Government supported and reified whites’ desire to live apart from Black folk. It acted with great intention in creating ghettos and encouraging residential segregation, although multiple actors contributed. This history has been written comprehensively by several authors.41 Here I offer only the litany of government policies and practices that rendered physical segregation the American way.
Violence and restrictive covenants were not as efficient nor respectable as zoning. As great migrants traversed the Upper South, several cities, including Baltimore and Louisville, enacted racial zoning to impose a stark residential segregation that did not exist when land use was unregulated. Again, the Supreme Court prohibited that strategy when it decided Buchanan v. Warley in 1917.
It was a limited victory. In 1926, the Supreme Court ruled on the landmark case Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty, condoning what is now referred to as Euclidian zoning. The Court endorsed the idea that certain uses of land, like duplexes, were “parasitic” on single-family homes and the people who lived there and therefore should be separated from these idealized neighborhoods. In ensuing decades, thousands of new suburban governments would form, enabling middle- and upper-class whites to wield the zoning power to exclude types of housing, and therefore, certain populations.
The federal government decided in the 1930s that it was economically risky and not appropriate for people of different races to live together. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) invented redlining, encoding unacceptable categories of neighborhoods in red ink, and lending elsewhere, preferably in newly developing white areas. It redlined more than two hundred American cities, giving majority-Black neighborhoods the lowly D rating. The D rating marked Black neighborhoods, in many cases vibrant, as “hazardous” to lending institutions. The A rating went only to “homogenous” white neighborhoods. That decision reverberated and became destiny. Blacks could not get loans to buy or invest in their homes. Starving whole neighborhoods of credit discouraged outsiders from investing there. A 2019 Federal Reserve study examined those neighborhoods and found current effects of the D rating eighty years ago. The D rating correlated with present disinvestment and decline. It increased Black segregation and depressed homeownership and property values. It accounted for 40 percent of the gap in home values between D- and C- rated neighborhoods by 1980, and untold differences in value compared with A-rated neighborhoods.42
Major federal policies supported expanding and demarcating segregated Black space and exclusionary white space. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured the thirty-year mortgage to bring homeownership to the white masses. Thanks to low down payments and interest rates, buying a home became cheaper than renting, for those who could qualify for an FHA-guaranteed loan. The FHA insured mortgages primarily for white suburbia, creating and reifying white space while refusing to invest in Black communities or underwrite mortgages for Blacks who sought to buy there. The Veterans Administration operated its mortgage-assistance programs in the same racially discriminatory manner. African Americans, cut out of the government’s largest wealth-building programs and traditional mortgages, were preyed on by avaricious speculators.43
In his influential essay “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote of unbroken kleptocratic plunder, of Black bodies and Black-owned land in the South, and of the meager savings African Americans accumulated in the North. His essay featured Clyde Ross. Mississippi authorities seized his parents’ forty-acre farm and animals on a claim of unpaid taxes that the family was powerless to defend. It was part of a widespread phenomenon of state theft of Black-owned land. The once-independent family was forced into sharecropping. Clyde Ross left the South. After fighting for the freedom of others in World War II, he sought his own in Chicago. Ross was part of the second wave of migration, hastened by World War II, that continued through 1970. About six million Black people moved in seven decades, like a steady exodus from Egypt. Ross and others wanted homes and, with rare exception, the only way they could acquire them was through installment contract purchases that conveyed no equity or ownership until the last usurious payment was made. Predatory speculators bought houses cheaply from panicked whites, sold them to Black folk like Clyde Ross at exorbitant prices, and evicted anyone who couldn’t make payments—relentless plunder that made speculators fortunes by cheating Black people.44
In the 1940s and 1950s, Chicago was a laboratory for segregation strategies that would shape future federal policy. Violence also continued to be a tool for containing the Negro. White Chicagoans used bombs, arson, and mob violence in the 1940s and less explosive tactics in the 1950s, against Black migrants. Whites also sparred with Blacks to keep them out of favored schools, parks, and beaches. The Irish in Englewood, the Czechs and Poles in Cicero and Trumbull Park, and others learned to think of neighborhood and public space in all-or-nothing terms, and they resorted to blows to try to hold it all. White ethnics developed cultural myths to justify virulent racial hatred. According to Drake and Cayton, local newspapers “boast[ed] that it was Southern and Eastern Europeans who really built this country while Negroes were ‘swinging in trees,’ ‘eating each other.’”45
The Windy City’s political and business leaders catered to white racism by maintaining and expanding swaths of Blackness. Chicago’s “second ghetto,” as historian Arnold Hirsch called it, was vertical. Many thousands of descendants were placed in an “unbroken wall of high-rise public housing” constructed along State Street from Twenty-Second to Fifty-Fifth Streets. This mammoth density of Black poverty was something new—a government-sponsored institution that served the interests of ordinary whites and the speculators who wished to exploit Blacks and fearful whites in housing markets. Once this new concentrated poverty was in place, white hysteria would only grow, and the vicious circle continued.46
Major federal policies mirrored the Chicago method of expanding and demarcating both segregated Black space and exclusionary white space. The interstate highway program, the world’s largest public works program when it was built, facilitated white flight from cities and walled off the Black side of town that whites learned to fear. Under a congressionally enacted urban-renewal program for “slum clearance,” which James Baldwin and others called “Negro removal,” the federal government subsidized the local destruction of nearly four hundred thousand mostly Black-occupied homes, erasing Blackness from downtown centers in the 1950s through the early 1960s. Most of those displaced were moved to public housing or more marginal neighborhoods. The federal government paid local housing authorities to build public housing and acquiesced when locals intentionally assigned Blacks and whites to separate and unequal housing projects.47 Like the ghetto itself, notorious public high-rises where every family was Black and poor incubated misery and disinvestment, although the occupants of the housing were usually blamed.
