The Poker Club Throughout his life, Dr. Baron maintained a complicated relationship with academia. He wanted his writings to be scholarly and he appreciated the pedagogical and investigative aspects of academic life. However, he always insisted…

The desegregation of Chicago’s Public Schools played out as an epic drama in which Hal Baron spent years struggling against Superintendent Benjamin Willis and his inexorable network of allies. Benjamin Willis—described in his Chicago Tribune…

Although I was committed to and supportive of the black movement theoretically and practically, my deep engagement was more accidental. When I was writing my dissertation, I taught at Wright Junior College in Chicago. The department chair got…

Harold Maurice Baron born in St. Louis, Missouri grew up in University City, the first suburb due west of downtown, lived in an upper-middle-class section, which was third Jewish, third Protestant, and a third Catholic. The rest of U City might have…

In high school race was hardly discussed as it was just assumed. The one teacher who broached the issue outside the conventional stereotypes did so within a frame of responsible stewardship. The most prestigious teacher in the school lived in…

"The beginnings of any substantial American public housing program lay in the Great Depression of the 1930's. Viewed in an overall political sense, the New Deal era was a mixture of social reforms with innovations in state capitalism that took…

Excerpted from Baron’s “Myrdal Preface: Remaking Race,” 2016 (Unpublished). "'Nothing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualize it to fit our own terrain. If race lives on today, it can do so…

Sixteen months after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, Hal Baron watched administrators riddle it with loopholes. Without immediate and decisive action, he argued, the U.S. would consign the new act to the same ineffective fate as that of…

Hal Baron's work focuses on five themes (history, housing, labor, education, politics), which all represent different aspects of what Baron terms the “web of urban racism.” The web of urban racism, a phrase Baron uses in his writings from the…