Abstract
The planning profession largely has ignored the black community and race issues throughout most of its history. Catlin’s (1993) content analysis of The Journal of the American Planning Association, for example, reveals a dearth of articles, both past and present, which focus on black people or black planning issues.1 Although there have been some recent exceptions, we agree with Catlin’s conclusion that the planning profession’s silence on black concerns, except for the brief 1965–74 period, must be reversed. Further, we argue that this reversal requires us to reexamine planning history from the perspective of race. Specifically, we contend that many new planning and development initiatives being undertaken in the black community could benefit from a deeper understanding of initiatives undertaken during the period 1895–1920. We are supported by other academics in our contention.2 Inclusion of these initiatives in planning history classes would demonstrate a good faith effort to respond to the complaints of many African-American students in urban planning that the curriculum ignores activities in the black community that could inform their planning practice.
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Notes
Robert A. Catlin, “The Planning Profession and Blacks in the United States. A Content Analysis of Academic and Professional Literature,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 13, 1 ( 1993): 26–32.
See Leonie, Sandercock. “Introduction: Framing Insurgent Historiographies for Planning,” in Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural Planning History edited by Leonie Sandercock (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998) 1–36
June Thomas, and Marcia Ritzdorf, Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997).
Donald A. Krueckeberg, Introduction to Planning History in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1983)
Daniel Schaffer, Two Centuries of American Planning. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988)
Mel Scott, American City Planning since 1890: A History Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the American Institute of Planners (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969).
Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1988)
Jon C. Teaford, The Twentieth-Century American City: Problem, Promise, and Reality (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983).
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, A Social Study (New York: Schocken Books, 1967).
David R. Goldfield, and Blaine A. Brownell, Urban America (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1990).
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968) 198–99.
Francis L. Broderick, “W.E.B. Du Bois: History of an Intellectual,” in Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by J. Blackwell and M. Janowitz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974) 3–24.
Elliott, Rudwick. W.E.B. Du Bois: Propagandist of the Negro Protest (New York: Atheneum, 1968) 52.
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© 2006 Gayle T. Tate and Lewis A. Randolph
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Fitzgerald, J., Howard, W.D. (2006). Discovering an African American Planning History. In: The Black Urban Community. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73572-3_4
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