I haven't been great about attending all of your wonderful #aag2021 sessions... But if mine catches your attention, here's a thread. It's about two manuscripts I'm working on theorizing the Chicago Freedom Movement via the social science of the 1960s Chicago Urban League
This fella, Harold Baron (1930-2017), was the director of the league, and tomorrow's presentation's really about him- mainly b/c my working paper about his research legacy is the more complete of the two manuscripts. Baron's life as an activist was astounding. Born in St. Louis,
Baron became radicalized- both towards humanist marxism and against racial segregation, at a young age. At Amherst College (early 1950s), he joined the Labor Youth League, a CPUSA-adjacent organizing group- an attempt to revive the energy of the Young Communist League. He-
- aspired to become a philosopher after college, getting accepted into University of Chicago to study under Rudolf Carnap, I suspect out of a desire to develop the left-humanist implications of Carnap's philosophy (he was very interested in the intersection between ethics and-
- science). Carnap ran off for Princeton though, and Baron jumped ship for economic history. During this time, he periodically wrote from a anti-imperialist marxist perspective in the UChicago student press, and became known as an anti-war organizer/speaker in the Hyde Park-
- neighborhood. His dissertation, mostly unpublished, was an examination of the origins of post-Civil War U.S. imperialism, attempting to locate the origins of the "demand" for hemispheric imperialism in the decades after the Civil War. Draws a fair amount from Kalecki-
- interestingly, not somebody widely read in the U.S. at the time (this was 1957-61). During his diss, he became a community college teacher in Chicago. The community college system had a hyper-bureaucratic approach to teaching that Baron found unconsciousable, so he started-
- looking for something else, eventually being laid off for refusing to administer multiple choice-only exams. During this time, he also started dating a North Lawndale teacher, a fellow Russian-Jewish socialist. This actually was the avenue into Baron's life as an anti-racist-
- researcher and organizer. North Lawndale was in the process of rapidly transitioning from being a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, to a predominantly Black one. It was hard for teachers like Paula (his future wife) not to notice that the Chicago Board of Education began-
- importing segregationist practices into North Lawndale's schools as it "turned." Paula hated it, as did fellow leftie teachers. They formed a cadre of sorts, with Faith Rich perhaps being the most renown. They began collecting evidence of what was happening in N. Lawndale-
- Eventually published in the NAACP's Crisis Magazine. This, along with Black Chicago's response to the Emmett Till murder, were two major catalyzing forces for what would become the school desegregation movement in Chicago, eventually evolving into the Chicago Freedom Mvmt-
- Leftwing white and Black teachers, parents, and academics, including notable figures such as Rosie Simpson and Timuel Black, were early activists in this movement, before it gained broader support or momentum. Everything I've read suggests that the early school desegregation-
- movement was a slow grind, constantly met with opposition in the press, especially the Chicago Tribune. An excellent documentary about the school deseg movement can be watched for free here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3663999896946213
Paula was the one who raised Harold's consciousness about school deseg's spread and character in Chicago, but Harold soon was able to make his own contributions, and very suddenly become a leader within the Chicago Freedom Movement. In need of a job, he responded to a newspaper-
- ad from the Chicago Urban League, searching for a new research director. the CUL had a research director position in previous incarnations, but the CUL was only just beginning to recover, under the leadership of Edwin "Bill" Berry, from an earlier institutional collapse-
- As Preston Smith III documents in "Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis," the CUL's 1940s-50s director, Sidney Williams, had taken a strong stand against anti-Black violent and riots throughout Chicago and its suburbs, calling as much attention to it as he could.-
- Williams was harshly punished for this by the white stakeholders of the CUL. He was fired, and the organization virtually collapsed. Bill Berry didn't even know about this history when he was brought in to lead the CUL, and I don't think Baron did either (but I think he-
- learned about his from St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton later on, who he became a sort of mentee of). So, the CUL had a reputation as a conservative organization that helped Black jobseekers, but tolerated no real opposition to the color line. This changed quickly after-
- Berry was brought in. By 1961, he wanted to do something to help the growing desegregation movement, and he and Baron became peas in the proverbial pod, especially once Baron was more established in the CUL by 1962. They coordinated to make the CUL more radical and to divert-
- its resources into document racial segregation in Chicagoland and to put pressure on the region's governments and major institutions. Baron was particularly important here. He knew that "street researchers" like Faith Rich were on to something important, and wanted to back-
- them up with credible research, but also provide play-by-play tactical advice for how to take on the Chicago Board of Education. In 1961, Black Chicago schoolteacher Al Raby coordinated the founding of the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, a big-tent voltron-
- of Black community organizations, religious groups, CIO-aligned labor, Black professionals, etc. At one point, Timuel Black made a push to bring politicized gang members into the org (who also played an instrumental role in organizing tenants), later on circa 1966 or so iirc-
Baron was quickly adopted by the CCCO as well, serving as a sort of informal head researcher. He was fascinated by the Chicago political machine and Chicago's political history, and briefed activists on how to navigate it and stave off its pressure. This is how he became an-
- advisor to MLK Jr. At some point, he made contact with St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, and became convinced that he wanted to push their social scientific legacy forwards, by syntheizing their political science methods with marxian and dissident Keynesian political economy-
- (he was an appreciator of Joan Robinson, Sweezy, Baran, Lester Thurow, Kalecki, and the Monthly Review school more generally). At some point, he also got really, really into Gramsci, but I think that may have been moreso in the mid-1960s. So, I'm going to just list stuff that-
