The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents' Activism in Chicago Public Housing (Environment and Behavior)

This comprehensive case study chronicles the four decade history of Chicago's Wentworth Gardens public housing residents' grassroots activism. It explores why and how the African-American women residents creatively and effectively engaged in organizing efforts to resist increasing government disinvestment in public housing and the threat of demolition. Through the inspirational voices of the activists, Roberta Feldman and Susan Stall challenge portrayals of public housing residents as passive and alienated victims of despair. The Dignity of Resistance chronicles the four decade history of Chicago's Wentworth Gardens public housing residents'grassroots activism. This comprehensive case study explores why and how these African-American women creatively and effectively engaged in organizing efforts to resist increasing government disinvestment in public housing and the threat of demolition. Roberta M. Feldman and Susan Stall, utilizing a multi-disciplinary lens, explore the complexity and resourcefulness of Wentworth women's grassroots, organizing the ways in which their identities as poor African-American women and mothers both circumscribe their lives and shape their resistance. Through the inspirational voices of the activists, Feldman and Stall challenge portrayals of public housing residents as passive, alienated victims of despair. We learn instead how women residents collectively have built a cohesive, vital community, cultivated outside technical assistance, organizational and institutional supports, and have attracted funding - all to support the local facilities, services and programs necessary for the everyday needs for survival, and ultimately to save their home from demolition. This book chronicles the four decade history of Chicago's Wentworth Gardens public housing residents' grassroots activism. The volume challenges common portrayals of public housing residents in order to show how women residents creatively and effectively sustain daily life, create a vital community and save their home from demolition. The resident Beatrice Harris, one of the key figures in local organizing efforts at Wentworth Gardens, is speaking with great dismay about the abysmal living conditions of her "homeplace," a 422-unit low-rise Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) family development on the South Side.