SOCIAL CAPITAL AT THE CROSSROADS

Lisette Lopez and Carol Stack

lisettel@uclink4.Berkeley.edu
stack@socrates.berkeley.edu

University of California
Graduate School of Education
4501 Tolman Hall
Berkeley, California 94720
 

Paper prepared for the Ford Foundation conference on "Social Capital and Poor Communities: Building and Using Social Capital to Combat Poverty," New York City, March 11-13, 1999.
 

Social capital resists abstraction. It does not make a conversation lifted above the fray of time and place. Instead, it must be grounded, heard in dialogue with local voices, seen against the background of individuals, families, and communities, a nation and world in motion. To understand how the workings of social capital affect urban sites, we must acknowledge the range of political and economic forces that have painted a new American landscape for the end of the 20th century. The concept illuminates our discussions of these forces only if we study it in their interplay over time. Changing geographies of financial capital have hardened the urban core; global and inter-regional migrations of people have altered it. It has been reconfigured by ethnic and racial divisions; destabilized by the erosion of public institutions and social services.

We argue that some conversations about social capital obscure the interconnections that make it a useful research tool, and that were central at its contemporary birth in Pierre Bourdieu's larger theory of capital and inequality (Bourdieu 1980,1985; Portes 1998, Wacquant 1998. The purpose of this paper is to (re)weave the many threads of social capital into patterns of agency and constraint that help us understand how impoverished communities of color function on urban ground.

Our economy is growing again, and yet many sense that things have gone wrong. Sometimes uneasiness surfaces in a general anxiety over declining standards of living, longer work hours, uncertain futures, changing family values. Sometimes it centers on the persistence of economic despair and social distress in disproportionately Black and Latino urban enclaves. Whatever our specific concerns, many of us look to social capital to solve the problems of poverty and marginalization in cities. It's a solution that invokes collective memories of a golden age -- the sixties and seventies for some, the twenties and thirties for others, or perhaps even the early 19th century -- when people who lived in cities seemed to have the skills and interest to build social connections and forge norms of trust. Mined over years, the local landscapes of urban communities of color disclose scaffolds of support, but alongside a living history of racial barriers, hatred, and distrust that may obscure structures of unity and resistance among people who were excluded and marginalized.

To discover how social capital may be created and destroyed in communities of color, we first look to history and familiar debates among social scientists over the causes of urban poverty and the nature (or the existence) of an underclass. Those debates provide us with context, offer us clues with which to decode processes of urban social change. Attention to the "neighborhood effects" of poverty in arguments about the underclass, for instance, prefigured our current interest in applying social capital theory to community dynamics. Relying on a theoretical perspective grounded in qualitative methods that focus on agency and daily life to explicate how local change articulates with global forces, we will weave a narrative that draws heavily on theories of urbanism developed by such historians as Alice O'Connor (1998), Robin Kelley (1994:1998), and Michael Katz (1993), theories that reveal policies and practices of racial containment behind urban-suburban segregation and labor market segmentation, and the work of communities to contest them.

Katz, Kelley, and O'Connor argue, in effect, that the development and deployment of white social capital after World War II worked to disadvantage communities of color by depriving them of resources with which to build social capital of their own. In the last thirty years, spurred by the economic hollowing of the cities and the encapsulation of African Americans and Latinos in urban enclaves of color, the disintegration of urban public institutions -- what Loic Wacquant refers to as the "erosion" of state social capital -- turned organizations responsible for providing the civic goods and services with which social capital is formed "into instruments of surveillance, suspicion, and exclusion, rather than vehicles of social integration and trust-building" (1998:25). So three interlocking factors -- economic withdrawal, racial containment, and the erosion of civic institutions -- destroyed the ability of urban communities to build the type of social capital that could halt the deepening of poverty and escalation of social problems.

In the first part of this paper, "Translating Changing Times and Landscapes," we sketch with broad strokes major trends in the interplay between urban history and social capital formation. But first, let us briefly situate ourselves in the field of research. Debates over the nature of urban poverty are always embedded in and shaped by a larger struggle to interpret social change (Gans 1995, Katz 1993; 1995). Discussions of the underclass in the 1980s and early '90s identified social-cultural dynamics as significant contributors to poverty in the urban core and evolved at a time when major efforts were underway to scale back social expenditures that characterized the 'welfare state era' in western industrial societies. Following a period of profound economic restructuring, that campaign revised policy priorities and investments and rewrote the social contract, shifting responsibility for social welfare and the public good away from government and onto individuals and communities.

Social programs promoted by labor and civil rights groups after the Great Depression were eviscerated by this new contract, which appears to have the force of holy writ; and de facto acceptance of the political law that taxes cannot be raised, only cut, has utterly altered the terrain of social expenditures. The rush to focus on changes in civil society (evidenced in fascination with the social capital of communities) as the source of social problems and as the appropriate site for solutions comes in the context of this changed (broken?) social contract

In the second section of the paper, "Mining Ethnographies for Social Capital," we track the operations of networks, norms, and trust, through the illustrative ethnographic case studies we know best (Stack 1996a&b). Because social capital is a cultural process that enables and restricts access to resources, it must be situated in a larger analysis of social change. Bourdieu, for example, argues that social capital interacts with cultural capital through key state and social institutions to reproduce class inequality. Qualitative research demonstrates the truth of this assertion by revealing how formal and informal practices in public agencies and institutions devalue and denigrate the social and cultural capital of low-income minority communities. Once we see how social capital is linked to cultural capital and the politics of public institutions, we also see social/cultural capital as a powerful mechanism through which race, class, and gender inequalities have been maintained. [1]

Having offered an account of how social capital has been created and undermined in the last few decades -- one that differs in important ways from other analyses -- we move in part III of this paper to a discussion of how civic capacity, a more robust analytical framework that points to avenues for action and intervention essential to constructive social change, operates in urban educational reform. We venture into research in education because schools are a pivotal, yet highly problematic, arena for integration of poor communities into mainstream society, and because the concept of civic capacity has developed in efforts to understand educational policy (Stone 1998). We offer an argument about the need for bicultural orientations in creating links with mainstream institutions and in building legitimate participation and empowerment for members of communities of color. We suggest that social capital helps us investigate and consider the matrix of action required to address social problems and to reform public institutions, but we propose that civic capacity more richly illuminates that effort and we expand the research agenda to include the concept. We argue that as a tool for understanding and resolving issues of urban poverty, civic capacity is transformative: It locates social capital at the crossroads of multiple forces, enmeshes it in cultural capital, and links it with public institutions and social inequality to effect change.

When Viola Jackson finished high school in 1940, her graduation present was a one-way ticket from Mississippi to Chicago on the Illinois Central Railroad.[2] She was 16, old enough to join the stream of family that flowed north along those tracks in the half-century between 1916 and 1968, when Jackson counted 98 relatives, three generations of children, women, and men, who left the South in search of jobs and better lives. Pearl Bishop [3] stayed behind in Burdy's Bend, North Carolina, when her ten children, her nieces and nephews, and her husband, Samuel headed to Brooklyn, the Bronx, Philadelphia, Newark, or Washington, D.C., to find work. She might have gone herself, except that between her front door and the road north, there were always children blocking the path. The Great Migration separated many African-American families, scattered sisters and cousins and brothers and parents across hundreds and hundreds of miles. But it kept families together, too. Workers in the North sent money home to help those who had stayed on to farm family land in the devastated South. Social/cultural capital was stretched across state lines and regions of the country.

African Americans looked away from poverty and towards opportunity when they set out from their rural homes. Before long, though, the factory work that attracted them to the industrial centers of the North and West relocated to suburbs far from the urban core. Jobs available to the second generation of migrants were unstable and poorly paid. Without reliable, high-wage work, life in the cities no longer made sense to many African Americans. As the urban infrastructure failed them, as crime and drugs threatened their children, the idea of returning to their homeplaces, even in severely impoverished parts of the South, began to take root. In 1975, U.S. Census Bureau numbers suggested, for the first time, that the exodus of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North was turning back on itself.[4]

By now, returnees number in the millions. Still, millions more black Americans remain in the cities, and the black experience, largely southern and rural at the beginning of the century, is now predominantly urban.

The demographic transformation did not, however, solely result from black migration to the North; at the same time whites were moving away from urban places and into the suburbs. After World War II, federal social programs such as the G.I .Bill of Rights and home loan policies that privileged veterans eased the movement of whites away from urban neighborhoods that had been the proving grounds of immigrant communities and into suburbs where the common feature, "whiteness," effaced old divisions between ethnic groups. Highways extended the reach of the new, white middle-class; the booming post-war economy put them into cars, enabled them to follow high-wage work wherever it led, most often away from the inner cities that continued to receive minorities moving north.

The movement of whites to the suburbs was selective, an opportunity denied the vast majority of people of color. According to Alice O'Connor, "Organized violence, zoning regulations, racial covenants, mortgage lending practices, and block-busting were the most overt and direct of the practices devoted to creating and maintaining a residential color line" around the urban core. But "equally important have been a whole series of race-conscious decisions about urban development and infrastructure building over the years, whether seen in public housing, urban 'renewal,' public transportation, highway and road building, and in most major cities, the construction of stadiums, urban shopping malls and other major 'public' spaces" (1998: 7). Those policy decisions, consciously taken and vigorously enforced, further tightened the boundary line of color around the core cities, O'Connor asserts. They reveal the "other" side of social capital, how it is used to exclude.

William Julius Wilson's naturalistic, race-neutral explanation for the destruction of the urban core -- "that the disappearance of work and the consequences of that disappearance for both social and cultural life are the central problems of the inner-city ghetto" (Wilson 1996:xix) -- is just plain wrong, O'Connor says: There is "nothing 'natural' or inevitable about the racialized 'pockets' of concentrated poverty that have become an accepted part of the urban -- and rural -- United States. ... The ghetto is not self-perpetuating; it takes constant reinforcement and reinvention to keep racial restrictions in place" (1998:2;8).

