The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
22 Papers of the NAACP, Part 27.
23 Students for a Democratic Society, “Chester, PA: Community Organization in the Other America,” MS, Delaware County Historical Society, Chester, Pa., December 4, 1963.
24 Bender, Police Brutality in Chester, 4–5.
25 Governor’s Commission Investigating Recent Events in Chester, Pennsylvania, Report of the Commission.
26 Delaware County Daily Times, “Negroes Form New Group Called ACT,” March 16, 1964.
27 Delaware County Daily Times, “NAACP Blasts Malcolm X,” March 14, 1964.
28 Ibid.
29 Papers of the NAACP, Part 27.
30 Papers of the NAACP, Part 25, Branch Department Files, Series B, Regional Files and Special Reports, 1956–1965.
31 Pope et al., “Chester, PA,” 3.
32 Governor’s Commission Investigating Recent Events in Chester, Pennsylvania, Report of the Commission, 29.
33 Bender, Police Brutality in Chester, 4.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 10–11.
36 Governor’s Commission Investigating Recent Events in Chester, Pennsylvania, Report of the Commission, 36.
37 Bender, Police Brutality in Chester, 24.
38 Governor’s Commission Investigating Recent Events in Chester, Pennsylvania, Report of the Commission, 62.
39 John R. Fry, “Remember Chester,” Presbyterian Life, June 1964, 6.
40 Ibid.
41 Papers of the NAACP, Part 25.
42 Governor’s Commission Investigating Recent Events in Chester, Pennsylvania, Report of the Commission.
43 Ibid., 93.
44 Ibid., 14–15.
45 Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission v. Chester School District (1967).
46 Delaware County Daily Times, “CFFN Frowns on CPA ‘Self-Help,’” July 30, 1964.
47 Kirk Byron Jones, “The Activism of Interpretation: Black Pastors and Public Life,” Christian Century, September 13–20, 1989, 817–818.
48 Governor’s Commission Investigating Recent Events in Chester, Pennsylvania, Report of the Commission, 91.
49 Papers of the NAACP, Part 27.
50 Bender, Police Brutality in Chester, 6.
51 Governor’s Commission Investigating Recent Events in Chester, Pennsylvania, Report of the Commission, 12.
52 Spencer Klaw, “Old Scratchhead Wakes Up in Chester, Pennsylvania,” Reporter Magazine, June 18, 1964, 34.
53 Bender, Police Brutality in Chester, 6; Governor’s Commission Investigating Recent Events in Chester, Pennsylvania, Report of the Commission, 12.
54 Papers of the NAACP, Part 23.
55 Ibid.
56 Klaw, “Old Scratchhead,” 33.
57 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 561.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid., 560.
60 Ibid., 563.
61 Delaware County Daily Times, “Civil Rights Vacuum in Our City,” January 4, 1967.
62 George W. Corner, “The Black Coalition: An Experiment in Racial Cooperation, Philadelphia, 1968,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120, no. 3 (1976): 178–186.
63 Greater Chester Movement, “Greater Chester Movement Policy Statement,” November 11, 1961, 3.
64 Ibid., 6.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 John Thomas Meli, “Barriers to Employment Growth in a Distressed Area: A Case Study of Chester, Pennsylvania,” Delaware County Archives, Lima, Pa., December 11, 1972, MS.
68 Delaware County Daily Times, “Scott to Hire, Train 30 Poor,” July 26, 1968.
69 Robert Zdnek, “Community Development Corporations,” in Severyn T. Bruyn and James Meehan, eds., Beyond the Market and the State: New Directions in Community Development (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 112–127.
70 Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Keith Lawrence, “Expanding Comprehensiveness: Structural Racism and Community Building in the United States,” in John Pierson and Joan Smith, eds., Rebuilding Community: Policy and Practice in Urban Regeneration (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 34–63; Alice O’Connor, “Swimming against the Tide: A Brief History of Federal Policy in Poor Communities,” in Ronald Ferguson and William T. Dickens, eds., Urban Problems and Community Development (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 77–110.
1 Douglas L. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
2 Delaware County Daily Times, “Probe GCM Immediately,” February 26, 1969.
3 Delaware County Daily Times, “After $12.4 Million, City’s Poor Still Poor,” May 1, 1972.
4 Delaware County Daily Times, “Relatives Find GCM a Good Place to Work,” May 5, 1972.
5 Delaware County Daily Times, “Board Members’ Businesses Thrive with Sales to GCM,” May 3, 1972.
6 McLarnon, “Ruling Suburbia,” 601.
7 Delaware County Daily Times, “GCM Buys Insurance from Board Member,” May 2, 1972.
8 Delaware County Daily Times, “No Laughing Matter to Poor,” May 9, 1972.
9 Delaware County Daily Times, “Action Centers Reach Few,” May 10, 1972.
10 Delaware County Daily Times, “City Hall Pulls GCM Strings,” May 8, 1972.
11 Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, Annual Report (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, 1968), 9.
