Book Event with Kimberley Johnson and Pedro Regalado: "Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis"
Please join the Silicon Valley Archives in welcoming Kimberley Johnson and Pedro Regalado as they discuss Johnson's latest book, Dark Concrete: Black Power, Urbanism, and the American Metropolis, on October 22, 2026, at 4:30 p.m. This event is co-sponsored with the Silicon Valley Archives by the Program on Urban Studies at Stanford, the Stanford Department of African and African American Studies, the Stanford Program in American Studies, and the Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.
Please RSVP at this link to attend.
Dark Concrete is about how the Black Power movement reshaped urban politics in the United States—from expectations to practices. Although the national and international dimensions of the Black Power movement are often focused on, Kimberley Johnson looks at the movement at the local level, highlighting Newark and East Orange, New Jersey, and Oakland and East Palo Alto, California, and three policy areas: housing, education, and policing. She examines how Black Power Urbanism had its own local meanings as it was defined by local activists, neighborhood residents, parents, tenants, and others who sought to repair cities and particularly black neighborhoods that were shattered due to urban renewal and highway construction, as well as ongoing political and economic disinvestment. Dark Concrete depicts how local conditions influenced the emergence of the Black Power movement and, in turn, the ways in which these local movements reshaped urban politics, institutions, and place.
Kimberley S. Johnson is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, with affiliate appointments in the Department of Politics and the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Johnson recently held the John G. Winant Visiting Professorship in American Government at the University of Oxford (2024-25). Johnson’s work examines American political development, the formation of the modern administrative state and bureaucratic governance; urban and suburban governance; race and ethnic politics; and the political production of (sub-)urban space.
Pedro A. Regalado is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. Regalado's work focuses on cities, immigration, capitalism, and empire, with particular attention to Latino communities. He is especially interested in how everyday working people, migrants, and entrepreneurs shaped, and were shaped by, the political economy of urban America across the twentieth century.