Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (104 page)

The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
which appeared in the same year as Harrington’s polemic, had an impact that was almost as immediate.
²¹
Curiously, however, although many people did and do agree with her, the long-term impact of her book has not been what Jacobs hoped.
Death and Life
is probably the most sensible book ever written about cities. It is, first, an attack on Ebenezer Howard and his idea of garden cities (a contradiction in terms for Jacobs), on Lewis Mumford and his stages of city life (‘morbid’ and ‘biased’), and above all on Le Corbusier, whose ideas for a ‘Radiant City’ she blames for much of the great ‘Blight of Dullness’ that she saw around her.
²²
She began by stressing that the basic component of the city is the street, and in particular the sidewalk (pavement, in British usage). Sidewalks and streets are safer if busy, she points out; they are communities in themselves, entirely natural communities, peopled by inhabitants who know each other, as well as by strangers. They are places where children can learn and be assimilated into adult life (she observes that ‘street’ gangs usually congregate in parks or schools). Streets stay busy, and safe, all day long if, and only if, they are home to diverse interests – i.e., they are occupied not just by offices or shops but by a
mix,
which includes a residential element.
²³
She argues that parks and schools are far more ‘fickle’ than streets – there is no telling whether a park will become a skid row or a hangout for perverts (her word), or which school will work and which won’t.
²⁴
She thinks ‘neighborhood’ is a sentimental concept but hardly a real one. Apart from streets, cities should be divided into districts, but these should be natural districts, corresponding to the way the city is divided up in the minds of most residents. The purpose of a district is political, not psychological or personal. A district is there to fight the battles that streets are too small and too weak to fight – she quotes the case of drug peddlers moving into one street. It is the district that prevails on the police to move into a street in force for a limited period until the problem is dispersed. Districts, she says, should never be more than a mile and a half from end to end.
²⁵

The essence of the street, and the sidewalk in particular, where people meet and talk, is that it enables people to control their own privacy, an important aspect of freedom. She believed that people are less than straightforward about privacy, hiding behind the convenient phrase ‘mind your own business.’ This reflects the importance of gossip – people can gossip all they like, but often pretend they don’t, or don’t approve. In this way they can retreat into their own private world, their own ‘business,’ whenever they want without loss of face. This is psychologically very important, she says, and may be all-important for keeping cities alive. Only when these psychological needs are met – a cross between privacy and community, which is a city speciality – are people content, and content to stay put.
²⁶

Jacobs also identified what she called ‘border vacuums’ – railway tracks, freeways, stretches of water, huge parks like Central Park in New York. These, she said, contribute their own share of blight to a city and should be recognised by planners as ‘a mixed blessing’; they need special devices to reduce their impact. For example, huge parks might have carousels or cafés on their perimeters to make them less daunting and encourage usage. She thought that old buildings must be preserved, partly because of their aesthetic value and because they provide breaks in the dull monotony of many cityscapes, but also because old buildings have a different economy to new buildings. Theatres go into new buildings, for example, but the studios and workshops that service theatres usually don’t – they can’t afford new buildings, but they can afford old buildings that paid for themselves a long time ago. Supermarkets occupy new buildings, but not bookshops. She thought that a city does not begin to be a city until it has 100,000 inhabitants. Only then will it have enough diversity, which is the essence of cities, and only then will it have a large enough population for the inhabitants to find enough friends (say thirty or so people) with like interests.
²⁷
Understanding these dynamics, she said, helps keep cities alive. Finance, of course, is important, and here cities can help themselves. Jacobs felt that too often the financing of real estate is left to professional (i.e., private) companies, so that in the end the needs of finance determine the type of real estate that is mortgaged, rather than the other way round.
²⁸
Provided her four cardinal principles were adhered to, she said, she felt certain that the blight of city centres could be halted, and ‘unslumming’ be made to work. These four principles were: every district must serve more than one, and preferably more than two, primary functions (business, commerce, residential), and these different functions must produce a different daily schedule among people; city blocks should be short – ‘opportunities to turn corners must be frequent’; there must be a ‘close-grained’ mingling of structures of very different age; and the concentration of people must be sufficiently dense for what purposes they may be there.
²⁹
Hers was an optimistic book, resplendent with common sense that, however, no one else had pointed out before. What she didn’t explore, not in any detail, was the racial dimension. She made a few references to segregation and ‘Negro slums,’ but other than that she wrote strictly as an architect/town planner.

The issues raised by Harrington and Jacobs were both referred to by President Johnson. There is no question, however, that the main urgency that propelled him to his Great Society speech, apart from the ‘deep background’ of the Cold War, was race, especially the situation of American blacks. By 1966 a whole decade had elapsed since the landmark decision of the Supreme Court in 1954. in
Brown
v.
Board of Education of Topeka,
that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional, repudiating the doctrine of ‘separate but equal.’ As Johnson realised, in the intervening years the basic statistics of black life were dispiriting. In 1963 there were more blacks in America in
de facto
segregated schools than there had been in 1952. There were more black unemployed than in 1954. More significant still, the median income of blacks had slipped from 57 percent
that of whites in 1954 to 54 percent. Against this background, Milton Friedman’s arguments about the long-term beneficial effects of capitalism on race relations looked thin, and in 1963, as Johnson recognised, action was needed to avert trouble.