12 Ibid., 12.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 54–58.
15 Pennsylvania Crime Commission, Pennsylvania Crime Commission 1971 Report, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Justice, December 1971.
16 Ibid.
17 Delaware County Daily Times, “GCM Loses Out on CITGO Venture,” May 16, 1972.
18 Ibid.
19 Pennsylvania Crime Commission, “A Chester City Racketeer: Hidden Interests Revealed,” Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Justice, March 1978.
20 Ibid.
21 Gregory T. Magarity, “RICO Investigations: A Case Study,” American Criminal Law Review 17 (1979): 367–378.
22 Delaware County Daily Times, “Sprague Report Says No County Corruption,” October 18, 1974.
23 Delaware County Daily Times, “State Asks Prosecutor to ‘Review’ Delco,” July 23, 1975.
24 United States of America v. John H. Nacrelli (1979).
25 Pennsylvania Crime Commission, Organized Crime in Pennsylvania: A Decade of Change (Conshohocken: Pennsylvania Crime Commission, 1990), 315.
26 Magarity, “RICO Investigations,” 373.
27 Pennsylvania Crime Commission, Organized Crime in Pennsylvania, 310.
28 Ibid., 211.
29 Charles H. Rogovin and Frederick T. Martens, “The Role of Crime Commissions in Organized Crime Control,” in Robert J. Kelley, Ko-Lin Chin, and Rufus Schatzberg, eds., Handbook of Organized Crime in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994), 389–400.
30 Sheila Foster, “Justice from the Ground Up: Distributive Inequities, Grassroots Resistance, and the Transformative Politics of the Environmental Justice Movement,” California Law Review 86, no. 4 (1998): 775.
31 Philadelphia Inquirer, “A Trash Plan They’re Willing to Fight to Get,” September 28, 1986; Philadelphia Inquirer, “Delco OKs Trash Plant in Chester,” November 26, 1986.
32 Delaware County Daily Times, “Chester Trash Project,” June 12, 1989; Philadelphia Inquirer, “Vote Delayed on Chester Trash Plant,” November 4, 1986; Jerome Balter, “Environmental Justice: Time for Meaningful Action,” Temple Environmental Law and Technology Journal 18 (1999): 153.
33 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Suspect Bond Issues Put Communities in a Bind,” June 29, 1987.
34 Philadelphia Inquirer, “A Trash Plan.”
35 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Chester’s Mayor Asks Residents to Vacate Homes for Trash Plant,” July 1, 1987.
36 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Dealing with Trash: A Tale of Two Plants,” August 30, 1987.
37 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Delco Sheriff Rebuffed on Trash-Plant Proposal,” December 11, 1986.
38 Philadelphia Inquirer, “$335,000 Fee for Chester Counsel Raises Questions,” December 24, 1986; Philadelphia Inquirer, “Questions on Funding Trash Plant: Unusual Method Cited in Chester Bond Sale,” February 1, 1987.
39 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Questions on Funding Trash Plant”; Philadelphia Inquirer, “Suspect Bond Issues.”
40 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Dealing with Trash.”
41 Philadelphia Inquirer, “IRS Tells Another City to Pay over Bond Deal,” March 15, 1991; Philadelphia Inquirer, “Grand Jury Accusations Deal Chester Another Blow,” April 14, 1991.
42 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Mayor Says Chester Won’t Pay IRS,” February 28, 1991.
43 Philadelphia Inquirer, “A Trash Plan.”
44 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Vote Delayed on Chester Trash Plant”; Philadelphia Inquirer, “PE in Deal for Power from Trash, Westinghouse Plans Chester Waste Plant,” June 10, 1988; Foster, “Justice from the Ground Up”; Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York: NYU Press, 2001).
45 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Delco Sheriff Rebuffed.”
46 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Tangle of Trash Plans for Chester,” April 24, 1988.
47 Philadelphia Inquirer, “No Matter What, It’s Still Home,” July 9, 1987.
48 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Chester’s Mayor Asks Residents to Vacate Homes.”