In the activism of the 1960s, as the racial demographics of cities were being drastically transformed (before industrial jobs completely abandoned the cities) community leaders within black communities built upon embedded social institutions, the Church, homeplace ties, work and kin relations, neighborhood organizations and friendship to transform the political landscape. Civil rights struggles in the South and in the North demanded formal legal equality for African Americans. In well organized campaigns of public protest, Black Americans pressed for legal reforms and protection, seized political power, gained access to public jobs, and secured the commitment of government resources (for awhile, at least) through the War on Poverty's ambitious and progressive social policy agenda.

In contrast to the passive and pathological picture of communities painted by some research on the urban underclass, social historians contend that inner city residents are active agents in determining their destiny, even as they work against daunting constraints (O'Connor 1998, Katz 1993, Kelley 1994). It was inside the ghetto walls of Brooklyn in the 1960s that Eula Bishop, who would return to Burdy's Bend in 1979, learned to use social capital to organize her neighbors in a rent strike. Up north, she'd seen the levers of power with her own eyes. When she rejoined her parents, who lived cautiously on the family land in rural North Carolina, Eula brought that urban experience with her. She told Pearl and Samuel that she'd planted a bit of Burdy's Bend in every stranger she met in New York. Then she began to plant a bit of New York in Burdy's Bend. Shantee Owens, whose mother lived in Rosedale, an hour's drive from Pearl and Samuel Bishop, moved south not long after Eula did. They got acquainted up north, where Shantee had gone to college, married a college graduate, and worked with women who wore silk blouses and linen suits to the office every day. Back home, Eula and Shantee found it hard to get the kind of jobs they'd had in New York, and for awhile, both worked in a local poultry plant. Still, they had returned from the city with experience, skills, with a sense of their own power. They might have their troubles, but like a number a women returning south, they had the resources and hope to work with.

When she was 35, Maude Allen came home to Rosedale with her B.A. in public administration, her long work history in the public schools of Washington, D.C., and her experience of mothering six children, and started going to meetings. She was able to translate her skills to address Chestnut County needs. Maude had gathered support from all the right people in the county: the superintendent of schools, two principals, the sheriff, the editor of the local newspaper, and parents, and dressed like a professional woman from the nation's capital (which she was), she presented to the Chestnut County Board of Commissioners a 20-page proposal for a task force that would see private and public funding to create a youth council. She asked the commissioners for a half-time salary to chair the task force while she worked to raise funds for the council, and the commissioners agreed. The county's young people named their organization CATS (Chestnut Action for Teenage Students). "You know, they have voices," Maude Allen says, "but nobody ever thought about hearing them. In CATS they are being trained to think politically. That's certainly something my generation was never taught."

Though her generation may not have been raised to think politically; many learned to do so, Maude among them. Shantee Owens, who won election to the Chestnut County Board of Commissioners in 1988, learned how to think politically, too. It was a blend of skills and a sense of possibility that most African Americans who returned to the South had acquired up north. "If I had come back here with the same attitude that I left with in my twenties," Maude Allen says, "I would be just like the people who have lived here and never gone anywhere. But I came back different. I know when they are dumping on us, and I call their attention to it. I talk to them in a diplomatic way, but I say, 'Hey, this is not the way it's supposed to be.' And you know, they back off when they know you'll call them on it. . . . The only problem is that down here, nothing can be direct. I have found it a major challenge and a pain in the neck. Down here, to get anything done, you have to go about it delicately, and a lot of times you have to be very innovative. Even something that should be relatively easy, it's not going to happen the easy way. People here just don't think like I do. They don't figure on alternate ways of working through problems. They get easily frustrated and overwhelmed. They have never been exposed to success."

Migration was an engine for change because it showed African Americans that things could be different, and provided skills to make it so. Friends and acquaintances say that Allen, who had taken advantage of policies that opened up government jobs to African Americans when she worked in public school administration in Washington, D.C., is a genius at organizing -- and CATS demonstrates how she gathered, arrayed, created, strong social capital in Chestnut County. Up north, Allen had been exposed to success. She and Eula Bishop and Shantee Owens could not only look critically at the links between their community and county government; they had learned to renegotiate relationships between people of color and white-dominated government and social service agencies. They were able to function in and finesse, and transform multiple worlds.

Qualitative historical research has moved inside urban communities "to understand community formation from the ground up," contends O'Connor (1998). It views cultural processes as pivotal to building and maintaining community and transforming the political balance when openings develop. Prevented from exercising political power outside their own neighborhoods before the 1960s, African Americans looked to culture as a means of asserting difference and dissent. Kelley advocates the exploration of the infra-politics and the expressive, stylistic, and pleasure-oriented motivations behind urban cultural forms, "aspects of black working-class life that have been relegated to the margins" (1994:4). Cultural arenas of music, art, fashion and leisure are domains for self-expression, resistance and collective identity formation that contest marginalization. In the 1960s and 1970s, these forms of cultural contestation morphed into an identity politics that insisted on electoral power and local control of institutions within urban communities of color -- schools, for example. In political spaces that were opened up north, Eula Bishop, Shantee Owens, Maude Allen were able to study how social capital could be translated into political capital to marshal neighborhood networks, to rely on geographic concentration of African Americans in cities to organize.

Social capital always exists in the urban core in some form, as people find ways to work together and to support one another. But its power to enact desirable change, to promote community well-being, is subject to circumstances, and can be severely and consciously limited. As the color-line was being drawn between white suburbs and minorities contained within cities, two other major factors were at work affecting the ability of social capital of communities to aid them.

The first was economic. As stagnating productivity and decreasing competitiveness in global markets produced a national economic crisis in the mid-1970s, and the scaffolding of jobs and recent public investment in urban areas collapsed. Restructuring was underway. The United States was clearly shifting from an industry- to a service-based economy, and jobs in that emerging economy were highly segmented. Compensation for work assumed an hourglass shape: High skills won high income; low skills earned minimum wage, and eventually, in the urban core, no wage at all.

The second factor was the politics of public policy. In the 1980s, discretionary social expenditures were slashed as budget priorities changed. Arguing that tax cuts would spur growth and restore prosperity, Republicans deregulated business and disinvested in cities, killing programs that had aided poor urban communities. Loic Wacquant contends that the deep retrenchment of the public sector in urban areas including "brutal cuts in federal funds for urban and community development, the reduction of welfare programs, the shrinking of employment coverage, increasingly regressive taxation schemes, and state and city policies of 'planned shrinkage' negatively impacted the formation of social capital in urban communities"(1998:29). The logic behind his assertion is that state institutions presumed to provide basic civic goods and services -- such as physical safety, legal protection, education, housing, and health care -- are pivotal settings and sources of support for "the formation and distribution of both formal and informal social capital" (35). For middle class communities, these institutions are decently run and well funded, and the relationship is relatively smooth and integrative. But for lower income minority communities, cultural barriers, the lack of resources and institutionalization of inefficiency impede their ability to secure essential resources and develop the networks that could integrate them into "mainstream" society and jobs. State institutions become "instruments of surveillance, suspicion, and exclusion, rather than vehicles of social integration and trust-building" (26).

The resulting degradation of public facilities -- apparent in the breakdown of police protection, the criminal justice system, education, welfare support, and health care provision (not to mention the absence of financial resources and services and decent housing) -- crippled urban communities. What Wacquant calls the erosion of 'state social capital,' that is "the formal organizations presumed to provide civic goods," played a decisive role in the destruction of urban social capital. He further points out that the power of poor communities to contest how key social goods and services are being delivered has been undermined by the political push to downsize, privatize, and devolve responsibility for services from the federal government to states and localities.

In "The Prosperous Community" (1993), Robert Putnam argues that changes in the political landscape are partly responsible for our nation's social problems. "Our political parties, once intimately coupled to the capillaries of community life, have become evanescent confections of pollsters and media consultants and independent political entrepreneurs -- the very antithesis of social capital. We have too easily accepted a conception of democracy in which public policy is not the outcome of a collective deliberation about the public interest, but rather a residue of campaign strategy. The social capital approach, focusing on the indirect effects of civic norms and networks, is a much-needed corrective to an exclusive emphasis on the formal institutions of government as an explanation for our collective discontents" (41). While George Bush was president, Putnam contends, "community self-reliance -- 'a thousand points of light' -- too often served as an ideological fig leaf for an administration that used the thinness of our public wallet as an alibi for a lack of political will. . . . Social capital is not a substitute for effective public policy, but rather a prerequisite for it, and in part, a consequence of it. Social capital . . . works through and with states and markets, not in place of them" (42).

Taking a different lens we see how the color line strangles the urban core: how could social capital thrive? As race-conscious policies created and advantaged white middle and upper-middle-class suburbs, social capital in the cities was stripped of resources by state practices and the collapse of market forces through which it works. By the late 1980s, politicians relied on phrasemaking to disguise the policy-driven rush of resources out of the cities. Community self-reliance, the thousand points of light that shine life in prosperous suburban sites, could, would, should illuminate the darkness of poverty, crime, and despair in urban ghettoes. But people of color who lived in the central cities now had less access than ever to sources of economic and social power.