- he did from here on out, because if I did a more deep context dive, this thread would never end. He was one of the busiest guys on earth from 1961-1968. Throughout this time, Baron hired on young researchers to gather empirical data on Black political disempowerment, housing-
- segregation, worked with ed specialists to design plans for new integrationist schools (never implemented, sadly), and incredibly, worked with a young economist named Bennett Hymer to write one of the four original mission statements (the others being written by others around-
- the U.S. independently of each other) for labor dualism/segmentation theory. He testified to Congress at least once (I think twice), coached Martin Luther King Jr. on how to deal with Daley and the machine, edited and researched speeches for MLK Jr., gave approx 150 talks-
- around Chicagoland about "the system of Northern segregation," as he called it, provided covert financial support and institutional cover for the Revolutionary Action Movement, bought GENERAL BAKER and the Dodge Revolutionary Action Movement a printing press (for real!!!)-
- Once threatened to knock out Norman Mailer while on a trip in New York (he was drunk and screaming at people in a hotel bar), helped sneak a Black Power artist being hunted by the FBI out of the U.S. (mainly by buying his art in cash), mentored Richard Rothstein, teaching him-
- the archival research methods he would use in "The Color of Law" (and yes, for the record, Rothstein will tell you this), and developed a research he would eventually name "racial formation theory" in 1985. In the 1960s though, his best theoretical contribution, in my-
- assessment, was a critique of the de facto-de jure typology of racism. He didn't deny that these described actually-existing forms of racism, but he argued that postwar political economy had become enmeshed in selectively depressed urban labor markets, which were, in turn,-
- reinforced by a network of civil society institutions (schools, the local state, etc.) that had come to depend on the depressed wages of Black workers and their functional role within U.S. metropolitan labor markets. He began to suspect, by 1965, that "northern" racism was-
- evolving into a system where geography, social abstractions, and processes of downward harmonization would become the primary reproducers of racial segregation, not as much "trogledyte racism," as the Fields sisters would call blatantly-expressed racism in their work Racecraft-
-. There is one more accomplish of Baron's during this time- a huge one, in one sense, but a terrible failure in his own perception. The Gautreaux Case. Baron knew Dorothy Gautreaux, a leader among Black public housing residents in Chicago. Looking at how organized they were-
- becoming, he (and yes, it was him- this is acknowledged in the extant lit) came up with the idea of suing the Chicago Housing Authority. He wasn't a lawyer (although he knew law enough to edit some state legislation here and there throughout his life), but he knew how law-
- worked. They brought in an ACLU affiliate to file two lawsuits: One against HUD, and another against CHA. Baron was tasked with gathering evidence proving that CHA was a consciously segregationist institution. He brought in Students for a Democratic Society members as-
- research associates, notably Richard Rothstein, Renny Davis, and Harriet Stulman. He had them interview people, go through archives, test real estate brokers, etc. The evidence was overwhelming. Baron synthesized it in the longform essay "Building Babylon." The thing is, the-
- lawsuit did not go the way he wanted. When going into negotiations, the judge and the ACLU decided that public housing would now take the form of moving individual Black families into the suburbs, eventually called "Moving to Opportunity." Baron and most of the grassroots-
housing activists in the Chicago Freedom Movement hated it. Baron described it as an attempt to eliminate segregation by eliminating Black communities. His bitterness regarding this outcome would drive him to theorize U.S. racism more deeply, and to analyze the ideological and-
- strategic shortcomings of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement. His final synthesis of the latter project was 1985's "Racism Transformed: The Implications of the 1960s" published in the Review of Radical Political Economy. It's the same one that coins "racial formation theory"-
- one year before Omi and Winant did, although they do acknowledge him as a predecessor in the first two editions of their book (and then wrote him out of the story in the third). To be fair, their version of the theory was pretty different, but they shouldering him out is sad-
- nonetheless. After the CUL, he synthesized his empirical and theoretical findings from his CUL days in the longform essay "The Web of Urban Racism." In the 1973, he collaborated with early labor segmentation theorists in their first essay collection, authoring-
"Racial Domination Under Advanced Capitalism". It's probably his hardest to track down today, because it was only published in a book, but it was widely cited and seen as breaking open research into how racism, the capitalist state, and civil society had evolved since WW2. It-
- was influential enough that a grumpy Trotskyite political economist wrote an essay condemning him for having inspired dissident political economists to begin investigating nationalism and racism's roles within postwar U.S. capitalism and the reproduction of colonial relations-
- internationally. Now, I should point out that Baron was a good synthesizer- these things didn't pop straight out of his head. Important influences at various points were Kwame Ture, Miliband, Gramsci, Foucault, Freire, Ray Mack, MLK Jr. (ofc!), Poulantzas, the Fields sisters-
- etc... Point being, the guy was a voracious reader. Oh, and did I forget to mention? He was one of the showrunners for Harold Washington's campaign, and served as the guardian of progressive political practice within the mayoralty. Once HWash was elected, he served as his-
- "Chief Policy Advisor," an official title that H Washington gave him! After Harold Washington's heartrending death (something that, in a certain sense, demoralized Baron for the rest of his life), Baron decided, under the influence of liberation theologian ex-priest friends-
- of his, to get involved in organizing local development projects in Central America, especially El Salvador, particularly targeting refugee communities that had resettled after war & revolution in El Salvador. This led to the foundation of EcoViva, a development org that's-
- still going strong to this day (Google em'). Their philosophy is to get funding and resources straight into already-existing civil society groups in Central America, without State Department ideological apparatus breathing down the communities' necks. Also, he was an-
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