February is African-American History Month: Urban planning history -- the attempt to make Roxbury a separate city from Boston

I was surprised to come across a Boston Globe article ("Roxbury, Mattapan, and parts of Jamaica Plain could have become a separate Black majority city. Here’s what happened") on a de-annexation proposal for Boston, where the predominately Black areas would create their own city called Mandela.  

Also see 

-- "Separatist City’: The Mandela, Massachusetts (Roxbury) Movement and the Politics of Incorporation, Self-Determination, and Community Control, 1986–1988," Trotter Review
-- "Africa in Boston: A Critical Analysis of Mandela, Massachusetts," libcom
-- "Black neighborhoods becoming Black cities: Group empowerment, local control and the implications of being darker than brown," Harvard Civil Rights- Civil Liberties Law Review, 1988

Greater Atlanta. More recently, in Greater Atlanta, there has been a "create your own city" movement to separate blacks and whites, by selectively incorporating county lands ("The Incorporation of New Cities Has Increased Racial Segregation in Metro Atlanta," JCHS, "Suburbs, Inc.: Exploring Municipal Incorporation as a Mechanism of Racial and Economic Exclusion in Suburban Communities," Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences).  This continues with a proposal to calve off the Buckhead District ("Georgia senators reject Buckhead efforts to leave Atlanta," AP).  

Schools.  Similarly, in Shelby County, Tennessee, which created a consolidated city-county school district, white residents began breaking off and creating their own school districts ("Merger of Memphis and County School Districts Revives Race and Class Challenges," New York Times, "Back to the future: A new school district secession movement is gaining steam," Washington Post).

Mandela versus electing Black leaders.  While the Roxbury initiative was voted on, twice, it didn't pass ("Separatist City of ‘Mandela’ : Boston Voting on Proposal to Let Black Areas Secede," Los Angeles Times).  From the Globe article:

The Mandela referendum was defeated overwhelmingly that year and lost again at the polls two years later. Yet the underlying idea behind the movement — to place decision-making power and resources in the Black community’s own hands — survives nearly 40 years later. As voters in those same neighborhoods have worked over the years to choose candidates they feel are most suited to transform Black Boston, the issues of disinvestment, inequality, and underrepresentation that Mandela hoped to address have still been top of mind. ...

The proponents’ asks focused on giving Black people decision-making power. They wanted hard-earned taxpayer dollars to funnel back into these neighborhoods, and not other parts of Boston with more historic investment. They wanted to control development. They wanted better outcomes for students in Boston Public Schools, which was dominated by kids of color. And they wanted full political representation from their blocks, not just the few Black firsts that had penetrated Boston City Hall in the years prior. 

 “It was about ownership,” said Kambon, director of the Black Community Information Center in Roxbury. “We want to control our own destiny. We have the resources and the people power to make it happen.”

Black leaders, black city, no change?  I was thinking about this in terms of how many center cities around that time, majority Black, were starting to become Black led, although this was another 5-8 years after Roxbury.  And how Black elected leadership didn't make a lot of difference to urban outcomes compared to their more recent white predecessors.

Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago (in the 1980s), Washington, DC, Los Angeles were among the cities electing Black mayors.  And Atlanta.

A point in the book Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, 1986-1999 about Black "takeover of public school boards" is pretty apt, that Blacks could get control only once resources for improvement were pretty much dissipated.  The federal government stopped giving extra money to cities, as their needs were increasing.

Atlanta: the city too busy to hate ("How Atlanta became the 'city too busy to hate'," Yahoo).  The difference in success between Atlanta and the others was likely because at the time Atlanta was a growing city, while the others were shrinking.