St. Louis, Missouri, for example, created an urban oasis that became a monster. The Pruitt-Igoe projects housed twelve thousand very low-income Black people in thirty-three high-rise buildings. It became a national symbol of “failed” public housing, and its residents were often cast as villains in the mythical story of its demise. Left out of this tale in which modern design succumbed to garbage, urine, stench, broken windows, crime, and vandalism are the racist policies of state and federal government and the external force of deindustrialization. The more accurate story is that city leaders eagerly used public housing funded by the federal government to isolate poor Blacks. The project collapsed financially because St. Louis’s once-vital industrial economy plummeted. Industrial jobs disappeared from the central city; newly jobless tenants could not afford the rents to maintain the buildings. In hindsight, it was a bad idea to build complicated high-rises without allocating funds for their maintenance. The Pruitt-Igoe residents wanted and demanded upkeep that was not forthcoming. Ultimately, Pruitt-Igoe was torn down, its detonation aired on national television. It became a mythic symbol of the mistakes, recrimination, and tension that would play out wherever ghettos wer
e constructed.48
These cumulative public investments in segregation produced intended results. Rates of Black-white residential segregation rose in every decade from the 1920s to the 1970s. Hypersegregation of poor Blacks emerged in more than fifty metropolitan areas before the civil rights movement began to change housing policy.49 Demographers define hypersegregation as experiencing very high levels of isolation along multiple technical measures. In the twentieth century, no other racial or ethnic group was subjected to such apartheid.50
Middle- and upper-income African Americans were also segregated. My family experienced this racism in Huntsville, Alabama, in the mid-1960s. Our ancestor Lucinda Bowdre, née Cashin, died as the Civil War ended and Emancipation began. Four generations later, descendant Cashins resisted the color line in the heart of Dixie on myriad fronts. My parents began with public accommodations. My mother, Joan Carpenter Cashin, sat down at a Walgreens lunch counter and demanded to be served. She intentionally got herself arrested with her four-month-old baby, me, in her arms. This bit of psychological warfare was a turning point in Huntsville’s sit-in movement. After Black Huntsvillians won the right to eat and shop where they wanted, my parents and fellow agitators turned to desegregating schools and politics. They were integration pioneers, trying to reconstruct the South as Herschel Cashin’s radical Republican generation had also tried to do.
My parents also confronted the color line in housing. Only one elementary school in Huntsville had programs for deaf children; my parents tried for two years to buy a home in its district for the benefit of my hearing-impaired brother. No one would sell to a multi-degreed Black dentist, my father, Dr. John L. Cashin Jr., who had run for mayor in a bid to encourage Blacks to register to vote. Restrictive covenants and the attitudes that animated them persisted in the early 1960s, even after the 1948 Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kramer determined they were unenforceable. My father improvised, recruiting whites from the Unitarian church we attended to purchase a house for us with his money. Most of our new neighbors were welcoming, although telephone cowards threatened us constantly, and once someone shot a bullet through our front picture window as we slept.51
After Congress enacted the Fair Housing Act in 1968, more Black families became integration pioneers. Southern white representatives in Congress massively resisted this law, and it passed only after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. As grieving and aggrieved Blacks rioted and cities burned, some moderate Republicans decided to join other legislators to support the law. The act penalized racial discrimination in housing but had no meaningful enforcement mechanisms. The law did open housing markets, and most nonpoor Black Americans exited ghettos.
Thankfully, levels of segregation between Blacks and whites have declined considerably since 1970. But the footprint of concentrated poverty has exploded since 2000. The truly disadvantaged descendants of slaves are Black Americans stuck in neighborhoods that higher-income Blacks fled.
The civil rights movement worked a transformation in Black class structure. Before the movement, the majority of Blacks were poor. Today, a large majority of Black Americans are not poor.52 But racial disparities persist.
