race, ghetto and underclass talk

Gordon Parks' photography has often captured African American life in cites

The transformation of rural African Americans into urban people is a twentieth century event. By World War II, more blacks lived in cities than in the countryside.  As they settled in, African Americans were affected by many things including deindustrialization, high unemployment and residential segregation.  Scholars, among them, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, St. Clair Drake,  Horace R. Cayton. Gilbert Osofsky and Williams Julius Wilson, have contributed to the growth of black urban studies as a scholarly field. After initially focusing on northern cities like Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, researchers have in recent decades concentrated on urban communities across the nation. This week, the students taking this class will think about how African American life in cities has been shaped by critical attention to race, ghettoes and what has been called the “underclass.”