Rhonda Y Williams
Biographic Data
| ID | 772168 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rhonda Y Williams |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rhonda Y |
| FAMILY NAME | Williams |
| SIGNATURE | WILLIAMS R Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | Case Western Reserve University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 15 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Special Issue
“Illicit work,” the category of analysis for this special issue, does double duty: first, by focusing on the intertwined relations of labor and racial capitalism that specifically flourish under conditions of criminalization. In this valence, “illicit” means illegal. But “illicit” also speaks to the cultural discourse about the criminal world, and the stories that journalists, police, and politicians told about criminalized places that justified …
Places Created and Peopled
This essay is based on remarks given as part of “The Legacy and Impact of Arnold Hirsch” session at the Urban History Association conference in Columbia, South Carolina, in October 2018. My conference remarks were in part prepared outline, in part extemporaneous riff. This essay takes its cue from my conference remarks, in that it, too, is in flux, building on my prepared outline, my in-the-moment handwritten notes, my memory, and additional idea…
Concrete Demands
Between the 1950s and 1970s, Black Power coalesced as activists advocated a more oppositional approach to fighting racial oppression, emphasizing racial pride, asserting black political, cultural, and economic autonomy, and challenging white power. In Concrete Demands, Rhonda Y. Williams provides a rich, deeply researched history that sheds new light on this important social and political movement, and shows that the era of expansive Black Power …
Citizens and Paupers
In Citizens and Paupers, Chad Alan Goldberg examines social welfare policies as “pre-eminent sites for political struggles over the meaning and boundaries of citizenship in the United States” (p. 1). For him, citizenship is not simply a status describing national belonging, it is also “an instrument of social closure” that stratifies groups, thereby abridging their access to resources and rights (ibid.). A work of historical sociology, Citizens a…
Envisioning "The Black Woman" and Analyzing Voices of Protest
The articles and teaching strategies in this issue of the OAH Magazine of History have explored the complexities of both the Black Power and the civil rights movements. This teaching strategy continues this examination by offering a classroom activity focused on the writings of black women during the period. By reading and analyzing these primary sources, students will come to understand how individuals connect with historical changes and become …
Black Women and Black Power
The phrase “Black Power!” usually evokes inspiring, or frightful, images of black men in the late 1960s. They wore black berets, Afros, dark sunglass es, and slick leather coats. Maybe they sat kingly in high-backed rattan chairs. Perhaps they carried guns or shouted rancorous and aggressive “Black Power” slogans that threatened to turn the world upside down. Such spellbinding masculine images of Black Power dominated not only public attention in…
Black Milwaukee, Women, and Gender
This article reflects upon the contributions and limits of Joe William Trotter Jr.'s Black Milwaukee by revisiting the book's proletarianization model. This model helped to complicate analyses and historical narratives of black urban experiences by departing from “ghetto”-based paradigms and focusing squarely on economy, class relations, and black people as laborers. But the model also proved limited, particularly as it related to the substantive…
Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion
The Politics of Public Housing
"Exploring Babylon and Unveiling the "Mother of Harlots
American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. By Robert O. Self. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America Series. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. 386 pages. $35.00 (cloth). A city, a garden city, a modern city, a rich city, a city of culture, an excessively wicked city, an evil city, a spiritually bereft center of power, an empire built upon the subjugation of people, or the United States of America—the …
The Politics Of Public Housing
Black women have traditionally represented the canvas on which many debates about poverty and welfare have been drawn. For a quarter century after the publication of the notorious Moynihan report, poor black women were tarred with the same brush: “ghetto moms” or “welfare queens” living off the state, with little ambition or hope of an independent future. At the same time, the history of the civil rights movement has all too often succumbed to an…
The Politics of Public Housing
In this collective biography, Rhonda Y. Williams takes us behind, and beyond, politically expedient labels to provide an incisive and intimate portrait of poor black women in urban America. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Williams challenges the notion that low-income housing was a resounding failure that doomed three consecutive generations of postwar Americans to entrenched poverty. Instead, she recovers a history of grassroots activism, of po…
I'm a Keeper of Information
Did you have to say it like that? Like what? I would ask my mother each time, somewhat perturbed, only slightly befuddled, and immediately self-aware that somewhere in that last sentence (or two or three), once again, I had stepped out of line, so to speak. It's not what you said, it's how you said it! my mother usually whipped back, her voice raising an octave, or more than likely flowing over her signature calm-yourself-Ginny humph. All I said …
We're tired of being treated like dogs”
(2001). “We're tired of being treated like dogs”: Poor Women and Power Politics in Black Baltimore. The Black Scholar: Vol. 31, Black Power Studies: A New Scholarship, pp. 31-41
Understanding Urban Unrest
Journal Article Understanding Urban Unrest: From Reverend King to Rodney King. By Dennis E. Gale. (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996. xii, 228 pp. Cloth, $51.00, ISBN 0-7619-0094-2. Paper, $24.50, ISBN 0-7619-0095-0.) Get access Rhonda Y. Williams Rhonda Y. Williams Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86, Issue 2, September 1999, Pages…
Citizens and Paupers
In Citizens and Paupers, Chad Alan Goldberg examines social welfare policies as “pre-eminent sites for political struggles over the meaning and boundaries of citizenship in the United States” (p. 1). For him, citizenship is not simply a status describing national belonging, it is also “an instrument of social closure” that stratifies groups, thereby abridging their access to resources and rights (ibid.). A work of historical sociology, Citizens a…
