The Color of Compromise

by Jemar Tisby

  Unfortunately, this form of Christian education also included complicity in racism. For the first ten years of its existence, Pepperdine admitted black students but did not permit them to live on campus. Perhaps even more subtly, the free market became a form of economic gospel truth for Pepperdine. Spurred by the open-market business philosophy of its founder and a growing number of Christian entrepreneurs, the school taught its students to distrust unionism and federal intervention, specifically in the form of welfare programs geared toward the poor.36 Schools such as Pepperdine indoctrinated a new generation of white Christians with ideas that would lend educational and ideological support to an individualistic approach to race relations and that would lead to an aversion to government initiatives designed to promote and protect civil rights.

  FDR’s New Deal had problems as well. Like many churches, the politicians who promoted reforms to the political economy conformed to the contours of Jim Crow. Ira Katznelson argues that the interventions of the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s “excluded, or differentially treated, the vast majority of African Americans.”37 Due to the resistance of high-level southern politicians seeking to insulate the racial hierarchy in their communities from federal interference, Roosevelt and his administration compromised with racists to pass racially discriminatory laws. For example, while avoiding explicitly race-based language, Social Security provisions excluded most base-level agricultural and domestic workers—the vast majority of whom were black women and men.38 This exclusion was not accidental; it was by design.

  COMPLICITY WITH RACISM IN THE POST WORLD WAR II ERA NORTH

  When Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, America roared back, entering World War II. Yet the Roosevelt administration sought to exploit black people as soldiers while simultaneously maintaining racial segregation, effectively forging two separate but unequal militaries. Despite issuing Executive Order 8802—banning racial discrimination in the federal defense industry—earlier in 1941, FDR and his military leaders were unable or unwilling to dismantle racism in the everyday practices of the armed forces. Most black troops had white commanders at the senior levels. As with the first World War, black soldiers often remained in menial labor roles, and aside from a few notable exceptions such as the Tuskegee Airmen, they did not have access to advanced training. Most of the training camps for soldiers were in the South, and military life reflected the segregation of the surrounding community.39

  Racial discrimination did not end after World War II. Laws designed to benefit returning soldiers often did not apply to black veterans. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill, included substantial aid designed to help military veterans reintegrate into civilian life. This welfare program assisted GIs in purchasing homes, paying tuition for college, and gaining health coverage. The GI Bill helped usher in a period of extended and rapid economic prosperity in America, but the privileges extended almost exclusively to white men. The Veteran’s Administration, created to disburse benefits to returning soldiers, denied mortgages to black soldiers and funneled these veterans into lower-level training and education rather than into four-year colleges.40

  In the postwar era, residential segregation became a major battle front in the black freedom struggle both in the South and beyond. Few decisions are more personal than choosing where to live. Proximity to good schools, extended family, grocery stores, workplace, and local amenities, among other factors, play into where one decides to reside. Owning a home in the neighborhood one chooses has often been seen as a decision based on hard work, individual effort, and free choice. Consequently, patterns of racial segregation appear to be the innocuous and unavoidable coincidence of individual preference, devoid of any major racist component. Views like these belie the deliberate and intentional nature of residential segregation. Through a series of rules and customs, government employees and real estate agents have actively engineered neighborhoods and communities to maintain racial segregation.

  Current residential segregation has roots going back at least to the Great Depression. The financial debacle at the end of the 1920s led to a housing crisis because many homeowners could no longer pay their mortgages. Banks foreclosed on homes, and the rate of home ownership plummeted. In 1933 the federal government created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) to purchase the homes of people who were at imminent risk of defaulting, issuing new loans under new terms. To manage the risk associated with purchasing homes and offering loans, the HOLC investigated the surrounding neighborhood and other potential properties to determine if they were likely to retain or increase in value. The racial demographics of the neighborhood were often a key factor in assessing property values. “The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red.”41 Neighborhoods with any black people, even if the residents had stable middle-class incomes, were coded red, and lenders were unlikely to give loans in these areas. This practice became known as redlining. The HOLC policy was a form of government-sponsored racism. Today, even though many people think of segregation as something that occurred primarily in the South, the truth is that redlining affected countless neighborhoods in metropolitan areas across the country—St. Louis, San Francisco, Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York City, just to name a few.

