Down the Up Staircase

Three Generations of a Harlem Family
Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-0-231-18102-0
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten, Format (B × H): 223 mm x 147 mm, Gewicht: 420 g

Down the Up Staircase traces the social history of Harlem through the lens of one family across three generations, connecting their journey to the larger historical and social forces that shaped and transformed Harlem. Sociologist Bruce D. Haynes and coauthor Syma Solovitch capture the sweeping tides of change that pushed blacks forward through the twentieth century—the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the early civil rights victories, the Black Power and Black Arts movements—and the many social forces that ravaged black communities, including Haynes's own. As an authority on race and urban communities, Haynes brings unique sociological insights to the American mobility saga and examines the tenuous nature of status and success among the black middle class.

In many ways, Haynes's family defied the odds. All four great-grandparents on his father's side owned land in the South as early as 1880. His grandfather, George Edmund Haynes, was the founder of the National Urban League and a protégé of the eminent black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois; his grandmother, a noted children's author of the Harlem Renaissance and a prominent social scientist. Yet these early advances and gains provided little anchor to the succeeding generations. This story is told against the backdrop of a crumbling three-story brownstone in Sugar Hill that once hosted Harlem Renaissance elites and later became an embodiment of the family's rise and demise. Down the Up Staircase is a stirring portrait of this family, each generation walking a tightrope, one misstep from free fall.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Haynes, Bruce

Solovitch, Syma

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Geschichte: Sachbuch
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Biographien & Autobiographien: Historisch, Politisch, Militärisch

Inhaltsverzeichnis

PrefaceAcknowledgements1. Mad Money2. Not Alms but Opportunity3. New Negroes4. Soul Dollars5. Stepping Out6. Do for Yourself7. Free Fall8. Moving on Down9. Keep on Keepin' onNotes

Über Autor(innen)

Bruce D. Haynes is associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Red Lines, Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb (2001) and the coeditor of The Ghetto: Contemporary Global Issues and Controversies (2011).

Syma Solovitch is a freelance writer, developmental editor, and educator. This is her first book.