As the United States prepares for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Donald Trump wants museums, National Parks, and school curriculum to focus on the positive side of American history. This post is part of a series examining more negative aspects of the American past and its influence on the present.
After the Civil War, the newly freed African American population was largely trapped in debt peonage as share croppers and tenant farmers in the South. As a result, they were denied access to new industrial jobs in Northern cities that largely went to recent European immigrants. World War I opened up work and housing possibilities in Northern cities, especially Chicago, but after the war white mobs drove Black residents out of urban neighborhoods and better jobs. The summer of 1919 was known as Red Summer. There were deadly race riots targeting Blacks in Chicago and East St. Louis in Illinois, Washington DC, Omaha, Nebraska, Houston, Texas, Charleston, South Carolina, San Francisco, and in Syracuse, New York. In 1921, the African American community in Tulsa, Oklahoma was destroyed.
We don’t usually focus on racism when we study and teach about the 1930s New Deal but it laid the foundation for housing segregation today. With the federal government’s abandonment of post-Civil War Reconstruction, the slaveholder regime used domestic terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan to take control over Southern governments and send Jim Crow representatives to Washington DC. In order to get New Deal legislation passed, Franklin Roosevelt reached a compromise with Southern White Dixiecrats in Congress. National legislation like jobs, housing and social security, which in theory included everyone, in practice was administered locally, so white segregationists in control of Southern states and municipalities could deny benefits to Blacks.
In his book When Affirmative Action was White (2005), historian Ira Katznelson documented how New Deal housing policies and the GI Bill reenforced racial segregation. The National Housing Act of 1934 codified in Federal Housing Administration 1936 Manual established deed restrictions and zoning ordinances to provide protection from adverse influences which meant “If a neighborhood is to retain stability it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” Recommended restrictions included “Prohibition of the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they were intended.”
These same guidelines were incorporated into the application of the post-World War 2 GI Bill. “In New York and the northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI bill supported home purchases by non-whites.” As whites used federal subsidies to flee urban centers and landlords and government officials permitted housing to deteriorate, inner cities increasingly became slums for the poor.
Under the GI bill, banks and realtors decided who would get a mortgage and in which communities. Red lines were drawn around areas that were set aside for Black veterans and their families. The discriminatory implementation of the GI Bill and federal highway construction created white only suburbs with some small Black enclaves in less desirable areas. Levitttowns on Long Island and near Philadelphia had restrictive regulations preventing Blacks from buying or renting in those communities.
Today we live with the legacy of slavery and racism. A three year study by Newsday on Long Island found widespread evidence of unequal treatment by real estate agents reenforcing segregated communities. The two Long Island counties have a total of 291 communities with African Americans largely living in just 11 of them, which has meant racially and economically segregated school districts.