Allocation of social services such as health care, education, sanitation, and recreation "reinforced the 'undesirable' designation of minority neighborhoods and symbolized the relative absence of minority political clout; and even though "history 'from the ground up' is replete with examples of resistance to, as well as political and economic exploitation of, the spatial restrictions of the color line"(O'Connor: 2), the legacy of such policy choices was anger and distrust. "Nowhere has the racial differentiation of city services been more visible and explosive than in local law enforcement, whether reflected in ongoing struggles over hiring and promotion practices, in the absence or inadequacy of police protection in many minority neighborhoods, or, especially, in the long history of selectively brutalizing police practices in minority neighborhoods" (7). Enforcement procedures that maintain the color line and locate power in segregated suburbs sever almost all paths of association between minorities and whites, between poor and middle class. Social capital works through government action and markets. It is not race-neutral.

So we measure the significance of race "not by evidence of discrimination alone, but by the institutions, formal and informal practices, and public and private policies that continue to uphold the color line in urban jobs, neighborhoods, services and opportunities". These practices and policies work to create white social capital at disadvantage to the social capital of minorities. O'Connor argues that we need to reconceptualize the color line "not just as a mechanism for racial containment . . . but as a way of defining and upholding the advantages of being accepted as white" (O'Connor: 14).

By the 1980s, government and business responses to the economic crises of the 1970s, and local, regional, and federal social, housing and development policies of the entire postwar period, came together to ravage central cities, which became sites of danger and death for minorities, and especially for young men. Sammy Grant, Eula Bishop's son, was born in Brooklyn, but grew up back home with his grandmother, Pearl. Sammy liked Burdy's Bend, never wanted to go north to work. It took him a long time to find a good job in North Carolina -- three counties away, 65 miles coming and going -- in the heating and air conditioning shop of an army base. The week before the job was to start, Sammy drove up to Brooklyn to visit his best friend, Joe Davenport. He and Joe were walking down the street early one morning when someone ran up behind them, shouting words that Joe couldn't make out, and stabbed Sammy to death. Eula left home and went to New York to bury her son. She vowed that this would be her last trip to the city, no matter what.

As their chances to earn adequate income in the legitimate workforce evaporated, many minority residents in the central cities turned to the underground economy of crime, and increasingly drug dealing, as a source of support. Increasingly intractable poverty, and its many troubling consequences -- single-parent families, reliance on welfare, substance abuse -- are harsh realities that devastated urban communities, encapsulated them, notched the color line yet again, dangerously stressing the networks, norms, and trust by which minority residents of the urban core had lived. In absence of alternative industry, the drug trade grew, and violence grew with it. Cities became heavily militarized zones of surveillance and incarceration as the war on drugs replaced the war on poverty. While the growth in the illegal economy and welfare has lethal and destructive consequences for urban communities, it is important to recognize the roots of what has been seen as a pathological, alienated, isolated underclass in historical and contemporary practices of economic marginalization and racial containment as well as in public institution misdoing.

Wilson has formulated the problem differently. He identified the profoundly negative impact that economic restructuring has had on cities, arguing that massive loss of industrial jobs in urban areas makes self-sufficiency impossible for residents of the inner cities, particularly for African-American men. The suburbanization of most low-wage job growth only worsens the situation. Without a job, "which imposes disciplines and regularities, a person lacks not only a place in which to work and the receipt of regular income but also a coherent organization of the present -- that is, a system of concrete expectations and goals." Joblessness, the argument continues, blocks "rational planning in daily life, the necessary condition of adaptation to an industrial economy" (Wilson 1996: 73). So joblessness is the demon of the cities because it undermines the work ethic and alters the culture and norms of a community.

O'Connor compares Wilson's race-neutral approach with the race-conscious analysis of Massey and Denton. They identify certain types of urban poverty as manifestations of "American apartheid," the "complex of systemic and institutional barriers, public and private practices, and individual attitudes devoted to keeping blacks 'in their place,' and call for aggressive government action to eliminate racial segregation as a necessary, if not itself sufficient, response to the problem of poverty" (O'Connor 1998: 5). But for Massey and Denton, the anti-discrimination measures that will remove barriers in the labor and housing market will not erase damage done to African Americans by segregation because their social isolation has made "ghetto dwellers evolve a set of behaviors, attitudes, and expectations sharply at variance with those common in the rest of American society" (Massey and Denton 1993:13). By the mid-1990s, they contend, the destruction of social capital in poor communities of color is complete. Here the race-neutral and race-conscious arguments converge -- the contemporary ghetto is beset by a self-perpetuating cultural pathology. Positive social capital is not likely to exist in such an environment. Their arguments stand in stark contrast to the accounts offered here by Wacquant and several social historians. Some of the difference may result from theoretical perspective and assumptions, some may follow from methodological choice.

From strong, largely quantitative data, Wilson, and Massey and Denton, construct a picture of poverty that is patterned, predictable, and highly deterministic: Job loss and racial and economic concentration -- resulting from neutral economic and social forces or race-conscious housing and lending practices -- alters the local social and cultural environment, which in turn warps behavior and values, which in turn leads to the disorganization of individual life and the destruction of institutions in high-poverty areas, where residents, by being unemployed, quickly become unemployable. But they provide no significant supporting evidence for their conclusions about the causal relationship of economic and social forces to behavior, of behavior to cultures, and of so-called cultural processes to behavior.

A different angle of approach suggests that to understand cultural norms and processes, we must situate meaning within local knowledge, and identify the real choices people make, the agency they exert in the most difficult circumstances. The aim of such research is to uncover the relationship and mediating factors among cultural norms, social structure, and social outcomes. In recent years, social historians and anthropologists have been working to track the ways in which local contexts, institutions, and relationships mediate group and individual agency in low-income urban communities of color. Urban ethnography has reconfigured the debate, reconstructed urban space as vigorous, complex, and fluid, rejected the simplistic notion that defines race through demographic attributes and cultural identity alone, and substituted for it the idea that race is mediated by circumstance, that it defines itself and evolves from a set of social relationships negotiated and institutionalized over time (O'Connor 1998: 2). As ethnographers study cultural practices, cultural production, and identity formation within informal networks and formal institutions such as families, schools, work sites, and communities, we disclose agency that builds and uses social capital. We see that human actions are embedded in social and ideological processes and practices that differ significantly according to their positions in material and social networks. Such interrelations, we learn, from Lamphere, "are not just a matter of race, ethnicity, or immigrant status but can be influenced by the organization of a workplace, apartment complex, or school" (1992: 2). Social capital does not stand alone. It is influenced by sites and institutions that "mediate or serve to channel larger political and economic forces into settings that have an impact on the networks of a community . . . where macro-level forces are brought to bear on micro-level relationships" (Lamphere 1992:4).

An adequate theory of history and poverty would incorporate race and shine a coherent light on disparate patterns of social structure, culture, and agency to produce a multidimensional map for those who study social capital in urban sites. That map must link the distribution of resources and power to the ideologies that justify and support that distribution. It must account for processes of change that involve collective struggle, individual and group agency. It must disclose the interdependence and varying roles of social dimensions and identities such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, language, nationality. It must understand how and why different identities become salient. It must cross and connect such important sites as family, school, work, peer groups, community institutions, and public space with such larger entities as polity, economy, society. It must reveal the local dynamics of national and global forces as they articulate themselves in specific urban and rural sites and practices.

Although the analytical frameworks spearheaded by Robert Putnam and William Julius Wilson take very different approaches to the study of the urban core, the recent research focus on social capital is not discontinuous from the debate about the social breakdown thesis. At least when it comes to characterizing poor communities, interest in social ties and norms for behavior (if not in those pertaining to collective action), has been around for long time. And both Putnam and Wilson have drawn critical fire from other scholars for extrapolating what many regard as weak theoretical assertions from strong data, and then proposing broad, generalizable conclusions that may be misapplied to poor communities.

In Making Democracy Work (1993), Robert Putnam describes how leftover feudal traditions undermine social trust and the civic character of social and political life in small villages in southern Italy. Among these anachronisms, he argues, top-down or vertical privilege and patron-client relationships beget distrust and block opportunities for the development of public-spiritedness and community cooperation. In 1995, at Harvard's Kennedy School, Carol Stack described her research in nine counties in the rural South, destinations for African Americans returning home from northeastern cities (Stack 1996a). Many urban dwellers who moved back to "persistent poverty" regions were determined to apply hard lessons learned up north to create networks of civic engagement. They actively participated in social capital formation in their new (but familiar) communities, built institutions within and across nearby counties, brought needed services to local people. Their activities set them on a collision course with entrenched white hierarchies; these old southern syndicates of influence used all the weapons they could command to subvert grassroots organizing among African Americans in their communities.

Building upon an account of race-conscious practices and social policies in the historical framework we've sketched so far, we hope to map the journey on which returning African Americans embarked in the South they had left behind years before. We'll document several important phenomena: the vibrant voluntary civic associations that emerged in these localities; the skill and knowledge base of the participants; and systematic, organized, structural resistance -- call it stonewalling -- through which local (white) government hoped to negate or at least to diminish the stock of social capital and trust forged by the returnees. At the end of Stack's talk at the Kennedy School, Robert Putnam pointed to similarities between the feudal Mafia in southern Italy and local white structures of power in rural North and South Carolina. Distrust between whites and blacks in these rural communities may indeed share some of the drama of arbitrary Mafia power in southern Italian communities. But as this story unfolds in the American South, the threat to organizing efforts comes from the public sector, from institutionalized state power and privilege; the adversary, we argue, is lodged deep in public-sector decision-making, in a living legacy of old southern race relations.

The mechanisms of Mafia influence in southern Italy and public-sector control in the American South depend upon vertical structures of power, expressed in and maintained by tenacious and corrupt patron-client relationships. Under systems of patron-client relationships, lines of communication and control are tightly held: Powerful patrons interact with a few carefully chosen individuals or families, who interact with larger groups to enforce compliance with policies and practices chosen by the patrons. The success of the civic associations we describe below can be measured, in part, by the extent to which they were able to nullify the patron-client pattern, by the extent to which they severed those narrow lines of communication, disseminated information in their communities, spread the word that they could, should, would amass collective social capital, that they had the personal and collective courage to do it. And there was more. These bi-modal rural/urbanites intended to enact a new politics in the rural South. They planned to use black social capital to engage civic capacity.

