Clement Jr. Cottingham / Clement JrCottingham
Contrary to William J. Wilson who focuses on industrial changes and itsconsequences for urban social structures, Cottingham examines the trajectory ofurban black civil society during its fitful transition out of a politically entrenchedracial/caste regime. In the 1930s, a vigorous, though severely segregated, urbanblack society emerged as southern migrants arrived in New Jersey's smallindustrial cities. As it was politically constructed, civil society was founded on a rigidsocial hierarchy through communicative interactions organized through blacknewspapers, churches, clubs and civic organizations.
With the race-based urban riots of the 1960s, this political order immediatelydissipated. As a consequence, the normative walls embedded in the interstices ofold black civil society immediately crumbled. In conjunction with economic changes,mutuality within the political realm-the integration of racial, class, gender, andideological hierarchies-was politically reconfigured in the 1970s and 1980s.
Urban black civil society now existed on a remade political terrain and operatedoutside the social norms previously embedded in the old regime. Powerful politicalforces jolted the social realm and spawned alternative communicative discoursesembedded within urban black civil society.
In an effort to salvage civil society in the 1980s, New Jersey's administrativeagencies deployed policy regimes to arrest an unfolding urban social order. In theface of surging black identities, interests, and social norms, state authority wasrestructured in schools, hospitals, and juvenile courts to discipline a subalternsocial order. As the politics of national political incorporation advanced in the 1990s,southern black migrants confronted entrenched barriers in their struggle for greaterjustice and enhanced social equality.
