Kim Williams
This research will support a book that extends Peter Eisinger’s 1980 work, The Politics of Displacement: Racial and Ethnic Transition in Three American Cities, which examined the response of white elites “displaced” by blacks in city governments in the early 1970s. Using Eisinger’s framework for understanding how displaced groups adapt, this new book will focus on the next chapter in the story: the displacement of blacks by Latinos. We have become accustomed to understanding the path of political succession in urban America as a process in which blacks replace whites. The current wave of immigration complicates this picture considerably. New circumstances and unfolding trends beg the question as to whether and how we might compare the ascendance of blacks in the late 1960s–early 1970s to the putative rise of Latinos now.