Reinventing Citizenship: Black Los Angeles, Korean Kawasaki, and Community Participation
Kazuyo Tsuchiya
Abstract
In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and Japan went through massive welfare expansions that sparked debates about citizenship. At the heart of these disputes stood African Americans and Koreans. This book offers a comparative study of African American welfare activism in Los Angeles and Koreans’ campaigns for welfare rights in Kawasaki. In working-class and poor neighborhoods in both locations, African Americans and Koreans sought not only to be recognized as citizens but also to become legitimate constituting members of communities. Local activists in Los Angeles and Kawasaki ardently ch ... More
In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and Japan went through massive welfare expansions that sparked debates about citizenship. At the heart of these disputes stood African Americans and Koreans. This book offers a comparative study of African American welfare activism in Los Angeles and Koreans’ campaigns for welfare rights in Kawasaki. In working-class and poor neighborhoods in both locations, African Americans and Koreans sought not only to be recognized as citizens but also to become legitimate constituting members of communities. Local activists in Los Angeles and Kawasaki ardently challenged the welfare institutions. By creating opposition movements and voicing alternative visions of citizenship, African American leaders, the text argues, turned Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty into a battle for equality. Koreans countered the city’s and the nation’s exclusionary policies and asserted their welfare rights. The work exemplifies transnational antiracist networking, showing how black religious leaders traveled to Japan to meet Christian Korean activists and to provide counsel for their own struggles.
Keywords:
African Americans,
Koreans,
Los Angeles,
welfare rights,
Kawasaki,
citizenship,
War on Poverty,
Lyndon B. Johnson
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816681112 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816681112.001.0001 |
