Baltimore was once a vibrant manufacturing town, but today, with factory closings and steady job loss since the 1970s, it is home to some of the most impoverished neighborhoods in America. The Hero's Fight provides an intimate look at the effects of deindustrialization on the lives of Baltimore's urban poor, and sheds critical light on the unintend

"Fernández-Kelly tells these life stories with novelistic flair. This is not ordinary 'interview' data. It is hard won over years of direct immersion--watching people grow up, change jobs, give birth. The Hero's Fight is inflected with intimacy. It is also a book of wide-ranging commentary that masters an extraordinary range of literatures."--Harvey Molotch, author of Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger

"The Hero's Fight examines the lives of a web of interconnected residents in inner-city Baltimore with a rare combination of care, concern, and critical reflection. This powerful and important book challenges us to reconsider the most basic tenets of how a welfare state should and could help the most vulnerable members of our society."--Harel Shapira, author of Waiting for José The Minutemen's Pursuit of America

"The Hero's Fight develops a historically informed and ethnographically robust sense of the troubled social, economic, and political waters urban black Americans face and navigate. Fernández-Kelly successfully illustrates how the potent combination of being black, American, and living in the urban places shapes the souls of black folk today. Well-written, rich in detail, and intersectional in its approach, The Hero's Fight is a wonderful addition to sociology, political science, anthropology, African American studies, and urban studies classrooms, debates, and scholarship."---Marcus Anthony Hunter, Social Service Review