We're tired of being treated like dogs”
(2001). “We're tired of being treated like dogs”: Poor Women and Power Politics in Black Baltimore. The Black Scholar: Vol. 31, Black Power Studies: A New Scholarship, pp. 31-41
Understanding Urban Unrest
Journal Article Understanding Urban Unrest: From Reverend King to Rodney King. By Dennis E. Gale. (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996. xii, 228 pp. Cloth, $51.00, ISBN 0-7619-0094-2. Paper, $24.50, ISBN 0-7619-0095-0.) Get access Rhonda Y. Williams Rhonda Y. Williams Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86, Issue 2, September 1999, Pages…
Understanding Urban Unrest
Journal Article Understanding Urban Unrest: From Reverend King to Rodney King. By Dennis E. Gale. (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996. xii, 228 pp. Cloth, $51.00, ISBN 0-7619-0094-2. Paper, $24.50, ISBN 0-7619-0095-0.) Get access Rhonda Y. Williams Rhonda Y. Williams Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86, Issue 2, September 1999, Pages…
I'm a Keeper of Information
Did you have to say it like that? Like what? I would ask my mother each time, somewhat perturbed, only slightly befuddled, and immediately self-aware that somewhere in that last sentence (or two or three), once again, I had stepped out of line, so to speak. It's not what you said, it's how you said it! my mother usually whipped back, her voice raising an octave, or more than likely flowing over her signature calm-yourself-Ginny humph. All I said …
We're tired of being treated like dogs”
(2001). “We're tired of being treated like dogs”: Poor Women and Power Politics in Black Baltimore. The Black Scholar: Vol. 31, Black Power Studies: A New Scholarship, pp. 31-41
The Politics Of Public Housing
Black women have traditionally represented the canvas on which many debates about poverty and welfare have been drawn. For a quarter century after the publication of the notorious Moynihan report, poor black women were tarred with the same brush: “ghetto moms” or “welfare queens” living off the state, with little ambition or hope of an independent future. At the same time, the history of the civil rights movement has all too often succumbed to an…
The Politics of Public Housing
In this collective biography, Rhonda Y. Williams takes us behind, and beyond, politically expedient labels to provide an incisive and intimate portrait of poor black women in urban America. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Williams challenges the notion that low-income housing was a resounding failure that doomed three consecutive generations of postwar Americans to entrenched poverty. Instead, she recovers a history of grassroots activism, of po…
The Politics of Public Housing
"Exploring Babylon and Unveiling the "Mother of Harlots
American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. By Robert O. Self. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America Series. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. 386 pages. $35.00 (cloth). A city, a garden city, a modern city, a rich city, a city of culture, an excessively wicked city, an evil city, a spiritually bereft center of power, an empire built upon the subjugation of people, or the United States of America—the …
Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion
Black Milwaukee, Women, and Gender
This article reflects upon the contributions and limits of Joe William Trotter Jr.'s Black Milwaukee by revisiting the book's proletarianization model. This model helped to complicate analyses and historical narratives of black urban experiences by departing from “ghetto”-based paradigms and focusing squarely on economy, class relations, and black people as laborers. But the model also proved limited, particularly as it related to the substantive…
Envisioning "The Black Woman" and Analyzing Voices of Protest
The articles and teaching strategies in this issue of the OAH Magazine of History have explored the complexities of both the Black Power and the civil rights movements. This teaching strategy continues this examination by offering a classroom activity focused on the writings of black women during the period. By reading and analyzing these primary sources, students will come to understand how individuals connect with historical changes and become …
Black Women and Black Power
The phrase “Black Power!” usually evokes inspiring, or frightful, images of black men in the late 1960s. They wore black berets, Afros, dark sunglass es, and slick leather coats. Maybe they sat kingly in high-backed rattan chairs. Perhaps they carried guns or shouted rancorous and aggressive “Black Power” slogans that threatened to turn the world upside down. Such spellbinding masculine images of Black Power dominated not only public attention in…
Citizens and Paupers
In Citizens and Paupers, Chad Alan Goldberg examines social welfare policies as “pre-eminent sites for political struggles over the meaning and boundaries of citizenship in the United States” (p. 1). For him, citizenship is not simply a status describing national belonging, it is also “an instrument of social closure” that stratifies groups, thereby abridging their access to resources and rights (ibid.). A work of historical sociology, Citizens a…
Concrete Demands
Between the 1950s and 1970s, Black Power coalesced as activists advocated a more oppositional approach to fighting racial oppression, emphasizing racial pride, asserting black political, cultural, and economic autonomy, and challenging white power. In Concrete Demands, Rhonda Y. Williams provides a rich, deeply researched history that sheds new light on this important social and political movement, and shows that the era of expansive Black Power …
Places Created and Peopled
This essay is based on remarks given as part of “The Legacy and Impact of Arnold Hirsch” session at the Urban History Association conference in Columbia, South Carolina, in October 2018. My conference remarks were in part prepared outline, in part extemporaneous riff. This essay takes its cue from my conference remarks, in that it, too, is in flux, building on my prepared outline, my in-the-moment handwritten notes, my memory, and additional idea…
Special Issue
“Illicit work,” the category of analysis for this special issue, does double duty: first, by focusing on the intertwined relations of labor and racial capitalism that specifically flourish under conditions of criminalization. In this valence, “illicit” means illegal. But “illicit” also speaks to the cultural discourse about the criminal world, and the stories that journalists, police, and politicians told about criminalized places that justified …
Political science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Race, History, and American Society (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Gender Studies (5 works) · History (5 works) · American Political and Social Dynamics (4 works)