Researching the story of return migration to the South, Carol Stack crisscrossed nine counties in the Carolinas from the 1980s through the 1990s. She talked with white public officials across the region, but her focus was a broad cross-section of African Americans who had left northeastern cities and headed home: professionals, workers, landowners and people who had lost their land, Vietnam veterans, experienced but out-of-work bureaucrats, people who were starting small businesses. Some were drawn back to the rural South by joblessness or urban decay. Others, made stronger by the uncompromising demands of city life, came home out of a sense of obligation or mission -- to help their kin or to redeem a lost community.

Their destinations share a certain statistical profile. They are far from big cities, far from Sunbelt industry, way below national and even state averages for income, linked historically to the traditional southern cash crops, and skewed demographically by generations of out migration. Blacks have traditionally made up the majority of the population in such places, though all the decades of black exodus have sometimes changed the local racial balance. One such destination, Chestnut Count, has some 20,000 inhabitants, 60 percent of them black.[6] In 1980, census-takers had counted fewer than 1,000 people in the county seat, Chowan Springs, and just 467 in Rosedale, the next-largest town. But those who returned to these rural communities understood that need defies numbers; they looked around them and saw need everywhere, and they saw neglect. So, at a backyard barbecue late in October 1981, three women decided that the time had come to tackle Chestnut County's problems head-on, hands-on, through an organization they called Holding Hands. There were to be other such organizations in the region: Mothers and Children, Inc., Chestnut Action for Teenage Students, the Alliance of Women Workers, the Coalition for Employee Ownership.

Holding Hands begins with the life histories of Collie Mae Gamble, Isabella Beasley, and Shantee Owens, who grew up daughters of sharecroppers in and around Chestnut County. In the late 1960s, with little or no opportunity at home, they followed one another's example and moved north to join their relatives. Collie Mae Gamble got a job in Camden, New Jersey, processing bids on government contracts. Isabella Beasley worked in Newark for a state agency that administered federal funds for Head Start. Shantee Owens worked in public administration in the Bronx. In 1980, Isabella and her family moved back home. Collie Mae and her husband followed. Then Shantee returned, too. As they looked for employment themselves, they could hardly ignore the poverty that surrounded them. Holding Hands was born in a conversation out behind Collie Mae Gamble's house, but it originated long before, as any of the women involved could explain -- in ways of dealing with the world they developed in their youth, in political skills they honed in the cities as they raised families, ran neighborhood organizations, and worked in government agencies, in painful lessons they had begun to learn when the first of them moved home again.

The skills they developed in the North established these women as people to be reckoned with in Chestnut County. (Those who had never left the South had also formed organizations around social issues, but never achieved the same success.) It would be an exaggeration to say that Holding Hands began with an agenda. The organization's aims could hardly have been more basic. If there was somebody without heat, Collie Mae, Isabella, and Shantee would arrange to bring them a load of wood or find money to lend them a down payment for a tank of oil. If somebody's porch steps were broken, or if a family had children who needed coats, or if they needed a ride to town to see if they could get food stamps, Holding Hands could do something. If somebody needed a sack of groceries to get through the end of the month, or somebody else wanted to learn how to write his name -- well, Collie Mae and Isabella and Shantee could help with that, too. They could buy, beg, or borrow a walker for an old lady who couldn't get around any more without one. From the beginning, they were convinced that these little things made a difference.

The organization got off to a fast start. By the end of 1981, Holding Hands was registered as a tax-exempt, nonprofit corporation, and on Martin Luther King's birthday in January 1982, the group held a memorial ceremony at the newly refurbished community building in New Jericho. At the end of 1982, they'd reached their goal of 100 members in Chestnut County and had signed up 58 people in Powell County and 31 in Harden County. Several black churches honored the organization. But there were signs of hostility: A white reporter, covering a Holding Hands fundraiser in the local newspaper, observed that minding other people's business was not well received in Chestnut County. A couple of weeks later, the attacks turned personal. Collie Mae was understandably upset. "I got three phone calls in one day from people who would not identify themselves," she said. "They threatened that we better watch out, we're asking for trouble. Instead of hanging up on them, I asked, 'Now, who is this we you're talking about?' And they said, 'You just keep your hands to yourself -- keep your hands to yourself.'" Isabella got calls, too, and "There were at least three letters we know about that were sent to Social Services to try and discredit us. People found notes on their cars. White folks don't want us organizing, but then they never stop talking how we can't do for ourselves. But I say let's just keep going -- cause we're helping."

Isabella did keep going, kept raising money for Holding Hands. Looking for work herself -- and there weren't any jobs that matched her qualifications -- she'd traveled the rural roads long enough now to realize that Chestnut County had no projects funded by the kinds of federal programs she had helped to administer in New Jersey. Head Start didn't exist here, nor did any subsidized day care. Even though many such programs were specifically designed for high-poverty areas (a description that fit Chestnut if it fit anywhere), the only federal social services dollars that came into the county went to Food Stamps and AFDC. Isabella hadn't yet heard all their explanations, but it was clear to her that local officials preferred not to provide the poor people of the county with such services as day care, even if those services could be provided without spending a penny of local money.

The patron agency chose to exercise its power by refusing to acknowledge that its clients had need of services at all. This was not a case of white social capital stripping resources from the black community to its own benefit, a pattern that surfaced again and again in the history of suburban and urban sites after World War II. Inner city residents of color had been told -- though not in so many words -- You have to lose out so that whites who live in the suburbs can win. In Chestnut County, the message was simpler, starker, uglier: You lose out because we decide that you lose out. Isabella Beasley didn't like that message. So she did some research on the employment picture in Chestnut and neighboring counties. Two food-processing plants in Chestnut County employed more than 1,000 workers, and three other such plants in nearby counties employed 2,000 more. A men's underwear factory employed 210 people, and a furniture-maker employed more than 400. Wages in these facilities averaged just over five dollars an hour, and employers offered nothing or next to nothing in benefits.

To Isabella's way of thinking, this meant that unsubsidized day care services must cost much more than most working people could afford. She talked to parents, who articulated their need for day care. And she spoke with public officials, who admitted to her face what she already suspected: year after year, they turned back federal programs that permit local options, funds like Title XX. "One administrator told me she didn't believe in government subsidies at all, even though her office manages AFDC and Food Stamps," Isabella said. "In another office the director said it was a point of pride for him that in his county they served very few of the eligible families . . . and he said that poor people have more dignity and self-regard for it."

Isabella Beasley didn't think that bureaucrats should decide what constitutes dignity and self-regard for poor people. She knew that few rural counties with near-majority black populations even applied for Title XX day care funds. But she thought she could organize a successful effort to bring that funding to Chestnut County, and she knew the people to call upon for help: Collie Mae, of course, and Eula Bishop Grant, who had become a vice-president of Holding Hands; Menola Rountree and another woman Shantee had recommended, Maude Allen, director of Chestnut Action for Teenage Students. Maude, as we've seen, was someone who could make things happen.

At their first meeting, which drew women from three counties, Maude Allen asked how they planned to obtain the necessary application forms, Isabella smiled; such a question demonstrated sophistication about the hard realities of local politics. It would be foolish, self-destructive even, to approach area social service agencies. Someone would have to drive all the way up to the state capital and ask for the application packet in person. The women gave their organization a name -- MAC, Mothers and Children, Inc. Isabella reminded them that government bureaucracy moved slowly. But MAC set its own timetable for fundraising and site selection, and over the next several months, Collie Mae and her committee prepared the old Shell gas station in Chowan Springs for the mandated preliminary inspection. MAC wouldn't have to pay rent for the building where it would house its demonstration project, a model day care center for several counties. But every square inch of the place needed repair and renovation.

The women kicked off a grassroots fundraising effort from headquarters -- their office equipment included a card table and a rusty file cabinet -- in the storage shed behind The Working Women's Curb Market, a produce stand on the highway outside of Chowan Springs. Then MAC activists began writing their grant application. Once again, they bypassed the obstructive social services agencies in Chestnut County and started to lay groundwork for a close working relationship with state officials. As the women built their own social capital, they intended to exploit public political institutions that could support their efforts. Representatives took a preliminary draft of the application to the Chief Deputy Director in the Day Care Section of the Department of Human Services in the state capital. He agreed to review their work, and they made him, in effect, a partner in their enterprise, consulting him on every detail, the dotting of every i and the crossing of every t. After eighteen months, the day care center passed the mandatory physical inspection and MAC received official notification of their first grant award.

Now the trouble began. Because the funds would go through her office, notice of the grant was also sent to the county director of social services in Chowan Springs, Mrs. Beard. She announced immediately that she would return every penny of the money to the state (that is, she would make it impossible for MAC to activate the funds). Isabella Beasley followed the organization's line of communications straight over Mrs. Beard's head and back to her new friend in the state capital. "I worried the Chief Deputy Director to death trying to find out what happened to our funds. We had renovated the building and completely furnished it. There were all the little tables and chairs, and the mats, the toys, the playground. We had interviewed daycare teachers and assistants, and we had begun training. We had checked eligibility and assembled a group of children -- not all black children, either -- it was strictly on income. We had everything but the funds."