  Redlining practices persisted into the 1950s and 1960s, making residential desegregation one of the main fronts for civil rights activism in the North. In Detroit, Black Christians and their allies knew their white neighbors, even fellow Christians, were committed to maintaining this residential segregation, so an alliance of religious leaders—Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish—came together in 1962 to form the Religion and Race Conference. Their primary goal was “to assist middle-class blacks to move into the larger community.” Members of the conference wanted to pose a “challenge to conscience” to compel white residents to embrace integration. A similar organization, the Greater Detroit Committee for Fair Housing Practices, focused on white churches. They handed out “Covenant Cards” that white Christians could sign as a demonstration of their commitment to residential desegregation.42

  In addition to federal redlining policies, realtors and neighborhood associations used private measures to enforce residential segregation. For much of the twentieth century, “restrictive covenants” provided a legal, race-based mechanism to exclude black people from purchasing homes in white communities. “Private but legally enforceable restrictive covenants . . . forbade the use or sale of a property to anyone but whites.”43 These restrictive covenants, which also dictated details such as what color residents could paint their houses, effectively kept black people out of communities, especially new growth suburbs, for decades. Even after the 1948 Supreme Court ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer forbidding these racial covenants, real estate brokers simply dropped explicitly race-based language but still effectively excluded minorities from buying homes in white areas.

  In the 1940s and 1950s, business and popular opinion readily recognized Levitt & Sons as the most well-known and prolific real estate company in the nation. The company had pioneered a way to mass-produce single family detached homes in a twenty-seven-step process based on the industrial assembly line model. Levitt & Sons built homes at a rapid clip to match the postwar demand for housing. They purchased large parcels of land and built houses close together in an almost uniform architectural style and size. These clusters of homes became known as “Levittowns” and formed the earliest pattern for the modern suburban subdivision.44

  Unfortunately, Levittowns repeated the patterns of residential racial segregation that existed in other communities. In a nod to social pressures, federal policies, and the pursuit of profit, Levitt & Sons maintained a policy of racial restrictions. The company’s president, William Levitt, defended his racist policies by proclaiming his innocence in serving the needs of his customers: “That is their [white customers’] attitude, not ours.” He went on to emphasize that the
commercial nature of the business precluded their ability to promote racial integration: “As a company our position is simply this: ‘We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the two.’ ”45 In this way, private businesses participated in forming the racially segregated housing patterns that have permeated municipal areas in every region of the United States, not just the South.

  To maintain residential segregation, white homeowners would sometimes resort to forms of violence as brutal and terror-inducing as any found in the South. Like many other people living in Detroit, Easby Wilson, a black factory worker, found employment in the auto industry. Yet unlike many others, he kept his job during a recession in the mid-1950s and saved enough money for his wife and five-year-old son to purchase a home in a comfortable neighborhood. A white community on the northeast side of the city offered sidewalks, tree-lined streets, and ready access to the plant where Wilson worked. When he began looking for a home there, his real estate agent assured him that racism would not be an issue. However, once Wilson had closed on the home, the troubles began.46

  Even before the Wilsons moved in, a vandal “broke into the house, turned on all the faucets, blocked the kitchen sink, flooded the basement, and spattered black paint on the walls and floors.” That was just the start of a five-month-long assault on the Wilsons in retribution for their presence in an all-white northern neighborhood. Soon after they moved in, a crowd of more than four hundred white protestors held picket signs and chanted to protest their new black neighbors. Harassers frequently threw rocks and bricks at the home. An elderly white lady was found pouring salt on the lawn of the Wilsons’ property. Police posted a car outside of the Wilsons’ home on a twenty-four-hour basis, but even that did not help. Easby Wilson and his wife finally decided to move when their son started waking up in the middle of the night with “nervous attacks.” A psychologist told them that their son, Raymond, “risked ‘becoming afflicted with a permanent mental injury’ ” if they stayed and endured more assaults.47

  The Wilsons’ saga illustrates a wider trend of resisting desegregation in the North. For example, over the next several years, white residents in Detroit initiated more than two hundred instances of opposition to black integration, including “harassment, mass demonstrations, picketing, effigy burning, window breaking, arson, vandalism, and physical attacks.”48 Detroit illustrates a pattern that played out across the country. Although many white residents stayed and attempted to keep their downtown neighborhoods racially homogenous, many others decided to relocate to the suburbs. This phenomenon would become known as white flight—“a massive migration of whites to the suburbs”—and it certainly had many “nonracial” causes as well. White residents might have moved away from a neighborhood for issues related to “crime, schools, services, and property values.”49 But the presence of other factors in white flight does not preclude race from being an important consideration. The complex mix of issues—which include race—is a part of the way racism has adapted to changing social conditions in the United States. Subsequent chapters will take a closer look at how class and race concerns combined to make white flight not simply a spatial transformation but a political one as well.