Among the blacks themselves there was, as might be expected, a range of opinions as to the way forward. Some were in more of a hurry than others; some felt violence was necessary; others felt nonviolence ultimately had more impact. In March 1963 there had been riots in Birmingham, Alabama, when an economic boycott of downtown businesses had turned ugly following a decision by the commissioner for public safety, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, to have the police surround a church and prevent people from leaving. Among those arrested in the wake of these events (on Good Friday) was Martin Luther King, a thirty-four-year-old preacher from Adanta who had made a name for himself by rousing, rhetorical speeches advocating nonviolence. While he was in solitary confinement, King had been denounced by a group of white clerics. His response was ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ nineteen pages scribbled and scrawled on envelopes, lavatory rolls, and the margins of newspaper articles, smuggled out of the jail by his supporters. It set out in vivid and eloquent detail why the people of Birmingham (i.e., the whites) had ‘left the Negro community with no alternative’ but to take the course of civil disobedience and ‘nonviolent tension’ in pursuit of their aims.
³⁰
‘Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States…. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation…. We had no alternative to prepare for our direct action…. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving at jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.’
³¹

After his release from the Birmingham jail, King achieved the peak of his fame, and he was chosen as the main speaker for an historic march on Washington that summer, designed deliberately by a variety of black leaders to become a turning point in the civil rights campaign. The march was to be massive, so massive that although it was to be peaceful, it would nonetheless convey an implicit threat that if America didn’t change, didn’t do something – and soon – about desegregation, then … The threat was left deliberately vague. About a quarter of a million people descended on Washington on 28 August 1963, between a quarter and a third of them white. The marchers were relatively good-natured, and kept in line by a team of black New York policemen who had volunteered as marshals. The entertainment was second to none: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Mahalia Jackson, with a number of other celebrities showing up to lend support: Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Lena Home, Sammy Davis Junior. But what everyone remembered about that day was the speech by King. In recent speeches he had used a phrase he had found to be effective – B have a dream’ – and on this occasion he lavished extra special care on his delivery.
³²
Just as some men’s face is their fortune, in King’s case it was his voice. A very distinctive baritone, its dominant characteristic was a slight quiver. Combined with a rhetorical
strength, this quiver made King’s voice both strong and yet vulnerable, exactly matching the developing mood and political situation of ordinary American blacks. But it also had a universal appeal that whites could identify with too. For many, King’s speech that day would prove to be the most memorable part of the civil rights campaign, or at least the part they chose to remember. ‘Five score years ago,’ he began, announcing his near-biblical tone, ‘a great American, in whose symbolic shallow we stand, signed the Emanicipation Proclamation.’ With his first sentence he had hit his theme and rooted it in American history. ‘But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free…. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.’ And then he opened out, saying that he had a dream that one day his four little children would be judged ‘not by their colour but by their character.’
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Even today, the recording of King’s speech has the power to move.

King lived through and helped bring about turbulent times (Vietnam was a second factor). Between November 1955, when Rosa Parks, a black American, was arrested for sitting at the front of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama (blacks had traditionally only been allowed in the back of the bus), and 1973, when Los Angeles elected its first black mayor, an enormous social, political, and legislative revolution took place. That revolution was most visible in the United States, but it extended to other countries, in Europe, Africa, and the Far East, as this list, by no means exhaustive, indicates:

1958:
Disturbances in Little Rock, Arkansas, when the state governor tries to prevent the admission of black pupils to a school.

1960:
The Civil Rights Act is passed, empowering blacks to sue if denied their voting rights.

1961
: The Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) organises ‘freedom rides’ to enforce bus desegregation.

1962
: The Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity forms, chaired by Vice President Johnson. James Meredith, a black student, gains admission to the University of Mississippi, Oxford, under federal guard. The British Commonwealth Immigrants Act limits the rights of admission to Britain of certain Commonwealth immigrants.

1963:
The March on Washington. Equal-pay law for men and women in the United States is enacted.

1964
: The Civil Rights Act in the United States forbids discrimination in work, restaurants, unions, and public accommodation. The Economic Opportunity and Food Stamps Acts are passed, and the U.S. Survey of Educational Opportunity carried out.

1965:
Great Society initiatives includes Head Start programs to support education for the poor and minorities; Medicaid and Medicare to provide medicine for the poor and elderly; urban development schemes; and other welfare benefits. Women are accepted as judges.

1966:
NOW, the National Organization for Women, is founded, along with the Black Panthers, a black paramilitary outfit that calls for ‘Black Power.’
Under the U.S. Child Nutrition Act, federal funds provide food for poor children. British Supplementary Benefit assists the sick, disabled, unemployed, and widows. Inner cities are rebuilt.

1967:
Thurgood Marshall becomes the first black man appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Race riots in seventy American cities accelerate ‘white flight’ to the suburbs. Colorado is the first U.S. state to allow abortion. Homosexuality is legalised in Britain. In the United States, a report of the Commission on Civil Rights concludes that racial integration needs to be accelerated to reverse the underachievement of African-American children. Educational Priority Areas are created in Britain to combat inequality. Abortion becomes lawful in the U.K.

1968:
The Urban Institute is founded. The Kerner Report on the previous year’s race riots warns that the United States is becoming ‘two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.’ President Johnson announces ‘affirmative action,’ under which all government contractors must give ‘preferential treatment’ to African Americans and other minorities. Racial discrimination in the sale and renting of houses is outlawed. Shirley Chisholm is elected the first black congresswoman. The Immigration and Nationality Act replaces quota system with skill requirements. Hispanic workers protest against their treatment in the United States. The Race Relations Act in the U.K. makes racial discrimination illegal.