Once again, the state official sent notice of the grant to Chestnut County. This time, the social services department presented the matter to the county commissioners, who approved all funds coming into the county. Mrs. Beard made no secret of her department's opposition to public support of day care, and most of the commissioners were thought to agree with her. But Maude Allen, who had successfully secured funding for CATS by overpowering the commissioners with her ordered, logical, and exhaustive presentation of facts and figures, conjured a public relations miracle with her suggestion that MAC pack the meeting room with the children who would attend the new day care center. They sat together in the first three rows of grownup-sized chairs, squirming and occasionally whimpering. Parents and ministers and MAC board members who had come prepared to speak on behalf of the project never had to say a word; the day care funding was approved by a murmured voice vote.

From then on, opposition to MAC came in guerilla-style skirmishes. Bureaucrats stalled, politicians filed to reduce the allocation, clerks said they couldn't find the funds, officials forgot appointments, forgot to file papers, forgot how to write a check. But the funding was secure. MAC learned to work through Mrs. Beard by maneuvering around her. She could (and did) obstruct and delay, but she could not destroy what the women had built. After three years, Mothers and Children, Inc., was able to change funding protocols so that money could be allocated directly to their projects. Nevertheless, attempts at sabotage continued. "When I was coming up, I gave things my best shot," Shantee Owens said. "But better than any teacher, even better than my Amway lessons, time is the best teacher, time makes the difference! Our saving grace was that we created alliances across at least three counties. When this all got started we could have been in, you know, competition. But then we started helping one another out. If one group was having trouble getting the money -- political problems -- well, one of us from another county would call the state capital for them, help them out with our direct contacts. We began to train board members in how they could help. We approached our state representative. Only the strong survive."

And only the strong have direct contacts in the state capital. The cross-county alliance of women succeeded in bringing federal child care funding to the region by creating their own syndicate of influence, their own structure of local power, and by forging independent associations with the North Carolina Department of Human Services. By 1986, MAC was operating six clean and safe daycare centers that enrolled more than 300 children in three different counties, creating 50 new full-time jobs and a couple of dozen part-time positions. By 1995, enrollment and staff had doubled again. Just as MAC emerged from the training ground of Holding Hands, other groups began to make a difference in the 1990s. New leaders who learned political skills in established organizations went on to develop advocacy groups, and worker cooperatives, coalitions for economic justice, and small businesses sprang up on the same ground. Feeding on the help that flows from one organization to another, they formed networks that enhanced civic life in predominantly African American communities in the rural South. But each modest success, each assault on vertical privilege, provoked resistance from white bureaucrats.

As efforts in grass-roots mobilization and self-help, Holding Hands and MAC, Inc., cannot fail to impress. But it was their uplink into the state power structure, and the availability of federal funding, that guaranteed their success. Social capital works in and through markets, whether those markets trade in private capital or in public monies. Turkey raffles and fish fries will never support sustainable social services in resource-deprived and desperately poor rural counties. Nor can contributions from black business and professional people in these communities meet their needs. There isn't much precedent for corporate support of black organizations in places like Powell and Chestnut counties, and local government agencies accept without question the notion that tax hikes are un-American. Black city dwellers who return to their homeplaces and get involved typically feel they have to go it alone. The burden gets heavier over time: Deliberate subversion invites endless watchfulness, and that watchfulness eats at the hearts and nerves of civic engagement.

The new old South isn't the old old South, but distrust, fear, and hostility persist. In the midst of bitterness and ill will, outside money is a critical resource. Dogged self-help, with no reliance on government funding, can support some small initiatives, such as Holding Hands. But where many lack the minimum necessities of life, government action and private foundations must also play important roles. In the anti-government mood of the 1990s, indeed, everyone seems eager to assert what the poor really need: not handouts, but the sort of social capital that can only arise from their own individual or community self-reliance. Let government withdraw from the affairs of the poor, then. Or, if there is to be any federal role in supporting the poor or the weak, let it take the form of block grants to the states. The good folks there are closer to "their people," the story goes; they will know better than Washington bureaucrats how best to use these resources (Stack 1996b).

This rhetoric fuels the ideological fires of those who were never much concerned about the well-being of needy citizens in the first place. But the experiences of those returning to their rural roots lays bare a dismal reality. When local power holders try to subvert efforts by black communities to help provide obviously needed services -- firewood, say, or safe child care -- only fools would trust them to administer block grants. Block grants, lump sums of federal money transferred to the states for the general purpose of helping the poor, may be headed in the wrong direction as they percolate through the state capitals. Serious scholarly investigations have not yet wrestled with the political implications of local controls over these funds, especially in rural regions of the Southeast that remain battle grounds of distrust in the 1990s. There, the people who proclaim most loudly the urgency and legitimacy of self-help -- the bureaucrats and politicians -- also work to thwart that independence when they are faced with actual self-help organizations in the home communities. Decentralization limits checks and balances on the implementation of social policy at local levels, and imposes serious, oftentimes pernicious controls over access to public capital.

In poor communities, social/cultural capital is handcuffed to the cultural politics of locality and the politics of public institutions. Although MAC forged abundant horizontal ties across counties within public and private circles of influence, enlarged circles of trust within the public domain, and engaged an active coalition of citizens in building civic community, it took the women who founded the organization a long time to transform their impressive stock of social capital into fully-functioning day care services. Serious obstacles remain: in the electoral process itself, in protocols for the appointment of bureaucrats in human services departments, of public school administrators, judges, and magistrates. And straight-out racist dispositions in these communities should serve to burst the bubble of any theorists who see social capital as an abstraction. Integral to MAC's success are the skills, opportunities, and cultural knowledge that participants were able to acquire through their working lives and their interactions with public agencies, public institutions, and non-profit organizations. They acquired the leadership skills and know how that would be hard learned, if not impossible to acquire, back home. But as we've seen, collective social capital among low-income and working people is not easily transformed into capital.

In the Southeast, in New York City, in Iowa, the same dynamic repeats itself.[7] Energetic, imaginative, and determined efforts by low-income communities to consolidate economic, social, and political power often, if not always, meet resistance. People outside poor neighborhoods seem to say, "be doing for yourselves," as if no one had thought of, or was, in fact, already doing. By throwing up barricades against efforts at empowerment, they can pretend, if those efforts fail, that they never existed in the first place. They can blame the poor for not doing what they are doing. They can legitimate the forces that engender failure. They can give the cultural theory of poverty a new face.

Just as policy makers in the child welfare system formulate value judgments as they debate the "best interests" of children, families, and communities, social capital theorists invoke their own values when they examine the kind of "doing for yourself" that ought to be encouraged. Welfare policy typically disacknowledges or discounts the "work of kinship" in African American family life (Stack & Burton 1993). Ethnography, on the other hand, documents individual, collective, and cultural responses to poverty, and the cultural strategies people develop to cope with poverty and with social policies that shape their lives. Across the board, up through the 1970s and into the 1980s, social policies systematically undermined trust and shared rights and responsibilities in African-American kin networks. In the 1960s, before welfare reform and time limits, AFDC incentives encouraged household formation, even by young mothers, to limit "dependency" on kin. Mothers received higher welfare stipends if they lived alone, or if they lived with a female friend or stranger, than if they chose to remain with their own mothers, their grandmothers, or other relatives. And in case we have forgotten, although some states offered unemployed fathers the option to remain in AFDC households, most threw jobless fathers out of such families. It took nearly three decades of activism in kin-care movements to reconfirm what was obvious and natural all along: that low-income African American grandmothers -- and not only strangers -- should be eligible to become legal foster parents for their own grandchildren.

We might conclude that the cultural politics of public institutions negatively valued intricately fashioned kinship ties (and low-income or unemployed fathers as well). From the mainstream, the social/cultural capital that formed the basis of communities of concern and enacted meager protections against the despair of poverty among African American families, looked like "bad" social capital. So welfare policies that belittle difference were developed to oppose the work of kinship; and those policies disabled efforts to capitalize on networks of social trust and norms of reciprocity that moved beyond family life into common goals, civic engagement, a larger sense of community well-being. When policies abate the chance for poor people to capitalize on anything, they just keep poor people poor.

MAC, Inc., succeeded in capturing a share of the public capital resources available at the state level, and in day care centers that served Chestnut, Powell, and Harden counties, the organization put those resources to good use. It's harder for poor families to succeed, one by one, in building their own economic capital. Stack's (1996c) ethnographic study of the culture and politics of shelter in FmHA home ownership programs reveals the interplay between goal-oriented collective action and the politics of public institutions, and discloses an egregiously destructive values mismatch (Portes and Sensenbrenner 193:1323).

In the rural, southern communities where this research was carried out, family compounds typically comprise two- to four-acre properties with small houses, cabins, sheds, and mobile homes grouped together around a center courtyard. The housing stock, some of which has not been improved for fifty years, includes two-room, shed-style houses -- a front room with half loft, and a kitchen. People enter the house through the kitchen, which has a wood burning stove and a pump for water. From the kitchen, you can look through to the windowless second room filled with beds. A ladder leads to the sleeping loft. Fifty percent of these households earn less than $9,000 per year, and across three to four generations, households accommodate, on average, five children and three adults.

Families that earn from $7,000 to $14,000 a year are eligible to apply for a Farmer's Home Loan, but FmHA reserves the right to define the terms. The agency does not make loans to "single heads of households" It labels as high risk older women and even single female heads of households with sufficient income. Often, families informally select brokers À!À a young married couple each of whom has a job -- to act as family representatives and front the loan to build a house on family land. The FmHA house then becomes the domain of the extended family (indeed, FmHA architects note that young buyers often have to consult with their kin about every design detail); and in fact, the young people who are its owners in name are least likely to enjoy the privilege of living in the house. Family members, grandparents, great aunts and uncles, are given the chance to enjoy a bit of indulgence -- safer porch steps, better-equipped kitchens, comfortable bathrooms -- in their later years. Through FmHA loans, families alleviate over-crowded conditions in older sheds and shacks. Improved housing thus adds to the stock of social capital on family land.

