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30 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 293 (1995)
Thirty Years in America's Cities: Lots of Movement, Not Much Justice

handle is hein.journals/hcrcl30 and id is 301 raw text is: THIRTY YEARS IN AMERICA'S CITIES: LOTS OF MOVEMENT, NOT MUCH JUSTICE Lucie E. White In facing the future of the American ghetto, one cannot allow oneself the luxury of either hope or despair.1 Thirty years ago Harvard Law School students founded the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. In the same year, nineteen-year- old Josephine Abraham2 packed up her three-month-old baby and boarded a Greyhound bus in Birmingham, Alabama. Three days later, unwashed and exhausted, she arrived in Los Angeles. Her husband had made the journey six months before, in search of a steady factory job. Contrary to the rumors about the availability of steady work for blacks3 in L.A., Josephine's husband did not find an industrial job. But after five months of looking, an old friend from Alabama got him a part-time job as a janitor at a public school. As soon as he had saved up enough money to rent a run-down stucco bungalow for Josephine and the baby, he wired them to join him in Los Angeles. Josephine and her baby arrived in Watts in mid-July of 1965. Just about a month later, in mid-August, violence broke out a few blocks from her new home. Years later, she recalled the trauma of trying to comfort her baby as her husband helped neighbors quell approaching flames. When the violence had subsided, thirty-four people were dead and hun- dreds injured.4 Almost thirty years later, the city would witness an even higher death toll from urban insurrection. The riot caused Josephine to rethink the vision of justice that had lured her to take a bus from Birmingham to L.A. Today, she explains both of L.A.'s urban conflagrations as resulting from the pent-up rage of slav- ery, and the false promise that movement, into the city ... out of the city, would finally bring justice. After the first riot ended, Josephine scrubbed the soot off of the pastel walls of her newly rented bungalow. She made friends with her new neighbors, most of whom turned out to be fellow refugees from the I KENNETH B. CLARK, DARK GHETTO: DILEMMAS OF SOCIAL POWER 222 (1965), quoted in Olati Johnson, Integrating the Underclass: Confronting America's Enduring Apartheid, 47 STAN. L. REV. 787, 816-17 (1995). 2 Josephine Abraham is a pseudonym. Her story is a composite account, based on life history interviews I conducted in Los Angeles in 1992, while conducting research on women's participation in Head Start pre-school programs. 3 In this Introduction, I use the terms black and African American interchangeably to refer to people of African descent. 4 See UNITED STATES KERNER COMMISSION, REPORT OF THE NATIONAL ADVISORY COMMISSION ON CIVIL DISORDERS 37-38 (1968).

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