"A City’s Neglectful Past: Young Black Mothers and The Creation of A Reproductive Health Crisis in the Urban North 1900‐2005."

A City’s Neglectful Past examines how the promise of northern liberalism concealed enduring forms of racial inequality in reproductive health. Centering Syracuse, New York, a city long celebrated for its nineteenth-century abolitionist legacy, the project reveals how its twentieth-century institutions expelled pregnant Black girls from schools, criminalized their sexuality, and oversaw some of the highest Black infant-mortality rates in the nation.

Through this lens, Syracuse becomes a case study in the contradictions of progressive reform, where liberal ideals coexisted with structural neglect and moral policing. The Young Mothers Educational Development Program (YMED), founded in Syracuse in 1965 as the nation’s first comprehensive alternative school for pregnant girls, epitomized this paradox: a reform effort that sought to “save” the very girls it once excluded.

By the late twentieth century, amid urban renewal, deindustrialization, the War on Drugs, and conservative welfare reform, Syracuse’s young Black mothers faced intensified scrutiny even as their infants continued to die at alarming rates.

Drawing on archival records, oral histories, government documents, local newspapers, and public health data, the dissertation recovers the voices of these mothers and the community advocates who fought for them. A City’s Neglectful Past reframes the history of urban decline, medicine, and race, revealing how racial inequality endured under the guise of reform and positions the urban North as a critical site in the history of reproductive injustice.