55. Hyman, Debtor Nation, chaps. 1-2.
56. According to historian Louis Hyman, “the modern credit system of the twentieth century was built by white men for white men, leaving other Americans to borrow in older, more expensive and dangerous ways." The credit system did not just build wealth for whites, it “constrained the credit options for poor, urban African Americans [in ways that] would have been inconceivable for the rest of America." Ibid., 7.
57. Travis, Autobiography of Black Chicago, 136-137.
58. Ibid., 158.
59. “Hearings before the United States Commission on Civil Rights: Housing" (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959), 738-739. A survey found that “not even a token number" of mortgages were lent to blacks by 141 commercial banks and 229 life insurance companies in the country.
60. Travis, Autobiography of Black Chicago, 158.
61. Ibid., 128-129, 136, 157, 159.
62. Ibid., 137.
63. Edward Irons, “Black Banking—Problems and Prospects," Journal of Finance 26(2) (May 1971): 424.
64. Travis, Autobiography of Black Chicago, 160.
65. Ibid., 163.
66. Ibid., 155, 175.
67. Ibid., 143. This caused a division, with a splinter group still called the Negro Chamber of Commerce.
68. Ibid., 169.
69. Carver Federal Savings Bank, “Why Carver," https://www.carverbank.com/about -carver.
70. David L. Mason, From Buildings and Loans to Bail-Outs: A History of the American Savings and Loan Industry, 1831-1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 169.
71. Douglas Martin, “M. Moran Weston, 91, Priest and Banker of Harlem, Dies," New York Times, May 22, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/22/nyregion/rn -moran-weston-91-priest-and-banker-of-harlem-dies.html.
72. “Harlem’s Banker-Priest: Father Weston Heads New York’s St. Philip’s Episcopal Church and Oldest Black Savings Firm," Ebony, March 1969, 93.
73. Emile Milne, “Thirty Years Financing the Family: Carver Federal Savings Still Strengthens the Black Family with Home Mortgages, but Caught Up in a Changing Urban Scene, Now Competes Vigorously for the General Market," Black Enterprise, July 1979, 188. See also Dennis Hevesi, “William R. Hudges, 100,
Who Led Black-Owned Banks, Dies,” New York Times, September 5, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/nyregion/05hudgins.html?_r= 0. From its inception, Carver was backed by “the cream of Harlem’s black businessmen, as well as clergymen like the Rev. M. Moran Weston.”
74. Martin, “M. Moran Weston”; Charlayne Hunter, “Church in Harlem Plays Vital Role in Community,” New York Times, December 6, 1970, http://www.nytimes .com/1970/12/06/archives/church-in-harlem-plays-vital-role-in-community .html.
75. Martin, “M. Moran Weston.”
76. Marable, Malcolm X, 108.
77. Leslie Eaton, “A Shaky Pillar in Harlem; Black-Owned Carver Bank Seeks Solid Financial Base,” New York Times, July 11, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999 /07/11/nyregion/a-shaky-pillar-in-harlem-black-owned-carver-bank-seeks -solid-financial-base.html.
78. Milne, “Thirty Years Financing the Family.”
79. Eaton, “Shaky Pillar in Harlem.”
80. Gaston’s bank merged with Citizens Trust in Atlanta in 2003. Cliff Hocker, “Citizen’s Trust to Acquire CfS Bancshares,” Black Enterprise, September 1, 2002, http://www.blackenterprise.com/mag/citizens-trust-to-acquire-cfs-bancshares/; http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId =2254253.
81. Carol Jenkins and Elizabeth Gardner Hines, Black Titan: A. G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire (New York: Ballantine, 2005), 164.
82. Martin Luther King Jr., “We Are Still Walking,” December 1956, New York, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, https://swap.stanford.edu/20141218225454 /http: / / mlk-kpp01 .stanford.edu/primarydocuments /Vol3 / Dec-1956 _WeAreStillWalking.pdf.
83. “Advice for Living,” Ebony, March 1958. This was a monthly advice column in Ebony magazine. King would respond to letters sent by readers asking for advice on a wide range of issues. For more information on the column, see http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc _advice_for_living_1957_1958/; http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclo pedia/documentsentry/advice_for_living6/index.html.
84. “ ‘Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?’ You are quite right in calling for negotiation.” Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Letter _Birmingham_Jail.pdf.
85. Jenkins and Hines, Black Titan, 234.
86. Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York: HarperCollins, 1996) 229-230; cited in Jenkins and Hines, Black Titan, 202-205.
87. Jenkins and Hines, Black Titan, 218.
88. In his highly acclaimed dissertation, Frazier studied the black family during and after slavery and explained the ways harsh social conditions had changed family structure, including the creation of matriarchal families. Published as E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939).
89. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 25.
90. Ibid., 25-26. Though the appeal was rooted in “racial pride,” Frazier believed it was leading the “black bourgeoisie” toward an inferiority complex. Frazier saw the Garvey movement and the Harlem Renaissance as a missed opportunity, a “Renaissance that failed.” To Frazier, the writers of the Renaissance were “shaking off the psychology of limitation and implied inferiority” and looking toward racial emancipation outside the expectations of white middle-class values. This,
Frazier claimed, was the cause of black racial inferiority. Poets like Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes made “no apology for the free, unconventional life of the Negro masses." Ibid., 123-124.
