“Hey Rent Man, I Want to Be Free”: Tenant Organizing and Black Social Infrastructure in Brooklyn

• In Event: Resistance and Disruption

Abstract

The “urban crisis,” a much studied period by social scientists and historians, documents major transformations in American political economy, social institutions, and their impacts on urban life. When this literature is attentive to Black urban life, it often focuses on victimhood or forms of criminality, rather than Black agency. This paper shifts the lens to focus on the import of grassroots Black organizing to social infrastructure. Black residents built a social infrastructure of care that intervened in the gaps produced by abandonment of the state and private sector.

In the 1970s and 1980s, capital flight and state abandonment produced concentrated poverty and the physical decline of housing in Black communities in Brooklyn. Black residents resisted these conditions through tenant organizing—strikes, protests, performances, and sometimes building takeovers. These actions, which highlighted racial exclusion and exploitation and affirmed the dignity of poor Black residents, are evidence of Black agency during the urban crisis.By attention to the ways that poor Black residents responded to their conditions, we better understand the social dynamics of the urban crisis and the implications of this for gentrification and subsequent urban phenomena.

Author

• Amaka Camille Okechukwu, Johns Hopkins University