Defended Neighborhoods, Urban Renewal, and “Hillbilly Removal” in Uptown, Chicago, 1955 – 1970

This article examines urban renewal in a neighborhood where most residents were white in a uniquely racialized case of urban Appalachian displacement to better understand the broader social processes of otherness and undesirability involved in urban renewal. In the period discussed in this article, the Uptown neighborhood experienced the largest influx of southern and Appalachian whites in Postwar Chicago and was the setting for a contentious struggle over urban renewal for about 10 years. Our primary framework for explaining the events surrounding urban renewal in Uptown, Chicago are drawn from the concept of “white trash” from Matt Wray and the “defended neighborhood” from Gerald D. Suttles. Like Suttles, we argue that urban planning resulting in renewal initiatives involve politics and cultural conceptions of what the neighborhood ought to resemble and who should reside there, and, therefore, will be likely to engender group conflict. The term “white trash” functions as a way for some socially comfortable white people to construct a debased “other” and solidify their own sense of superiority, reinforcing the social and ideological boundaries of whiteness as centered in middle-class norms. By coupling these frameworks, we reveal the politics of otherness deployed by local elites to justify their economic development initiatives.