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This chapter continues the discussion of the postwar rent strikes in New York City. Striking tenants believed that it was in their interest to withhold rent and resist eviction for as long as possible. A long strike, one that dragged on for weeks or months, deprived the landlords of much needed revenue and forced them to dip into reserves to pay the marshals, schleppers, and lawyers. However, by late 1919 and early 1920, municipal courts became so clogged with landlord-tenant disputes that judges were at their wits’ end.

This chapter describes the beginnings of postwar rent strikes in New York City. Many were convinced that a rent strike was the only way to protect their families. They were hopeful that if they went on strike they stood a fair chance of forcing the landlords to rescind or at least reduce the rent hikes. They also believed that a rent strike was justified on moral grounds because it contributed not only to the well-being of their families, but also to the nationwide campaign against profiteering. Compared to prewar rent strikes, the postwar rent strikes attracted far more tenants and far more buildings.

This chapter examines the rent strikes that erupted in Harlem and other ghettos in the 1960s. Ideologically, the rent strikes blur the line between civil rights liberalism and Black Power. Rent strikers renounced the liberal integrationist vision—moving out of the ghetto—that had animated the previous decade's black housing struggles. Instead they sought to improve conditions and build power within the segregated neighborhoods where they, like most African Americans, actually lived. This chapter considers the rent rebellion launched by ghetto residents, drawing inspiration from the burgeoning civil rights movement and support from New York's longtime tenant advocates. It shows that this rent rebellion won modest material improvements and contributed to a growing movement for community power in the ghettos. One of the strikes' main achievements was to galvanize tenants throughout New York City at a critical moment in the long-term fight over rent control. The chapter also discusses issues of gender and race in the Harlem rent strikes.

Between 1970 and 1974, tenants in the massive Stella Wright Homes led the longest rent strike in the history of U.S. public housing. The quality of Newark’s public housing had eroded alarmingly since its celebrated opening in the 1940s. Poor residents had been funneled into isolated and increasingly decrepit buildings. The tenants’ campaign recaptures a missing chapter of public housing's history and refines the concept of the fixer. Tenants decried housing authority mismanagement, but they also planned for their buildings’ restoration, countering negative depictions of public housing as unmitigated social disorganization. As officials traded accusations of blame, tenants pursued self-management. Like other fixers, Stella Wright tenant activists--many of them women--emphasized that reliable housing and employment were inextricably linked. They secured an array of allies and for a time enjoyed widespread support and won several critical legal victories. But as public housing programs shifted toward subsidized private rentals and some complexes were demolished with funding from HOPE VI, tenants’ successes were contained within a shrinking corner of the city’s public housing system. Yet the strikers identified problems that fixer organizations would attempt to solve by staking their hopes on the creation of new institutions, rather than the reformation of the old.

This chapter describes the impact of World War I on the lives of Scottish workers. The Glasgow Rent Strikes of 1915 were the first important point of confrontation between the workers—or more accurately the wives of workers—and the government during the war. These strikes were a direct result of the start of the war and the greed of war-profiteering slumlords. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this profiteering was its acceptance by the British government.

This chapter examines how the establishment of the St. Louis Civic Alliance for Housing rejuvenated Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway's vision of working-class citizenship and total person unionism. It begins with a background on the nine-month-long rent strike by public housing tenants in St. Louis and Gibbons's role in negotiating an end to the conflict, followed by a discussion on the Civic Alliance for Housing, a new entity that would help administer the city's public housing. It then considers the controversial NAACP election, focusing on questions raised about Evelyn Roberts's leadership and Calloway's role, and how the election exacerbated fissures among African American leaders. It also looks at two entities founded by Gibbons and Calloway, America 2000 and the Tandy Area Council, along with Calloway's unsuccessful bid for an area congressional seat in 1968.

From the early 20^th century through World War II, labor activism and women’s subsistence activism around tenants’ rights, food prices and education was central to industrial feminism and working-class women’s activism. This chapter traces the career of Clara Lemlich Shavelson after the 1909 uprising as she became a Communist Party activist and a leader in decades of rent strikes, kosher meat boycotts and the creation of working-class women’s neighbourhood councils. By 1935 her work had helped to spark a nation-wide meat boycott to protest price gouging.

