Revisiting 'The Inner City Mother Goose'

At the close of the 1960s, as the optimism of America’s Postwar economic growth was fading and the promise of the Civil Rights Movement was giving way to a Nixon-era “law and order” retrenchment, use of the term “inner city” was peaking as a catch-all phrase to describe a host of urban problems. The expression evoked a world of crime, drugs, blight, failing schools, and chronic unemployment, with all-but-unspoken racial connotations: “inner city neighborhoods” were almost always “black neighborhoods.” Use of the other common shorthand term, “ghetto,” traces an almost identical trajectory.

In the years following, residents and activists have pushed back on these terms, calling out their coded racism, and liberal-minded usage panels have increasingly rejected them as a shorthand for urban poverty.