The aftermath of the Katrina catastrophe exposed corporate America’s vision of a nation in which no major city will have a Black majority or politically powerful plurality. The workshop will examine the massive post-World War Two public-private suburbanization project, which transformed the demographic, economic and political landscape of the U.S.; the accompanying and equally massive disinvestment in urban America, which led to Black domination of many cities, by default; and the “end of cycle” period that is well underway, in which Big Capital seeks to return to the cities and reshape them to its own purposes, resulting in rapidly expanding gentrification and Black “push out.” We will detail and explain the de-Blackening of 7 of the top 12 heavily African American cities in recent years, and the perils to Black political power and self-determination – as well as the disastrous effects this trend will have on progressive politics in general, in the near future.

The Team will explore how already existing efforts to make corporations accountable to communities, and struggles against gentrification can combine and expand to build a Movement for Democratic Development that

• preserves African American concentrations of population and political power;

• provides practical political common ground between urban Black populations and immigrants struggling to maintain a foothold in the cities;

• educates city dwellers on the real and growing value of the land on which they live, and that resisting “push out” is a critical and doable struggle;

• joins with progressives in the Labor Movement, especially African American unionists, to channel pension fund investments to targeted urban centers (where the bulk of their members live) as a counter-weight to corporate coercive power:

• brings together a team of progressive professionals capable of auditing the totality of a city’s private and public resources and presenting plans for integrated, city-wide development based on the principle no project can be considered “development” that does not benefit the people who already live in the city;

• confronts capital with comprehensive data and plans for development based on research that is as thorough and grounded as the self-serving studies routinely conducted by corporations, thereby empowering communities to bargain with (or reject) capital seeking entrance to the city;

• organizes community residents to propose their own development schemes, based on their personal knowledge of neighborhood needs and the data and ideas provided by the professional team;

• ignites a movement through which urbanites can “dream” their own neighborhoods and city, and fight to achieve those dreams;

• ejects the generation of corporate-bought “beggar politicians” that have dominated Black urban political life, replacing them with the community activists and progressives who emerge from the struggle for democratic development and self-determination.