49 Ibid.
50 Edward J. Walsh, Rex Warland, and D. Clayton Smith, Don’t Burn It Here: Grassroots Challenges to Waste Incinerators (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
51 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Minister Critical of Delco Plan,” May 18, 1988.
52 Philadelphia Inquirer, “An Ocean of Opposition to Trash Plant,” May 1, 1988.
53 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Councilman Files Libel Suit in Trash Plant Battle,” July 7, 1988.
54 Ibid.
55 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Delco’s Proposal for Trash Plant Expected to Gain Approval of State,” August 25, 1988; Philadelphia Inquirer, “In Raucous Meeting, Chester Mayor and Council Battle over Trash Plant,” August 13, 1988.
56 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Chester OKs a County Trash Plant,” November 17, 1988; Philadelphia Inquirer, “Chester Begins to Collect on Trash-to-Steam Plant,” February 2, 1989.
57 Philadelphia Inquirer, “Chester Official Gets Prison Term in Trash-to-Steam Kickback Case,” September 6, 1992.
58 Delaware County Daily Times, “What Do You Think about Chester?” February 19, 1998.
59 Cole and Foster, From the Ground Up, 30–34.
60 Pennsylvania Crime Commission, Pennsylvania Crime Commission 1989 Report, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Justice, 1989.
61 Philadelphia Inquirer, “In Feudal Chester, Ex-Mayor Retains a Shadowy Rule,” February 6, 1989; Philadelphia Inquirer, “Report: Nacrelli Involved in Trash Plant Talks,” March 2, 1989; Philadelphia Inquirer, “Catania Says He Met with Nacrelli,” March 9, 1989.
62 Cole and Foster, From the Ground Up, 38.
63 U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Population and Housing, 1950 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 1950); U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Population and Housing, 1990 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 1990); Mike Ewall, Campus Coalition concerning Chester (C-4), “Environmental Racism in Chester,” 1999, www.ejnet.org.
64 Barry E. Hill, “Chester, Pennsylvania: Was It a Classic Example of Environmental Injustice?” Vermont Law Review 23 (1998): 479–510; Foster, “Justice from the Ground Up,” 775–841; Jerome Balter, “The EPA Needs a Workable Environmental Justice Protocol,” Tulane Environmental Law Journal 12 (1998): 357–375; Balter, “Environmental Justice,” 153–179.
65 Michael Greenberg and Dona Schneider, Environmentally Devastated Neighborhoods: Perceptions, Policies, and Realities (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 90–94.
66 Meta Mendel-Reyes, Reclaiming Democracy: The Sixties in Politics and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1995), 155.
67 Judith Auer Shaw, “Siting Incinerators in Neighborhoods: How Much Environmental Justice Do Residents Get?” Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University (2002); Cole and Foster, From the Ground Up.
68 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources, “Environmental Risk Study for City of Chester, PA,” 1995; Chester Environmental Justice Factsheet, 1996, www.ejnet.org. In Chester the question of racial discrimination as intentional or manifest in the uneven consequences of siting came to the fore in a landmark legal battle over the clustering of waste facilities in the city’s West End. See court briefs from Chester Residents v. Department of Environmental Protection (1995); Chester Residents for Quality Living v. Seif (1996); Chester Residents for Quality Living v. Seif (1997). See also Hill, “Chester, Pennsylvania”; Foster, “Justice from the Ground Up”; Robert W. Collin and Robin Morris Collin, “The Role of Communities in Environmental Decisions: Communities Speaking for Themselves,” Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation 13 (1998): 38; Balter, “The EPA Needs a Workable Environmental Justice Protocol”; Kristen L. Raney, “The Role of Title VI in Chester Residents v. Seif: Is the Future of Environmental Justice Really Brighter?” Journal of Natural Resources and Environmental Law 14 (1998): 135–151; Bradford C. Mank, “Is There a Private Cause of Action under EPA’s Title VI Regulations? The Need to Empower Environmental Justice Plaintiffs,” Columbia Journal of Environmental Law 1 (1999): 1–61; Valerie P. Mahoney, “Environmental Justice: From Partial Victories to Complete Solutions,” Cardozo Law Review 21 (1999): 361–411; Amanda C. L. Vig, “Using Title VI to Salvage Civil Rights from Waste: Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living v. Seif, 132 F.3d 925 (3d Cir. 1997),” University of Cincinnati Law Review 67 (1999): 907–934; Uma Outka, “Environmental Injustice and the Problem of the Law,” Maine Law Review 57 (2005): 209–259.
