Katia Gomes
URS-101-300-155
Urban Problems
One of the most challenging balances that communities try to achieve is between public safety and social justice. In the process local authorities unknowingly discriminate against community members based on race, gender or age. Another difficult balancing act is weighing environmental preservation and economic development. As a result many communities damage the environment in their everyday operations. These statements mentioned above practically speak for themselves.
Racial discrimination is one of the most controversial complications of humanity. Most developments were racially exclusive and the whites were not willing to budge. The whites were willing to fight in order to keep it that way. A lot of cities underwent intense changes in ethnic structure as blacks seemed to be diminishing the white population. The merging in the public school system during the late 1950s and 1960s “further threatened whites’ presumptive control of institutions and neighborhoods. The legality of racial segregation had been undermined in 1954 by the U.S. Supreme Court’s famous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, but public officials in the South vowed “massive resistance.” (226) “A 1974 U.S. Supreme Court ruling pointed to a durable solution for whites trying to escape school integration. In Milliken v. Bradley, the court ruled against busing students across district lines to achieve racial balance between schools in Detroit and those in its suburbs. Together, the various court rulings seemed to declare school integration to be mandatory within each city but unnecessary for the metropolitan area as a whole.” (228) Many different reasons began to emerge as several groups began to lose hope in the government in solving social problems. The collective violence caused by protestors and police fed the growing polarization of American politics. It weakened the liberal coalition that sustained the War on Poverty. The origins...