91. Ibid., 165.
92. Ibid., 173. He chastised whites who encouraged the belief that “wealth through business will solve their problems" but never took any black businessmen into their “white business groups which own and control the life of the American economy."
93. Ibid., 236.
94. Notable among them was the Tri-State Bank, formed in Memphis in 1946 by a group of black leaders including Richard R. Wright III, the grandson of his namesake and NNBL founder. The bank played a prominent role in the civil rights struggle when Dr. King urged blacks in Memphis to deposit their money there and many did. The first black-owned bank west of the Mississippi River was the Douglass State Bank in Kansas City, formed in 1947. The Broadway Federal Bank was formed on its heels later that year in Los Angeles, California, in order to offer mortgages to black veterans who were being routinely denied loans from white banks. Joseph A. Pierce, Negro Business and Business Education: Their Present and Prospective Development (New York: Plenum Press, 1995), 100. U.S. Department of Commerce, Savings and Loan Associations Owned and Operated by Negroes (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951).
95. Fewer than nine of these black-owned banks were formed between 1934 and 1960, and five of those were formed in 1959.
96. Credit Union National Association, “Long Run Trends (1939-Present)," https:// www.cuna.org/Research-And-Strategy/Credit-Union-Data-And-Statistics /Long-Run-Trends- (1939—Present) /.
97. FDIC, “Commercial Bank Reports," https: / /www5.fdic.gov/hsob/HSOBRpt.asp.
98. Mehrsa Baradaran, How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), chap. 3.
99. John R. Walter, “The 3-6-3 Rule: An Urban Myth?," Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Economic Quarterly 92(1) (Winter 2006): 51.
100. Calomiris and Haber, Fragile by Design, 16, 191.
101. The McFadden Act of 1927 prohibited branching across state lines. “The National Bank Act," Senate Report No. 473, 69th Congress, 1st Session, 6, http://www .federalreservehistory.org/Media/Material/Event/11-128; 12 U.S.C.
§ 264 (transferred to 12 U.S.C. §1811). The FDIC was created by the Glass-Steagall Act and made permanent by the Banking Act of 1935. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, “Banking Act of 1933," Circular No. 1248, http://www.federalreservehistory.org /Media/Material/Event/25-203.
102. Abram Harris, The Negro as Capitalist: A Study of Banking and Business among American Negroes (New York: Haskell House, 1970), 177.
103. Public Law 73-66, 73rd Congress, H.R. 5661, 3, June 16, 1933, https://fraser .stlouisfed.org/scribd/?title_id=991&filepath=/files/docs/historical/congressional /1933_bankingact_publidaw66.pdf&start_page= 1.
104. Scholars measure the extent of segregation using a racial “isolation index," which shows the extent to which a given race lives within neighborhoods populated predominantly by people of that race. In Chicago, for example, the isolation index for blacks rose from 10 percent in 1910 to 90 percent in 1940. The highest isolation index was 44 percent for Italians in Boston, but most other immigrant groups lived in fairly integrated neighborhoods among whites and other immigrants. Stanley Lieberson, “An Asymmetrical Approach to Segregation," in Ethnic Segregation in Cities, ed. Ceri Peach, Vaughn Robinson, and Susan Smith (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 61-82. Satter, Family Properties, 30; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 29-31.
105. “A. P Giannini," Who Made America, Public Broadcasting System, https://www .pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/giannini_hi.html.
106. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, “The Humble Beginnings of a Large Bank," http://www.occ.gov/about/what-we-do/history/giannini-bank-article -html-version.html.
107. Hyman, Debtor Nation, 94-95.
108. “For Italian Americans highly segregated in slum neighborhoods and routinely called ‘wops,’ ‘dagoes,’ and ‘guineas’ before the war, the 1940s brought brand-new money for college and homes." Nell Irvin Painter, The History ofWhite People (New York: Norton, 2010), 365.
109. Ibid., 371. Caro, Master of the Senate, 693. Sarah Turner and John Bound, “Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Effects of the GI Bill and World War II on the Educational Outcomes of Black Americans," Journal of Economic History 63(1) (March 2003): 145-178.
110. Painter, History ofWhite People, 366. Between 1944 and 1956, the GI Bill resulted in $14.5 billion in education subsidies for half of the returning veterans, some 7.8 billion people. That was just a fraction of the $120 billion the VA and FHA spent on housing from 1934 to 1964, all of which was open to Jews, Italians, and other recent immigrants.
111. Ibid., 371.
112. Ibid., 362.
113. Modern research by Thomas Piketty, Robert Gordon, and others shows that the era from the New Deal until 1970 was an exceptional era of prosperity and wealth equality in American history. This boom was a temporary boost to middle-class wealth and standards of living. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 14.
114. National Archives, Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of Discrimination in the Defense Industry, June 25, 1941, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash =false&doc=72.