69 Balter, “The EPA Needs a Workable Environmental Justice Protocol”; Balter, “Environmental Justice”; Vig, “Using Title VI”; Mahoney, “Environmental Justice”; Robert Bahar and George McCollough, Laid to Waste: A Chester Neighborhood Fights for Its Future (Berkeley, Calif.: Media, 1997).
70 Balter, “Environmental Justice”; Collin and Collin, “The Role of Communities in Environmental Decisions.”
71 Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living v. Seif (1996); Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living v. Seif (1997); Mank, “Is There a Private Cause of Action?”
72 Daniel Isales, “Environmental Justice and Title VI: The Administrative Remedy,” Temple Environmental Law and Technology Journal 18 (1999): 125–176; Melissa Kiniyalocts, Environmental Justice: Avoiding the Difficulty of Proving Discriminatory Intent in Hazardous Waste Siting Decisions (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Land Tenure Center, 2000); Shaw, “Siting Incinerators in Neighborhoods.”
73 Isales, “Environmental Justice and Title VI”; Mahoney, “Environmental Justice.” The Supreme Court’s dismissal left open the right of private parties to sue the state to enforce regulations under Title VI when there was unintentional discrimination. In April 2001, however, the Supreme Court ruled in Alexander et al. v. Sandoval that private citizens cannot use Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to sue state agencies for unintentional discrimination. For environmental social movements deploying a legal strategy, the burden of proving intentional racism remains. See John DiBari, “How the Sandoval Ruling Will Affect Environmental Justice Plaintiffs,” St. John’s Law Review 76 (2002): 1019–1046; Olga D. Pomar and Luke W. Cole, “Camden, New Jersey, and the Struggle for Environmental Justice,” Clearinghouse Review 36 (2002): 94–108.
1 Craig Offman, “The 10 Most Corrupt Cities in America,” George Magazine, March 1998.
2 The ordinance did not prevent existing waste facilities from increasing their intakes of trash. In the fall of 2015 the city’s Covanta waste incinerator contracted to burn trash from New York City.
3 The phrase is a reverse of the title of Elvin K. Wyly and Daniel J. Hammel, “Islands of Decay in Seas of Renewal: Housing Policy and the Resurgence of Gentrification,” Housing Policy Debate 10, no. 4 (1999): 711–771.
4 David Wilson, “Social Justice and Neoliberal Discourse,” Southeastern Geographer 47, no. 1 (2007): 7–100; Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy, “The Nature and Contradictions of Neoliberalism,” in Leo Panitch, Colin Leys, Alan Zuege, and Martijn Konings, eds., The Globalization Decade: A Critical Reader (London: Merlin, 2004), 245–274.
5 FAIR Deal Coalition of Chester, “Rolling the Dice: Gambling with Chester’s Future,” September 2006, www.fairdealchester.org.
6 Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, www.penndot.gov.
7 Delaware County Daily Times, “Storm Clouds Loom on the Waterfront,” January 2, 2009.
8 Delaware County Daily Times, “Gambling on Chester: City on the Move?” December 22, 2007.
9 CEDA official, interview with the author, 2009; residents associated with Action United, a nonprofit organization that helped residents organize on the supermarket and other community issues, interviews with the author.
10 Neubeck and Cazenave, Welfare Racism.
11 David O. Sears, P. J. Henry, and Rick Kosterman, “Egalitarian Values and Contemporary Racial Politics,” in David O. Sears, James Sidanius, and Lawrence Bobo, eds., Racialized Politics: The Debate about Racism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 103.
12 Henry A. Giroux, “Spectacles of Race and Pedagogies of Denial: Anti-Black Racist Pedagogy under the Reign of Neoliberalism,” Communication Education 52, nos. 3–4 (2003): 191–211.
13 Ibid., 198.
14 Ibid., 195–196.
15 Christopher Mele, “Revisiting the Citadel and the Ghetto: Legibility, Race, and Contemporary Urban Development,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (2016); doi:10.1177/2332649215608874
16 Marty Moss-Coane, “Chester: Murders, Curfews, and Violence Prevention,” Radio Times, July 13, 2010, http://whyy.org; Erik Eckholm, “A City Celebrates a Brand New Stadium, but Not after 9 P.M. in Some Quarters,” New York Times, June 27, 2010.
17 Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2007), 126–127.
18 See Jessica Shannon Cobb and Kimberly Kay Hoang, “Protagonist-Driven Urban Ethnography,” City and Community 14, no. 4 (2015): 348–351; Mario L. Small, “De-Exoticizing Ghetto Poverty: On the Ethics of Representation in Urban Ethnography,” City and Community 14, no. 4 (2015): 352–358.