Black Ideologies on Community Safety in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Sociology
First Advisor
Anderson, Elijah
Abstract
This three-article dissertation considers how community safety is being discussed in the 21st Century and its implications for the communal vitality of Black Americans. Given that precarity has always been a universal reality of citizenship for Black people in the United States, this dissertation project asks: how do Black people prioritize their safety concerns and reimagine the future of community safety in the United States? The first dissertation article considers this question historically. Specifically, it analyzes the political and practical objectives that guided Tuskegee Institute’s sociological program and institutional interventions in the 19th and 20th centuries. Leveraging a multi-modal historical sociological approach grounded in primary and secondary analyses of biographical data, narratives, and archival data, I show that Tuskegee Institute was an abolitionist organization driven to (1) create communities of care among Black Americans, (2) create safe spaces for processes of restorative care-building among socioeconomically diverse Americans, and (3) inspire divestment from harmful institutional practices. The second article in this dissertation project shifts back temporally to the 21st century to examine forces that are threatening the welfare of Black Americans in mid-size cities. More concretely, I evaluate how Black people living in Cincinnati, OH understand the impact of gentrification on their safety. Drawing on open-ended interviews conducted with a large sample of Black adults from diverse educational backgrounds and neighborhoods of residence, I show that Black Cincinnatians in my sample view gentrification as a threat to their personal and communal safety (1) within gentrifying neighborhoods, (2) in non-gentrifying neighborhoods, and (3) across the city of Cincinnati. Finally, the third and final article of this dissertation project evaluates how Black Cincinnatians evaluate the mandate to “defund the police” as a safety intervention. Leveraging open-ended interviews and surveys with the sample of Black Cincinnatians featured in the second article, I demonstrate how age plays a central role in shaping how my participants evaluate defunding as an outcome or process of change with implications for the institution of policing.
Recommended Citation
Lewis IV, Demar Francis, "Black Ideologies on Community Safety in the 20th and 21st Centuries" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1238.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1238