  In some cases, real estate brokers accelerated this white flight through a practice known as “blockbusting.” Salespeople used racial fears for financial profit: “Through blockbusting, brokers intentionally stoked fears of racial integration and declining property values in order to push white homeowners to sell at a loss.”50 Brokers would warn white residents of an impending “invasion” of black home buyers. Whites, who feared losing property value and who harbored stereotypes about black people, would sell at a lower price to the broker. The brokers would then sell the properties at inflated rates to black people desperate for homes and comfortable neighborhoods. Blockbusting is an example of how some agents leveraged racism for their personal advantage.

  The American church once again proved complicit in this racism by cooperating with residential segregation. In examining the white flight, Mark Mulder argues that churches actively participated in the racial relocation of whites from the city to other locales. “In many cases, churches not only failed to inhibit white flight but actually became co-conspirators and accomplices in the action.”51 Mulder examined seven Dutch Reformed churches in the Englewood and Roseland neighborhoods of Chicago. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, as neighborhood demographics changed, these churches relocated to suburbs where there was a higher population of white people. Certain evangelical theological positions may have made it easier to leave demographically transitioning neighborhoods rather than adapting to a new environment. For example, Mulder explains that congregational church governments meant that churches often owned their own building and had few outside checks on how they made decisions. “This manifestation of congregational church polity allowed for an easier departure of whites from central cities. . . . [These congregations] eventually found it much easier and attractive to leave the core city.”52 Rather than stay and adapt to a new community reality or assist in integrating the neighborhood, many white churches chose to depart the city instead.

  Residential segregation only lent fuel to another dimension of the northern struggle for civil rights. During the civil rights movement, activists from the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) called on Martin Luther King Jr. for help. In a 1965 speech, King said, “We stand at the gate of a new understanding of the dimensions and depth of the struggle with racial injustice in this country; dimensions not limited by geographic boundaries or adequately addressed by civil rights laws.”53 King well understood the national scope of racism and the inadequacy of changed laws alone in eradicating antiblack discrimination. After studying several cities, King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) finally settled on Chicago as the site to advance their northern civil rights campaign.54

  King announced his participation in the Chicago Freedom Movement in January 1966. The civil rights campaign encompassed residential desegregation as well as transportation, employment, and education issues. To effectively lead the movement, King decided that he needed to live in the same conditions as the people he intended to serve, so he and his family took up residence in the West Side neighborhood of North Lawndale nicknamed “Slumdale” by the local residents. Even though the landlords scurried to fix up the apartment in advance of the civil rights leader’s presence, King’s wife, Coretta, recalled, “The smell of urine was overpowering.”55 In August of that year, King led a march of 5,000 protesters in Marquette Park. The opposition from white racists was fierce. With police in riot gear waiting in the wings, counterprotesters waved Confederate flags and held signs saying, “The Only Way to End Niggers Is to Exterminate.”56 As King threaded his way through the throng, someone from the crowd threw a rock, striking him behind the ear. King’s knees folded, and he sank to the ground, dazed. Resolute and determined, King stood back up and continued marching. That evening King told reporters, “I have never seen such hate. Not in Mississippi or Alabama. This is a terrible thing.”57

  Although the SCLC and local Chicago activists secured some concessions from Mayor Daley and his administration, by 1967 it was clear that conditions for black people had not improved. King’s foray into the North to continue the black freedom struggle illustrates the national scope of the civil rights movement and the pervasive problem of racism across the country—not just its ongoing presence in the South. The intractable problems of segregation and inequality contributed to a more self-confident assertion of “black power” that would later come to define the movement, especially after King’s assassination in 1968.

  EVERY REGION HAS RACISM

  In the book Up South, Matthew Countryman writes, “Racism was never just a southern problem.”58 Racism stretched far beyond the states of the former Confederacy, affecting every region of the country. Though it would be far simpler to relegate racism to a single region such as the South as
the historic site of slavery and the Confederacy, this is simply not possible. The South has often been used as the foil for the rest of America. People in other parts of the country could always look below the Mason-Dixon Line and say, “Those are the real racists.” Yet the very conspicuousness of white supremacy in the South has made it easier for racism in other parts of the country to exist in open obscurity. Christians of the North have often been characterized as abolitionists, integrationists, and open-minded citizens who want all people to have a chance at equality. Christians of the South, on the other hand, have been portrayed as uniformly racist, segregationist, and antidemocratic. The truth is far more complicated.

  In reality, most of the black people who left the South encountered similar patterns of race-based discrimination wherever they went. Although they may not have faced the same closed system of white supremacy that permeated the South, they still contended with segregation and put up with daily assaults on their dignity, and the church contributed to this. Compromised Christianity transcends regions. Bigotry obeys no boundaries. This is why Christians in every part of America have a moral and spiritual obligation to fight against the church’s complicity with racism.

  CHAPTER

  8

  COMPROMISING WITH RACISM DURING THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT