This dissertation explores the nearly fifty-year history of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC), the nation's first federally funded community development corporation (CDC). The BSRC's creation stemmed from the bottom-up initiatives of African American women in the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council (CBCC), a federation of more than one hundred community groups aided by city planners at Pratt Institute. Their seminal efforts at rehabilitating Bedford-Stuyvesant marked a transition in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement's confrontation of discriminatory practices, municipal neglect, and the pathologies of poverty and urban decay. These efforts attracted the attention and commitment of Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Jacob K. Javits, who recruited business and philanthropic leaders to the cause and secured the initial funding to launch Restoration in December 1966. Together these partners in renewal forged a public-private partnership at a time when black and white Americans were moving farther apart. Together they articulated a new definition of community in which the combination of mutual responsibility and the strength of the American business system provided the means to turn poor neighborhoods into engines of renewal. They created an intermediary level of American governance that was more responsive to the needs of local people and placed new resources at the disposal of community leaders. The BSRC was the innovative product of a "creative federalism" that coordinated the power of the federal government, philanthropies, labor unions, universities, and the private enterprise system. This comprehensive organizational history investigates the full spectrum of the BSRC's comprehensive physical, economic, social, and cultural redevelopment agenda. Building on the concept that the 'process is the product' Restoration's successes and failures demonstrate how capacity was built in one of the nation's most challenged communities. After a decade of impressive accomplishments, Restoration was forced to retreat and reevaluate its mission as successive conservative presidential administrations withdrew the federal support that once largely sustained the corporation. The 1980s served as a crucible in which Restoration reinvented itself in order to survive. The new structure underscored the importance of communal ties, profitable sustainability, and nimble leadership that could move from "the streets to the suites." As it emerged from the challenges of the 1980s, Restoration was no longer the movement's North Star, but rather another point of light in a competitive constellation of more than 4,500 CDCs. In 2014, Restoration continues to balance the weight of its historic mission to provide comprehensive community development in a neighborhood that is undergoing rapid change. While poverty remains a fact of life for many of the area's minority residents, gentrification brings new challenges and opportunities to create a collaborative community that steps beyond the boundaries of race and class to build a better Bedford-Stuyvesant. / History

Through studying the intersections of sanitation and segregation in Brooklyn, New York in the post-WWII era, this thesis reveals a web of willful white negligence that constructed a narrative that supports continued environmental injustices towards black Americans. As a result of housing discrimination, the lack of sanitation, and the political and social climate of the 1950s, black neighborhoods in Brooklyn became dirtier with abandoned garbage. Institutional anti-black racism not only permitted and supported the degradation of black neighborhoods, but also created an association between black Americans and trash. In the present day, this narrative not only leads to the increased segregation of black Americans into dirty neighborhoods, but also justifies more environmental injustice in these vulnerable communities. Based on a case study of Brooklyn in the 1950s, this thesis asserts that environmental injustices are more than just siting landfills and toxic sites proximate to vulnerable neighborhoods, but rather they are dependent on the creation and preservation of narratives that claim minority communities are naturally predisposed to or deserving of living in dirty and unclean places.

This dissertation recounts how community groups in postwar New York City tapped into growing government engagement with urban problems, which culminated in President Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 declaration of "unconditional war on poverty." Focusing on the discourse among grassroots activists, social reformers, and city officials, I argue that the War on Poverty has been misunderstood by scholars inattentive to the rich exchange of ideas that occurred at street level. I show how local policy innovations flowed upward and influenced elites -- intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats -- before being projected back downward and adapted anew. Viewing the War on Poverty from the ground up not only provides a fresh perspective on its well-documented failures; it also turns up hidden successes. My narrative unfolds in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, where the drive to end poverty dovetailed with a vibrant civil-rights movement. A majority-black area of roughly 400,000 people, Bed-Stuy housed a mix of desperately poor tenants and upwardly mobile homeowners. I emphasize the policy role played by members of the area's middle class, especially women, who acted as brokers between politicians and the poor people whose empowerment the War on Poverty ostensibly promoted. In the 1950s, activists in Bed-Stuy partnered with the municipal government of Robert F. Wagner, Jr., to tackle pressing issues -- juvenile delinquency, deteriorated housing, capital flight -- through experimental social-work techniques and a new model of neighborhood-based planning. Such partnerships laid the groundwork for the federal Community Action Program, the centerpiece of the War on Poverty. Though Bed-Stuy's official Community Action Agency ultimately succumbed to mismanagement, bureaucratization, and internal strife, it did spawn several social-uplift and educational programs that helped to empower local residents, especially black women. By the late 1960s, Bed-Stuy's poverty warriors were searching for new ways of institutionalizing the federal antipoverty commitment and gaining a measure of community control. They found one answer in an alliance with Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who helped launch the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, the country's first Community Development Corporation. Restoration drew unprecedented federal funds and soon pioneered influential strategies of brownstone revitalization and local business development. As it evolved in the 1970s, Restoration reflected the dual goals of employing low-income residents and retaining Bed-Stuy's middle class -- a difficult balancing act, especially in a moment of accelerating disinvestment, mounting crime, and waning political will. Nevertheless, Restoration provided a model that community groups nationwide would follow into the 1980s and beyond.