Corona, once “a farming and light manufacturing village,” is now a predominantly African American neighborhood located on the northern shore of Queens, Long Island. While Corona used to be a rural town, an influx of European and Caribbean immigrants as well as people traveling from the southern United States caused the industrial economy of Manhattan to expand into its outskirts, consequently causing the population of Corona to grow exponentially. By the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, North Corona was a predominantly African American neighborhood that eventually grew and spread down through South Corona. The town struggled with increasing problems of neighborhood deterioration, poor public services, and political powerlessness, and eventually Corona became known as an impoverished African American community, or as some may call it, a “black ghetto”.
Older researchers such as William Julius Wilson, author of The Truly Disadvantaged, portrayed “black ghettos” as dysfunctional, unorganized, poverty stricken neighborhoods whose inhabitants are low-class, unemployed African Americans. Unfortunately, it is now known that the image Wilson depicts is not only false, but it encourages stereotypes that demean neighborhoods like Corona. Steven Gregory specifically wrote the ethnography Black Corona years later to show and to prove through experience that the old theories and labels that portray lower-class African American communities as unfit and chaotic are entirely fictitious.
The growth of poverty in urban African American communities between the 1970s and 1980s sparked an interest for researchers in justifying the origins of “black ghetto” poverty and the social problems that are connected with it. Researchers first developed two arguments. The first idea was that black poverty was coupled with “the putative welfare dependency of female-headed families”, while the other idea was called “spatial mismatch”, which was the theory that black poverty was a...