![]() These flourishing black communities were erased not only from physical existence, but also from living memory. Some 10,000 African Americans were left homeless. Greenwood was burned to the ground as airplanes dropped incendiaries on the neighbourhood. Scores of black people were killed in these onslaughts. A few years later, armed white mobs (backed by local law officers) razed to the ground the all-black Florida towns of Ocoee and Rosewood, and the prosperous black Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma. During the first world war, in 1917, another white-on-black race riot all but annihilated the black community of East St Louis, Illinois. During the second world war, this idea of white primacy sparked one of the worst race riots in American history, after white people insisted not only that Detroit’s federal housing built for war workers be segregated, but that all of it be turned over to white residents. Not only the refusal of white people to live with people of colour, but their conviction, running back through the history of the US, that any black space is not legitimate – that whatever black people own can and should be expropriated by whites, if they so desire it. They never soft-soap the crime and dysfunction prevalent in Yonkers’ predominantly black and Hispanic public housing projects, while at the same time, they deftly uncover white Yonkers’ true sin: the inability to see the people of colour in the projects as human beings, just as desperate as they are to build a better life for themselves and their children.Ī still from Show Me A Hero, the latest TV series from The Wire’s David Simon, about social housing in Yonkers, New York. Its overwhelmingly white, working-class population had already been battered by de-industrialisation when the fight began in 1980, and Simon and Zorzi are sympathetic to their fears. They are just as unflinching here, their canvas an endless, real-life fight over public housing in Yonkers, a small city just north of New York. Their previous collaboration, The Wire, about life in Baltimore’s inner city, was the best show ever on American television. ![]() Simon and co-writer William F Zorzi do this brilliantly, which should be no surprise. ![]() Show Me a Hero, David Simon’s TV adaptation of Lisa Belkin’s book of the same name, takes an unsparing look at one of the most corrosive issues in American life: the question of how we learn, literally, to live with each other.
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