This chapter traces the roots of East European Jewish women’s Socialism, feminism and labor radicalism in the Eastern European towns and cities where they were born during the late 19^th century. It then follows Schendierman, Newman, Lemlich and Cohn as they moved to New York City and became involved in labor and women’s subsistence activism.

The British Government built over 2,600 cottages for ex-servicemen, its largest estate at Killester a showcase garden city development. Responsibility after the conflict lay with an imperial agency, the Irish Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Trust, whose operation required the cooperation of the Irish Government. Perhaps the biggest obstacle was the antagonism of the tenants who were constantly in conflict with the Trust. The Trust’s rental policy was the subject of controversy favouring those who could afford the rent, rather than those most in need. Excessive rents were reduced under the duress of rent strikes but not before evictions for many of those in arrears, even when they were unable to pay. The tenants succeeded in the Irish Supreme Court to prove that the Trust had no right to charge rent. The Trust unsuccessfully sought a resolution through requests to the Irish Government to enact corrective legislation and in negotiations with the tenants. They were successful in court actions in seeking evictions for the more extreme forms of tenancy abuse but the building programme was halted. Although in the provision of homes and pensions Irish ex-servicemen were favourably treated, the British Government was severely criticised, perhaps due to false expectations and lack of complementary social support.

Chapter 6 uncovers the links between jobs and public housing. From the vantage point of overlooked historical actors, the chapter examines the massive urban renewal programs that razed black working-class neighborhoods and constructed massive public-housing structures throughout the city. The dignity for which black working-class women struggled pointed to a cluster of trenchant urban problems that St. Louis began encountering in the prewar period and later experienced in much more concentrated fashion. This chapter highlights the lives of public housing tenants and the labor activism of Ora Lee Malone to examine black women’s struggles against urban inequality. It also shows how black middle-class women reformers used their platforms to advance black working-class women’s causes. The work of the women featured in this chapter directly led to the 1969 rent strike, in which public-housing tenants struck against the St. Louis Housing Authority. In one of the first and largest rent stoppages in the nation, strike participants made tenant control a centerpiece of their platform.

This book explores the emergence of New York City's tenant movement as the leading voice for an alternative vision of residence and citizenship against the backdrop of suburban expansion. It considers how tenants responded to the unprecedented housing crisis that faced New Yorkers at the end of World War II and discusses their positions on three public policy questions: public housing, slum clearance, and civil rights. It also examines the tenants' creation of labor-union cooperatives and their fight against “urban renewal”; the struggle over the rent strikes that erupted in Harlem and other ghettos in 1963; and how community politics played out in racially mixed neighborhoods where tenants waged campaigns against redevelopment in the mid-1960s. The book highlights the variety of ways in which New York tenants laid claim to what Marxists have called “the right to the city”: a kind of democratic say over the uses of capital to shape the urban environment and the lives of its inhabitants.

This chapter discusses the rent strikes staged by Illinois Negroes with the help of Unemployed Councils in the early years of the Great Depression to resist evictions from the Chicago South Side. Chicago suffered during the depression which began in 1929, and the ill effects of the crisis were graphically reflected in the housing situation. Finding rents hard to collect, many owners agreed to condemnation and demolition of rundown houses as the cheapest way out. This chapter examines the alliance between militant Negroes and neighborhood Unemployed Councils in 1930 to fight Negro evictions from the South Side, culminating in riots on August 3, 1931. It also considers a few bright spots with regards to the Negro housing picture in Illinois, citing the high rate of home ownership among Negroes in Chicago; the provisions made in the State Housing Act in 1933 for the creation of the Illinois State Housing Board; and the completion of the Ida B. Wells Homes, a project built expressly for the colored citizens of Chicago, in 1941.

The institutions of imperial governance, however, could not maintain their authority or at times even maintain minimal law and order in North Carolina and northern New York. Both colonies faced open rebellion. The legal system was dysfunctional throughout North Carolina during much of the 1730s and 1740s, and the western, frontier sections of the colony were in open rebellion in the late 1760s and early 1770s. New York faced scattered, periodic rebellions in the Taconic region, the Mohawk Valley, and what is now Vermont from 1750 onward.