Note: This longer form was the basis for the Keynote Address at the Ohio Conference of Community Development's Spring Meeting, April 2017
First Things First:
Who Am I and What Am I Doing Up Here?
Good morning everyone. My name is Bob Ernst. In terms of
university education I’m what is known as an urban-social geographer. More
importantly, I’m an urban planner who spent nearly 40 years as a planning
consultant for large multi-disciplinary corporations here in the U.S. and
overseas. My specialties include land use and comprehensive planning. In terms
of Ohio experience, in the early 2000s I was project manager for the Hamilton,
Ohio, comprehensive plan where I worked closely with the City’s Director of
Planning, Jim Boerke, who many of you may know and is here today.
In September 2017, I wrote an essay that discussed viewing
America’s national myths through the lens of history. After my friend and OCCD
member Jack Riordan read that essay, he suggested it, at least in part, might
be an appropriate topic for the Keynote Address for this Fair Housing themed conference.
Because the topic of my essay did not, at least at first,
seem to me to dovetail exactly with what OCCD does or with the April Fair
Housing theme, I turned to your website for suitable cues. And there I found
several paragraphs titled Objective & Purpose. Allow me to quote directly
from that document:
OCCD’s objective is to enhance the
livability of the cities, towns and communities of the state of Ohio through:
·
the
elimination and prevention of urban blight and physical, economic and social
obsolescence;
·
and
the development and preservation of well-planned, economically-sound urban
areas with adequate community facilities, housing, and suitable industrial and
commercial development.
Those
objectives pointed me in the direction this address takes.
What Is this Keynote
Address About?
The easy answer is it’s about leaning on American history to
help us understand how the structure of our cities has been influenced by race
and other social factors, including class. The more complex answer is it’s
about who we are as a people and if we can expect to see changes in the future to
that identity. But, more importantly, the best answer is we’re here to talk
about all those topics together—history, race, class, and cities—because I
believe they are inseparable when housing, discrimination, and segregation are
discussed.
- Let’s talk for a
brief moment about how this address is organized. It has six different parts.
- Introduction
- Who Did
The New Nation of Americans Think They Were?
- How Our
Cities Came To Be What They Are Today
- Discussion
- Real
World Solutions, But no Magic
- Concluding
Thoughts
My inspiration for this address was a quote from a famous
American author, James Baldwin.
American history is longer, larger, more
various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said
about it.
I encourage you to keep those words in mind during this
address. They will come up again later in this address.
Our cities are what they are today
because we, as a nation, want it that way.
Let me explain that when I use the term “cities” I mean
large metropolitan areas like Columbus and Cincinnati as well as smaller cities
like Hamilton and Marysville and even much smaller places like Utica and
Mechanicsburg.
In order to understand how and why our cities are the way
they are today, we have to examine American history, laws, and the roots of
what many like to think of as our way of life, meaning what makes America
American. Obviously, that task is daunting in scope and beyond the capabilities
of most people. Sad to say, I am not one of rare individuals who are capable of
tying all those separate threads into a single understandable whole. Therefore,
my address tonight will be limited to what I believe are the two most critical
factors in the development of American cities and our urban social
infrastructure, race and class. To keep things on the doable level, my focus is
on political, legal, and social interrelations between white and black
Americans over time without ignoring other aspects of race and class.
Part of our collective problem we are likely to face in an examination
of this kind is that many Americans know little of their own country’s history
and what little they do know is frequently wrong or misunderstood. So, our
first challenge is to get the history right.
Who Did That New Nation of
“Americans” Think They Were?
Let’s begin with
the most famous sentence in the Declaration of Independence as a reminder of
its role as a foundational element in what we are as a nation and who we think
we are as a people:
• all men are created equal
• endowed with certain unalienable rights
• life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness
During this
address, I’d like you to keep those famous words in mind as we talk about our
history and think a little about the difference between inspirational and
aspirational.
Putting aside for the moment the issues of slavery and
legalized racial discrimination, we need to determine who the new nation of
“Americans” thought they were, meaning their identity. Well, an identity besides
being created equal and bestowed by God with the unalienable rights of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. One way to answer that question is by determining
who the new Americans thought were eligible to be admitted to their club. And
that takes us to the Naturalization Act of 1790 and other federal legislation
that determined who was allowed to become a naturalized citizen.
An important point to keep in mind is that the U.S. only
became formally acknowledged by the European powers as an independent country
by the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Thus, only seven years had passed between the formal
end of the War of Independence and the signing of the Naturalization Act, which
reads in part:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of
Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That
any Alien being a free white person . . . of good character . . .