Those who can't or don't want to front the loan may take a different approach and bundle their resources to apply for a "family mortgage." They learn that few (if any) FmHA administrators are willing to endorse a loan that spreads liability across the resources of extended kin. One kin network -- a group of adults, their children, and grandchildren, all of whom had good jobs in the Northeast -- wanted to help their "mama," the elderly woman who raised them after their mother died, get a decent house. When they went together to co-sign for the loan, the local FmHA administrator told them directly, "the paper work was too complicated" and that he "did not believe in spreading out the liability." (Mrs. Beard didn't believe in public funding for day care, either.)

In a nearby county, two brothers and a sister hoped to help buy a home for their older sister. They documented their resources, but the FmHA administrator questioned whether they could be trusted to contribute their individual shares to the house payments. "Buying a house is like a business," he told them. "It's not a social operation." FmHA officials "seem to think that poor people should behave the same way that people who have money behave," a day care teacher whose family network was turned down for a mortgage observed. "I don't believe we are poor risk." Family mortgages that spread financial liability across low- or multi-income kin networks could serve to cushion against default on these loans. But the FmHA administrator knew one thing about mortgages -- buying a house in not a social operation -- and the one thing he knew was wrong. For African Americans living on family land in the rural South, the building of a home is a profoundly social (as well as economic) undertaking. And although the concept may be unconventional in the context of federal housing policy for low-income people, shared liability is the norm in most financial enterprises. Nevertheless, FmHA doesn't permit African American communities to capitalize on their own rendering of multiple investors.

The agency specifies design features and furnishings for FmHA houses: standard heating equipment, carpets on floors, small kitchens with washing machines, electric stoves, and one centralized bathroom. Many applicants consider it unsanitary to cook and wash laundry in the same room. They know that overflowing, second-hand washing machines are best located in a storage or utility room outside the house. They know that there are other advantages to putting the washers outside, too. You can take off your work clothes before you go into the house and your clean, wet laundry is closer to the clothesline. People who live on dirt roads, who work the land, who come home each day from jobs in poultry processing plants or in lint-filled mills, often prefer vinyl floors that can be swept. But they can't have them, so they may cover their carpets with heavy plastic runners that are impossible to clean. FmHA also requires that each home has its own driveway from the main road. The agency seeks a suburban look, and the settings many mortgage holders would prefer, with homes placed around a courtyard, is forbidden. FmHA -- like welfare policy makers -- wants each house to stand on its own. Why is agency policy so inflexible? Because administrators are thinking about what they call the "recapture market," the resale value of their "product."

They anticipate foreclosures, and they build in embellishments that increase product value for the recapture market. FmHA is designed to serve low-income clients, but its administrators assume the posture of real estate brokers and come to think like bank officers. At the county level, they have considerable discretion. If local housing production is off and an allocation is fixed, FmHA functions to fill the gap, stimulating building in slow periods and slowing it down again when the economy is moving. That cycle guarantees that when the construction industry is very active, low-income families do not get housing. From outside, it may look as though Farmer's Home is designed to address the needs of private builders, who earn a reasonable profit to construct housing for a fixed price. FmHA manipulates low-income housing starts by controlling the flow of eligible applicants. During slow building periods, the agency processes loan applications quickly; when builders are busy with other construction projects, few applicants are processed.

Although guidelines and mandates for programs are set by HUD and directed from the state capital, and although local administrators complain that state officials make unreasonable demands on them -- and hold them accountable for risky decisions or excessive foreclosures -- they nevertheless have a significant amount of discretion. They don't often seem to exercise it on behalf of mortgage holders. They don't know, for example, whether more flexibility in client financing would increase or decrease the foreclosure rate, which appears to be tied to the economy, to plant closings, poor crop yield, summer heat that kills chickens, rather than to the values and attitudes of local clients.

HUD evaluates the performance of FmHA in each state, ranking the rates of delinquencies and foreclosures. At the national level, those numbers are abstractions. For many FmHA mortgage holders, the figures are all too concrete. They learn that home "ownership" is an illusion when they buy a house through Farmer's Home, and they learn this hard lesson during foreclosure, which takes places after a very short grace period, within three to six months. Mortgage holders receive no equity in an FmHA foreclosure (a down payment isn't required). Defaulting home owners who built their FmHA house on family property lose the land, too. That's why many low-income land owners choose to buy mobile homes -- they are less risky investments than FmHA houses, and although financing charges are very high, the buyer retains autonomy. Once mobile homes are paid for, owners brick up the sides and fashion an attractive facade. Serious safety drawbacks -- the chance of damage by fire or hurricanes -- don't constitute significant deterrents, given the economic choices.

Foreclosures on FmHA homes provide a ready-made entry point into homeownership for not-so-low-income families. The people who collect foreclosures get homes for resale at a bargain price and resell them on the open market. Thus, the home intended for the low-income buyer becomes reduced-cost housing for the first-time buyer who earns more than $15,000. And thus, some observers argue, FmHA subsidizes the real estate industry. Although FmHA was designed to provide ownership opportunities and to improve the housing stock in the areas where it operates, nothing about the program speaks to the needs of rural low-income residents. From Washington to local administrators, the bureaucracy is remote from the people it ought to serve. Until the first black housing official showed up in the near-black-majority nine-country area Stack studied, for example, fewer than five percent of FmHA loans for low-income housing went to African Americans.

When Wacquant writes about the "disintegration of state policy into a punitive vehicle of skepticism and mistrust" (1998), we must be reminded that programs designed to serve unemployed and low-income families never really had a golden age, in rural or in urban areas. Even when money was allocated at the federal level, for subsidized day care or for home loans, it was always policy to make it hard to get. MAC, Inc., succeeded, because the women who founded the organization were themselves so organized, so determined, so skillful, and so aware, as Shantee Owens said, that "only the strong survive." And they had their cross-kin, cross-county, connections, not to mention "direct contacts in the state capital" to help them. Mortgage holders (and welfare recipients) stand alone against the force of state and federal policies that, for the most part, have been punitive and disrespectful; the makers of those policies, who think they know which norms to enforce in poor peoples lives, have conducted uninformed, uncontrolled social experiments, often with disastrous effects. Many, like the social service administrators in Chestnut county, believe that they are acting in the best interest of their clients when they deny them access to public resources: Poor people have more dignity and self-regard if they do for themselves. But poor people who are liberated from the system of vertical privilege that once established social relationships in the rural South prefer to identify their own sources of dignity and self regard.

Having tracked social capital through time and in action in ethnographies we know well, we have seen how networks of norms and trust are forged, supported, and undermined in communities of color. But that's just the beginning of our task. Now we have to find ways to use our understanding of social capital formation to shape new policies and guide interventions that activate social assets and connect those communities to mainstream institutions. For cues, we turn to the arena of education, the ground on which Bourdieu and Coleman, when he brought the concept to the United States, developed their theories of human and cultural capital. For Bourdieu, Wacquant points out, analysis of "'social networks' and other organizational attachments" must be linked to schools and labor markets, the "main institutional sites in which the other two core species of capital, cultural and economic, are formed, traded, and vied for" (1998:27, citing Bourdieu 1996).

The work of Ricardo Stanton-Salazar (1997) on social capital and school outcomes among minority youth parallels the argument we've made in the first two parts of this paper: that ethnography discloses how racial, ethnic, or class-based cultural difference and prejudice create societal and institutional barriers; and that those barriers impede deployment of social capital and the acquisition of cultural and economic resources with which it can be combined to build prosperity. Stanton-Salazar starts from the position that "social antagonisms and divisions existing in the wider society operate to problematize (if not undermine) minority children's access to opportunities and resources that are, by and large, taken for granted products of middle-class family, community, and school networks" (3). His research reveals the range of institutional barriers to achievement for low-income minority youth and leads him to define social capital as "instrumental or supportive relationships with institutional agents," a formulation that captures not only the importance for human capital building of trust and reciprocity within one's family and community, but also the capacity to enter into such relationships with individuals, institutions, and networks of power that guarantee access to specific types of resources (7).

Stanton-Salazar found, as Jo Anne Schneider's (1998) work also illustrates, that formal and informal cultural biases of institutions create barriers in settings in which the ability to tap into resources is critical. In order to succeed, minority youth must be able to call upon, to use, the cultural capital of the institution and its institutional actors, be it school or social service agency or work place. Examining the nexus of cultural capital, social capital and the politics of public institutions, Stanton-Salazar points to the need for bridges along which minorities can come to know the unfamiliar cultural capital of what Lisa Delpit has called "the culture of power" (Delpit 1988). Institutional supports are "key forms of social support [because they] function to help children and adolescents become effective participants within mainstream institutional spheres," Stanton-Salazar observes (10). And social capital is the relationship that provides access to institutional supports, which, although they are taken for granted in middle class families, often hover out of reach for working-class children and children of color.

Whether or not barriers are formally institutionalized, institutional agents can informally deny or restrict access to minority children because of perceived differences in the "cultural, cognitive, and linguistic skills that are critical to competence and success in academic tasks" and that are "built upon white middle class community based language knowledge and cultural style" (Stanton-Salazar 1998:13).

If minority and working-class youth are to succeed in school, they must learn to decode the cultural logic of the dominant group. But no one teaches them how to decode that logic and negotiate the system, and without those skills, working-class and minority students can't develop ties to institutional actors and infiltrate the culture of power.

The importance of the link between cultural capital and support from key public institutions is apparent in all the ethnographic case studies we have reviewed. The women of MAC, Mothers and Children, Inc., succeeded because they had had the opportunity to work in the public sector and could rely on their knowledge of the real rules of public agencies and grants to overcome the resistance of local officials. They knew, they could read, the structure of power that confronted them. Sophisticated readers of the culture of power at FmHA figure out how to look like a mainstream nuclear family, the image the housing agency wants to see when (before) it grants home loans. Schneider's (1998) research on welfare reform and work also reveals that to secure and keep job placements, women need to understand certain clues to the dominant culture.