Blacks perennially lag whites in average wages. Acquiring more education does not change Black-white wage gaps, which exist at the lowest—and highest—education and wage levels. Black families are much less likely than white families to own a home, and for every dollar of wealth held by a median white family, a median Black family holds eight cents. Black students perennially lag whites in achievement, high school graduation, and completion of college. Blacks and whites use drugs at similar rates, but African Americans are 6.5 times as likely to be imprisoned by states for drug charges.53
These unequal conditions are not mere aftereffects of slavery. Generations of intentionally racist policies imposed on slavery’s descendants play a role, particularly the decision to create and maintain segregation. Segregation is still the defining feature of Black American life. Most Black American children attend separate and unequal schools. Most middle- and even upper-class Black Americans live near poor Black neighborhoods and experience an exposure to poverty that most whites and Asians avoid.54
Black progress is fragile. In families with little household wealth, any emergency can become a financial disaster. Segregation for Black Americans also means living in neighborhoods with very different possibilities and a distinct, if predatory, relationship with the state. Black neighborhoods, like those that received the D rating nearly a century ago, still garner less of everything, with the exception perhaps of policing. Meanwhile, the key holdover of the supremacist regime that has never been dismantled is the concentrated-poverty hood; it persists, as do stereotypes. The vicious circle of attributing conditions there to the alleged character of descendants continues, as does a nefarious distributional politics.
CHAPTER 3
SEGREGATION NOW
The Past Is Not Past
During World War II, defense contractors on the West Coast began to hire African Americans, and descendants moved west as well as north for opportunity. In Los Angeles, white racism and restrictive covenants limited migrants’ housing choices, and many African Americans landed in Watts. This neighborhood in South LA had been thoroughly integrated but became nearly all-Black in the 1960s largely because the federal government insisted on siting segregated public housing there.1 Watts burned in 1965. A roadside traffic stop led to an altercation between white police and a Black family, a matchstick that incited five days of rioting. Thirty-four people died, a thousand were injured, and the property damage rose to $40 million. An aerial shot of Watts burning in 1965 looked a lot like Tulsa burning in 1921.
The clash in Watts was not dissimilar to the race riots of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1940s. The actors and script may have varied, but the fault line was the same, white dominance versus Black insurgence. In Watts, an LA police department with a reputation for racism and brutality among Negroes were the frontline enforcers of law and order in a social order built on segregation. Similar clashes between Black citizens and the police erupted in the summers of 1966 and 1967. “Burn, baby, burn!” became a mantra for discontented residents of poor Black neighborhoods. In 1966, eleven cities burned. In the long hot summer of 1967, scores more cities burned. By the end of that tumultuous year, more than 160 revolts had erupted in cities large and small, although 75 percent of them were minor. The nation was riveted by the riots that roiled major cities, most lethally in Detroit and Newark. In the Motor City, undercover police raided an unlicensed Black-owned bar in the ungodly hours of a Sunday morning. Black Vietnam veterans were celebrating coming home and didn’t appreciate the disruption and disrespect. The raid set off a five-day revolt that ended in forty-three deaths, over one thousand injuries, and damage to two thousand buildings.2 The news media televised scenes of pillage, looting, arson, and the National Guard engaging against an implied domestic enemy.
Burning buildings during Watts riots, August 1965
President Lyndon Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, popularly known as the Kerner Commission, after its chairman, Illinois governor Otto Kerner. Johnson asked the commission to investigate the causes of urban uprisings and make recommendations. He handpicked moderate establishment figures, all but two of whom were white, as commissioners and expected them to issue a report praising his Great Society programs. The commissioners overcame Johnson’s intentionally limited budget. They held lengthy hearings with experts and local officials. They visited many cities, talked to people in Black neighborhoods, and read the scholarship of historians and social scientists on race and the Negro. Shocked by the conditions they saw, they wanted to awaken whites to the truth of ghetto isolation. They noted the growth of white segregationist and Black separatist groups and worried that growing polarization would tear the country apart.3 They foresaw Black urban majorities, surrounded by white exclusionary suburbs, and wanted to forestall an America divided into “two societies, one blac
k, one white—separate and unequal,” as the Kerner Report famously prophesized.
The Kerner Report, issued on Leap Day, February 29, 1968, surprised everyone with a scathing indictment of “white racism” and the segregation it wrought. It focused on institutional and structural forces rather than the behavior of individual rioters and became an instant bestseller. Among other broadsides, the report stated:
Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.4
The Kerner Report even suggested that Black rioters had learned about violence from white people. “A climate that tends toward approval and encouragement of violence as a form of protest,” it alleged, “has been created by white terrorism directed toward nonviolent protest; by the open defiance of law and Federal authority by state and local officials resisting desegregation.”
White terrorism had been on full display in the South. Less known today are the thousands of individual acts of menace outside the South by whites resisting Black people moving toward them. In Boston, for example, in the early 1960s, acts against new Black residents included “damaged cars, ignited papers thrust under apartment doors, fecal material at doorways, racial epithets on their doors, . . . rocks, bricks, bottles, and other debris thrown through their windows, . . . Molotov cocktails, arson, and shootings.”5
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