Slow and Sudden Violence: Why and When Uprisings Occur

In Slow and Sudden Violence, Derek Hyra weaves together a persuasive narrative of unrest, linking police aggression to an ongoing cycle of racial and spatial urban redevelopment repression. By delving into the real estate history of the St. Louis region and Baltimore, Hyra shows how housing and community development policies advance neighborhood inequality by segregating, gentrifying, and displacing Black communities. Despite moments of racial political representation, repeated decisions to "upgrade" the urban fabric and uproot low-income Black populations have resulted in pockets of poverty inhabited by people experiencing chronic displacement trauma and unrelenting police surveillance. These interconnected sets of divestments and accumulated frustrations have erupted in response to tragic, unjust police killings. To confront the core components of U.S. unrest, Hyra urges that we must end racialized policing, stop Black community destruction and displacement, and reduce neighborhood inequality.

Derek Hyra is a professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy within the School of Public Affairs at American University. His research focuses on processes of neighborhood change, with an emphasis on housing, urban politics, and race. Dr. Hyra is author of several books including The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville (University of Chicago Press 2008), Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City (University of Chicago Press 2017), and Slow and Sudden Violence: Why and When Uprisings Occur (University of California Press 2024).

Dr. Hyra’s research has been showcased in both academic journals, such as Housing Policy Debate, Journal of Urban Affairs, Urban Affairs Review, and Urban Studies, and popular media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He has also received several important grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 2024, he received the Activist Scholar Award from the Urban Affairs Association.

Dr. Hyra strongly believes in public service. He has served as board chair of the Alexandria Redevelopment and Housing Authority, as an Alexandria Planning Commissioner, and as an Obama appointee on the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Council on Underserved Communities. He was also a U.S. Congressional candidate in Northern Virginia in 2014 and served as the chair of the American Sociological Association’s Community and Urban Sociology Section in 2020. He is currently President of the Eastern Sociological Society, editorial advisory board member of Housing Policy Debate, and member of the Falls Church (Virginia) Planning Commission. He is also a co-editor of a new PENN Press book series, “Disrupting Urban Policy.” He received his B.A. from Colgate University and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

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