Stanton-Salazar argues that cultural differences in language, behavior, and beliefs may be overlooked or devalued in school settings, seen either as cultural deficits or pathology. Both perspectives, he contends, lead to the "institutionalization of distrust and detachment" between child and institutional agents, between family and community and school (1998:17). Wacquant observes that patterns of "exclusionary structures affecting the accumulation of social capital" by low-income communities of color can be identified across a range of important mediating and public institutions. Relationships of distrust created by those exclusionary structures are endemic between poor and minority parents and representatives of the school system precisely because schools are perceived as agents of the interests of the dominant culture.

So residents of urban communities must learn techniques through which to overcome barriers that block access to social/cultural networks of institutions; they must negotiate, move among multiple sociocultural worlds, adapt to and cross borders of cultural difference. "Borders are not inherently obstructive and disempowering," Stanton-Salazar says, but they become so when they are erected into institutionalized barriers that hinder access to resources, impede integration within mainstream institutions, essentially blocking the activation and formation of social capital (1998:23). Nevertheless, he points out, effective linking to mainstream institutions requires not only socialization into the culture of power but also maintenance of the cultural and social capital of the home community that nurtures young people through this difficult process. The capacity of youth to resist the potentially harmful effects of institutions that devalue and/or denigrate their cultural background "is dependent upon simultaneous embeddedness in family and community networks of support" (25).

Young people of color must build what Stanton-Salazar calls a "bicultural network orientation," a "consciousness that facilitates the crossing of cultural borders and the overcoming of institutional barriers and thereby facilitates entree into multiple community and institutional settings where diversified social capital can be generated and converted (25). That bicultural orientation enables people to move across multiple social worlds with competing norms expectations and socialization agendas, suggests strategies for negotiating pathways through competing and conflictual worlds. Middle-class experience, Stanton-Salazar explains, enacts and reenacts the "facile accumulation, transfer and conversion of mainstream forms of capital." The experience of working-class youth is different: It "involves coping with settings organized to restrict access to mainstream forms of capital and to problematize their own use of indigenous forms of cultural linguistic and social resources" ( 26).

Once working-class communities and communities of color have developed means of socialization into social/cultural networks that overcome barriers to inclusion in the dominant culture of power, the next and more important step is to develop longer-term, broadly-based strategies to transform those institutions and dismantle those barriers. To take that next step, we'll need a conceptual framework that goes beyond the limitations of social capital. We and others call that framework civic capacity.

Civic Capacity

Holding Hands provides a template for successful (if not necessarily sustainable) collective action. MAC, Inc., which grew out of the organizational experience of Holding Hands, exploited the social capital formed during that earlier effort at community building, combined it with other skills, and used it to construct a new institutional reality in Chestnut and surrounding counties. That kind of institution building, the kind that refuses to be stopped by barriers to change, must spread until it informs efforts to secure and support change, to reform and alter the operating procedures of public institutions. To ensure that those efforts achieve sustainability, that each new organizing effort does not have to start from ground zero, we need to envision a broader landscape. Social capital focuses our attention on the networks, norms, and trust that support individuals and communities of color, but we need a stronger framework as well, one that guides research and interventions.

The concept of civic capacity provides a more useful paradigm for our discussions of the complexities of successful social change. Researchers have used this concept recently in the area of urban educational reform. In case studies that explore racial and economic conflict in the context of community politics around schooling, Clarence Stone (1998), Marion Orr (1998), and Henig et.al.(in press) rely on the notion of civic capacity to provide constructive critiques of social capital theory. Stone argues that a civic capacity approach is based on urban regime theory, which "posits that policy change comes about only if reformers establish a new set of political arrangements commensurate with the policy being advocated" (1998:9). Although political relationships cannot explain everything, they are important in mediating responses to policy initiatives. The civic capacity approach depends upon community focus because "regardless of the source of the policy issue, the local community is a place where the response is carried out, and that response involves some form of [political] accommodation between governmental and nongovernmental sectors" (Stone 1998:1).

Civic capacity may be defined as cross-sector mobilization that brings together a range of actors in a coalition on community issues. The success of meaningful reform will depend on the dimensions of conflict and cooperation among stakeholders both inside and outside the educational arena, and the formal and informal means they can harness to define common objectives and pursue common goals (Stone 1998). A civic capacity approach entails establishing "web[s] of alliances and interactions" and "identifying the obstacles to such alliances where they do not exist" (Henig et.al.:137). To succeed, these alliances must create civic-governmental linkages that cross city hall with the institutional and political centers of power, and with multiple sectors in the community.

In efforts to build civic capacity for the reform of urban schools, the objective is to establish what Stone calls a performance regime, a set of arrangements that support the academic performance of all (including low SES) students. The performance regime links practices and networks inside and outside of school through key centers of power and authority; it requires changes within schools, but those changes depend upon external support mechanisms: community backing and public resources. And existing political relationships and institutional practices are always tenacious, sometimes intractable.

Comparisons of how civic capacity works through different policy areas -- urban renewal and economic development, say, as opposed to school reform -- reveal that social capital is not a set of skills or "habits of the heart" that can move easily from one domain to another. Formulations of social capital propose that small-scale acts of cooperation will build norms of reciprocity and trust that over time should cross over to facilitate larger-scale collective action (Putnam 1993;1995). We argue that this is a simplistic hope. The success of city and regional economic development coalitions rarely translate into effective educational reform collaborations among the same actors; and small-scale educational reform victories do not add up to system-wide change (Stone 1998, Orr 1998, Henig et.al.). But organized community building that links community social capital with public institutions, and forges coalitions with other sectors to create new syndicates of power can facilitate more broadly-based collective action. The Texas Industrial Areas Foundation (TIAF) network provides a compelling example of what such efforts can accomplish (Shirely 1997). TIAF's explicit goal is to develop social capital in three key areas: the community, within schools, and between schools and the community. The uniqueness of this approach is that it seeks to use social capital to close gaps between and across groups and with key institutions by acknowledging directly and working to overcome traditional grounds for conflict and hostility among all these players. And it accepts the reality that in its theater of operations, social capital must include accountability for it forge trust.

In practice, the TIAF school reform approach starts with community building and moves toward political empowerment (Warren 1998). The strategy, Dennis Shirley explains, is based on "leadership development, political participation, the creation of a constituency, and the strengthening of community-based organizations" (1997:243). Time-and labor-intensive organizing is accomplished through one-on-one relationships, small-group house meetings, and periodic all-day neighborhoods walks. These contacts enable the TIAF network to identify needs and generate community- specific plans for building social capital across groups and civic institutions. Shirley argues that TIAF's efforts to mobilize marginalized, low-income parents have succeeded (where so many others have failed) because "they have taken parent's concerns seriously and made them the starting points and basic foundation for the campaigns . . . they taught parents how they could become political actors" (242).

It's also of great significance that, although they have focused their efforts with working-class Latinos and African Americans, they keep ethnic solidarity or conflict from becoming the central issue. The TIAF network draws its base constituency and paying membership from among religious organizations. With many different churches as its foundation, the network has built powerful and enduring cross-ethnic and cross-class relationships; and TIAF has even organized around on issues of importance to higher-income communities at times. Its explicit, intensive strategy for community and social capital building has generated impressive civic capacity in many Texas cities where few would ever have thought poor Latinos could secure the reforms and resources they have in fact now won.[9]

Maybe because the network gained credibility from the coalition of churches from which it grew, key actors in the reform of schools in the TIAF communities offered whole-hearted support for the effort. Researchers can provide a range of examples and contexts in which those actors held back support, challenged reform, and undermined civic capacity around a particular issue (Henig et.al., Stone 1998, Gittell 1998, Shirley 1997). Stone suggests that "some elements of social capital, namely trust and reciprocity, are linked to another element, that of duty and obligation. Trust and reciprocity [and duty and obligation] operate more readily when there is a shared identity of some kind" (1998: 270). The sense of identity may be based on racial background or religious affiliation; or it may be based on geographical location, a neighborhood or city; or it may be based on casual acquaintance. Wherever they are based, identities, like the social capital they support, can be oppositional and adversarial, inclusive or exclusive. Therefore, "it matters greatly whether the context of an activity is interpersonal or intergroup," Stone observes. "In an intergroup setting, shared identity in task performance has to contend with a past history, which may be conflict-ridden and rife with grounds for distrust" (270). Stone's argument reminds us how important it is to distinguish between interpersonal and intergroup social capital building.

In the (almost always) intergroup urban context, two variables profoundly affect civic capacity (or intergroup/civic governmental social capital): the ability of actors in the local community to overcome a range of potential divisions; and the ability of local groups to contend with forces external to the city (Stone 1998). With both variables, race is a highly problematic, if frequently subtle and indirect, factor. Racial conflicts around contemporary educational reform differ significantly from those that surrounded earlier battles over desegregation. But Henig et al., in their study of four cities, found that such conflicts are never far from the surface, that they erupt very quickly when other sources of tension develop between groups. The issue of race, it comes as no surprise, can generate formidable challenges for building and sustaining the necessary coalitions for civic capacity.

The challenge is heightened by the fact that human capital investments like education are seen as redistributive; investment in economic development, people assume, will accrue benefits for everyone. Stone points out that for some stakeholders, payoffs on investments in human capital are delayed significantly. Those delayed returns, and the perception that educational reform redistributes resources (wealth), guarantee that investments in human capital are more likely to encounter resistance in intergroup contexts than other kinds of public spending. Although racialized identities can help build solidarity within sectors of the city (particularly in the electoral arena), they can also create division, undermine support across race lines, and polarize conflicts or racialize those that weren't apparently racial to begin with. Reforms that necessitate collaboration or cooperation across racial lines can be imperiled.