115. Travis, Autobiography of Black Chicago, 94.
116. John David Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 148.
117. Stephen Robertson, “Toward a Spatial Narrative of the 1935 Harlem Riot: Mapping and Storytelling after the Geospatial Turn," paper delivered at the New Approaches, Opportunities and Epistemological Implications of Mapping History Digitally: An International Workshop and Conference, German Historical Institute, October 20, 2016. Stephen Robertson, “Mapping a Riot: Harlem, 1935," National Council on Public History Conference, Working Group on Interpreting the History of Race Riots and Racialized Mass Violence in the Context of “Black Lives Matter," Baltimore, March 19, 2016.
118. King, Randolph, and Adam Clayton Powell were active in both national and local movements.
119. Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 177.
120. Thomas Bauman, The Pekin: The Rise and Fall of Chicago’s First Black-Owned Theater (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 24.
121. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 56. Pierce, Negro Business and Business Education, 69. Indeed, although these businesses served only black customers, the total volume of sales meant that blacks were spending an average of two dollars a year on these stores. To further illustrate the problem, in 1938 there were about 2,600 black businesses in Chicago alone. There were 2,800 white businesses in Chicago that received nine-tenths of their business from blacks.
122. Harris, Negro as Capitalist, 177-180.
123. Albon Holsey, Speech to the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, Jackson, Mississippi, July 1929.
124. Cheryl Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?,” Black Harlem in the Great Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 135.
125. Green v. Samuelson, 168 Md. 421 (Md. Ct. App.).
126. Ibid. This case was followed by a 1938 decision in which the Supreme Court held that blacks were allowed to picket businesses that employed an all-white staff under principles of labor law. New Negro All. v. Sanitary Grocery Co., 303 U.S. 552 (1938).
127. “If Negro Quarters for Negroes—Negro Dollars for Negroes, Too," NewYorkDaily Mirror, 1935.
128. William H. Chafe, The Achievement of American Liberalism: The New Deal and Its Legacies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 191.
129. Quoted in Richard M. Dalfiume, “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution," Journal of American History 55(1) (June 1968): 90.
130. Hubert H. Humphrey, Address to the 1948 Democratic National Convention Address, July 14, 1948, Philadelphia, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches /huberthumphey1948dnc.html.
131. Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Random House,
2008), 382.
132. Raymond H. Geselbracht, The Civil Rights Legacy of Harry S. Truman, vol. 2 (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2007), 57, 78.
133. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 132.
134. Ibram X. Kendi, “Racial Progress Is Real. But So Is Racist Progress," New York Times, January 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/opinion/sunday /racial-progress-is-real-but-so-is-racist-progress.html?ref=opinion; citing Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 47-53 268.
135. Quoted in Robert E. Weems and Louis A. Randolph, Business in Black and White: American Presidents and Black Entrepreneurs in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 61.
136. Roy Wilkins, Talking It Over with Roy Wilkins: Selected Speeches and Writings (Norwalk, CT: M&B Publishing, 1977), 64. Weems believes that the division’s termination likely had to do with racial discrimination in the Eisenhower administration. Kenneth O’Reilly claims that Eisenhower was “habitually uncomfortable in black company." Kenneth O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton (New York: Free Press, 1995), 165. Weems and Randolph, Business in Black and White, 39 (this cited page relates to the footnoted sentence’s statement on the closing of the Department of Negro Affairs).
Chapter 5 Civil Rights Dreams, Economic Nightmares
1. Wil Haywood, Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America (New York: Knopf, 2015), 5.
2. Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate (New York: Random House, 2002), 159. The term was first used by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
3. Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power (New York: Random House, 2012), 488.
4. Ibid., 490.
5. Curtis Hessler, “The Civil Rights Act of 1963: Brass Tacks," Harvard Crimson, April 1964, http://www.thecrimson. com/article/1964/4/21/the
-civil-rights-act -of-1963/.
6. See generally, Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
7. Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), 173; James R. Ralph Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 42, 59.
8. “The year 1965,” according to Lee Rainwater and William Yancey, “may be known in history as the time when the civil rights movement discovered, in this sense of becoming explicitly aware, that abolishing legal racism would not produce Negro equality.” Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 11.
9. Bayard Rustin, “Funding Full Citizenship,” Council Journal 6(3) (December 1967).
10. Whitney M. Young, Beyond Racism: Building an Open Society (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 90-94, 116-118, 153.
11. Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), 137.
12. Jesse Curtis, “Awakening the Nation: Mississippi Senator John C. Stennis, the White Countermovement, and the Rise of Colorblind Conservatism, 1947-1964” (Ph.D. dissertation, Kent State University, 2015), 147.
13. William Brink and Louis Harris, Black and White: A Study of U.S. Racial Attitudes Today (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 100, 120.
14. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” Speech, Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC, August 28, 1963.
15. Martin Luther King Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson (New York: Warner Books, 1998), 70.
16. Ibid., 295.
17. Ibid., 10.
18. It would require “white Americans [to] recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change of the status quo.” Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).
The Color of Money Page 42