In the four black-led cities Henig et al. studied, critical intra-city and city-suburb problems developed. In the intra-city context, reformers had to rely on a white minority for cooperation and resources because whites had maintained considerable economic power as taxpayers, employers, and property owners. White middle-class residents could also avail themselves of the exit option and protest city policies by moving to the suburbs. In the city-suburb context, race became an issue when conflicts arose with key white external powerholders: suburban neighbors, state legislatures, governors, courts, or agents of the national government. Henig et al argue that because the four black-led cities were embedded in larger white-dominated power structures, conflicts of interests and priorities would always be interpreted in racial terms, whether they were rooted in race or not. Those conflicts, they say, "engender a more emotionally intense and combustible politics." Under such conditions, "added doses of mistrust, suspicion, wariness, and volatility associated with racial politics can have substantial consequences" (Henig et.al.:145:226) The researchers found that mutual trust among stakeholders is essential to joint action, and that it was missing in each of the four cities. Local dynamics of "hostility and mistrust" resulting from longstanding conflictual racial relationships meant that, in intergroup contexts, reformers must be experts on "foreign relations" (Stone 1998:34)

Our objectives in this paper have essentially been twofold: to see what we learn by mining history and ethnographies for lessons about social capital, and then to offer suggestions about how we might build it better and stronger in urban communities. Looking at social capital over time and on the ground, it is clear that its workings cannot be understood without situating it at the crossroads of politics, the market, racial struggle, and cultural conflict. When we root social capital in changing social landscapes, we confront the barriers, prejudice, and distrust that have eroded its power in largely minority urban communities in the last few decades. Distrust was forged not only by economic withdrawal and residential segregation, but also by the very institutions that purport to serve the public good.

By tracking the pathways and functioning of social networks of African Americans in North Carolina, we see social capital as a cultural process, played out in pivotal public institutions. For poor minority communities, whether they are rural or urban, the racial and cultural politics of the mainstream institutions that determine many opportunities in life frequently reproduce patterns of inequality. Institutional barriers that stem from differences and prejudice block not only the use of social capital, but also the ability to acquire resources that would make it a building block for prosperity. Social capital never stands alone. In impoverished and in privileged communities alike, it must work through the mediating institutions of the labor market, the polity, and the state. And at times the social capital of one group works against that of another.

How, then, can we do better? We can find some answers to this question by studying the activism and organizing that takes place daily in poor communities. Families and community leaders rely on their networks, skills, and resourcefulness to overcome the dearth of funds and surplus of obstacles imposed on them by mainstream institutions. In the urban context, this is the fundamental starting point. Useful frameworks for envisioning interventions to enhance social capital begin with frank acknowledgment of the powerful racial, political, and economic barriers that confront communities of color. Once we've acknowledged those barriers, we can devise means first to overcome, and eventually to dismantle them. We identify approaches to social capital that incorporate this agenda and outline ways to build social capital on a small scale.

Based on his qualitative research on minority youth, Stanton-Salazar (1997) argues that through a bicultural orientation to education, disadvantaged students can connect to mainstream institutions and secure the resources and knowledge they need to function successfully in the culture of power. Schneider (1998) found similar requirements for bicultural orientation in her research on welfare-to-work programs; she outlines the key role that private institutions can play when they use bicultural orientation to build bridges from communities to workplaces. In both schools and workplaces, Stanton-Salazar and Schneider argue, success depends upon learning and performing the proper cultural cues to activate the trust of institutional actors. Those who are able to bridge the different social/cultural networks of home, community, and formal institutions, are frequently braced by bicultural community practices.

Efforts to form social capital must integrate and affirm community cultural values, resources, and rights. The need for trust goes both ways. The biases of public institutions demand that communities of color acquire the cultural cues and knowledge of the culture of power; but bridging institutions must affirm the cultural assets of minority communities to gain their trust and build constructive alliances. Bicultural mutuality is the basis of trust and access and mediation. As Schneider learned, CBOs and churches play key roles as bridging institutions by providing a "safe recognized environment to practice the social cues and work habits expected by other employers." They also "served as trusted bridges between the recipient of government services and the wider community," enabling communities of color to acquire the cultural capital needed to make social capital effective with mainstream institutions.

The formation of social capital and bicultural orientation helps the working class and minorities overcome some barriers, but these approaches leave untouched the long-term problems poor people face. In efforts to meet those challenges, the concept of social capital is an important but insufficient tool. By contrast, the civic capacity framework begins with the notion that barriers must be overcome but has as its goal the achievement of sustainable reforms by the mobilization of actors across sectors and across difference. Large-scale change requires that reformers deal with conflicts in inter-group social capital to build coalitions. We have identified economic and social processes (such as racial containment and negative state social capital) that allowed urban areas to decline; we also need to acknowledge the political relations that have facilitated this decline. The civic capacity framework demonstrates that real policy and institutional change entails breaking old political relationships and establishing a new political equation to support and sustain reforms.

Although political relationships do not explain everything, they are important in mediating social change. The Texas IAF offers a compelling example of how civic capacity -- cross-sector mobilization that brings together a range of actors in a coalition on community issues--can be built. It is the third of three efforts (after bicultural education and training and bicultural institutions that build bridges) that must be absorbed as part of all research projects on social capital and/or agendas for intervention.

Underlying any future agenda to build social assets in poor communities must be a sufficiently developed theory of social capital. There has been some theoretical debate about whether social capital is the property of individuals or groups. We argue that it is neither. Social capital is a process, a web or network of relationships that facilitate access to resources to benefit individuals and enable groups to get ahead in some way. It is necessary to see that network of relationships as only one component of social capital, dependent on others, such as the cultural cues that activate it. Further, social capital is a function of membership in a group that is enmeshed in a larger system of unequal power and resources; it cannot be a property of the group or individual considered outside this unequal multi-group context. Social capital theorists should recall the concept's contemporary roots in Bourdieu's work, where it is embedded in a larger view of power in society.

Robert Putnam has proposed that participation in civic life is key to building the trust that fuels prosperity, and argues that the decline of trust lies at the root of a range of social problems. Such participation, however, can be positive or profoundly negative. When communities are themselves submerged in civic contexts of institutionalized racism and prejudice, participation breeds hostility and distrust. Building on research on participation in communities of practice, we point out that is necessary to distinguish among modes of participation; participation occurs in different ways with dramatically different outcomes (Lave &Wenger 1991). It can be marginal, when power holders or cultural mismatch obstruct mutual engagement and negotiation. Or it can lead to bridges that build common norms and identities, and eventually to integration, mutuality, and accountability that reflects empowered participation (Wenger 1998). In a context of mutual engagement and negotiation that is grounded in common cultural knowledge, trust can be forged and society transformed. Perhaps at the end of this millennium, we stand at a crossroads where we must look back and confront a history of marginalization that destroyed trust -- but we also have the capacity to witness the formation of bridges that overcome marginalization. We must now take the steps to build in the accountability and mutuality upon which full participation and trust is based.
 

1.We are borrowing Jo Anne Schneider's (1998) formulation of social/cultural capital to highlight the cultural nature of social processes involved. Following from her research on welfare reform, Schneider views social capital as functional, in that it refers to the social relationships and trust which enable people to gain access to resources, but also contends, building on Bourdieu and Portes and Sensenbrenner (1993), that social capital not only includes the "relationships with people and organizations that have access to resources," it also entails the "knowledge of cultural cues which indicate that an individual is a member of the a group and should be given access to those relationships" (1998:1-2) She points out that Bourdieu's notion of social capital as a culturally based process has been lost in prominent formulations generated in the U.S.(Coleman 1988, Putnam 1993;1995).

2. From research presented in Stack (1970).

3. All further references to people moving between urban areas and rural southern homeplaces are from Stack's ethnographic study of this return movement (1996).

4. Before 1970, black migration from North to South amounted to a tiny counter stream of about 15,000 people each year. After 1970, northward migration dwindled, and 50,000 African Americans headed south to home each year (Cromartie & Stack 1989:298).

6. For the sake of privacy, the names of places and people are changed.

7. Ida Susser and Douglas Foley provide examples of research in different communities that faced similar obstacles to community building. In Norman Street (1982), Ida Susser offers a community study of a pivotal period of economic transformation in New York City during the 1970s. She focused on the way a community responded to the loss of manufacturing jobs during a time when social services were also facing deep cuts. Though the case is from the 1970s, it is telling; the problems that confronted the community are now national trends. While community residents mobilized around their needs, she found that they "did not have the political power of a work force necessary to the city's economy" (Susser 19982:207). The loss of jobs meant they lacked the economic relevance to gain political power that could make their mobilizing efforts work. Further, racism stoked by politicians and present within the community, divided groups within the larger effort. Douglas Foley, in The Heartland Chronicles (1995), uncovered extensive evidence of racial conflict between the Mesquaki Indians and the local white community and representatives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The local government and white community repeatedly hindered efforts by the Mesquaki to revitalize their tribe.

9. Danielson and Hochschild (1998) contribute to the debate by challenging arguments that building civic capacity and supporting greater community participation can lead to serious and sustained educational policy reform in troubled urban districts. There are too many examples that support their pessimistic conclusion, but TIAF does present the counter-argument. Indeed, global, and regional economic and political forces will profoundly affect the resources and form of local reforms. Local civic capacity and community participation are not likely to be sufficient, but would appear to be a necessary component of sustainable change, any may form that basis for broader transformations.
 

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