My guess is many if not most Americans are unaware that the
Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to immigrants who were free
white persons (male and female) of good character, thus intentionally excluding
Native Americans, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks, most New World
Latinos, and Asians. That Act was superseded in 1795 by similar legislation
with only minor changes. What that meant in the real world was that by law the
U.S. officially declared itself a white man’s country.
In 1870, during the extensive debates in Congress over
removing the word “white” from provisions establishing eligibility for
naturalization, many Congressmen vociferously objected on the grounds that such
a change would allow thousands of Chinese immigrants living in the U.S. West to
become citizens. The measure was handily defeated. Those “white only” provisions
remained law until the mid-20th Century.
But none of those laws stopped numerous determined resident
Asians from pursuing their dream of becoming American citizens. In a famous
case titled, In re Ah Yup (1878), four Chinese men went to court and filed
naturalization petitions. Unsurprisingly, the court ruled against them as they
were non-whites.
Anti-Chinese sentiment was so high that in 1882 Congress
enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, which sharply restricted Chinese immigration
to the U.S., classified all resident Chinese as permanent aliens, and excluded
them from U.S. citizenship. That law required a ten-year moratorium on the
immigration of all Chinese labor, skilled and unskilled, and also established
that no court of any jurisdiction, state or federal, could legally grant
citizenship to Chinese resident aliens. When the Exclusion Act expired in 1892,
Congress extended it for an additional ten years, which, when made permanent in
1902, further required each Chinese resident in the U.S. to register and obtain
a certificate of residence. Without that legal document, Chinese residents were
subject to deportation.
The first successful assault on America’s effective
prohibition of citizenship for people of color (other than persons of African
descent) was brought in the famous case of Wong Kim Ark (1898), who was born in
the U. S. of Chinese citizens with permanent U.S. domicile and residence
status. After a visit to China, when Ark attempted to re-enter the U.S. he was
denied admission because Customs officials claimed he was neither a citizen nor
had the requisite permanent resident status. After several trials, the case
wound up in the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment’s
citizenship language covered the specific circumstances of Ark’s birth and
affirmed his citizenship (United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 1898).
The Japanese fared no better than the Chinese in taking
their citizenship challenges to court. In Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922),
the Supreme Court ruled that under the Naturalization Act of 1906, which
limited naturalization to “free white persons,” only persons of what was
popularly known as the Caucasian race were eligible, not Asians, and, in that
specific case, certainly not Japanese.
A similar, unfavorable Supreme Court ruling on Asian
naturalization claims (United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 1923) concerned the
petition for naturalization of a Sikh immigrant from India, who proudly
identified himself in court documents as "a high caste Hindu of full
Indian blood." The Court ruled that Hindus were not Caucasians as was
commonly understood and thus were not "free white persons" and were
racially ineligible for naturalization.
The Immigration Law of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed
Act, stated that aliens ineligible for U.S. citizenship were not permitted to
enter the United States, which of course included Chinese and other Asians
(with the exception of a very small number of Filipinos who were eligible to
immigrate to the U.S. since the Philippines was a U.S. colony).
In Toyota v. United States (1925), the Supreme Court
affirmed that it was “the policy of Congress to limit the naturalization of
aliens to white persons and to those of African nativity or descent” (Toyota v.
United States 1925, p. 268, U.S. 412). With that decision, the Court
acknowledged that overt white supremacy had been and remained the law of the
land until the mid-20th Century.
In case you might think that women were treated equally
under federal law, in the Expatriation Act of 1907, Congress provided that
female U.S. citizens who married citizens of any foreign country would have
their citizenship held “in abeyance” while they remained wedded or until the
husband became a naturalized citizen or died. In 1922, Congress passed the
Cable Act, which amended the Expatriation Act, stipulating: “any woman citizen
who marries an alien ineligible to citizenship shall cease to be a citizen of
the United States.” That meant any American woman marrying a racially
ineligible male would automatically lose her U.S. citizenship. Make no mistake,
the U.S. was a white man’s world by law.
How Our Cities Come
To Be What They Are Today.
Let’s
start with early American history, with the early British colonists. A chilling
chapter in that history that was almost totally ignored until the last several
decades concerns the enslavement of Native Americans by European colonists.
Today, most Americans have at least passing familiarity with the displacement
of Native Americans across the continent by whites but little awareness of the
specific ways in which displacement and enslavement overlapped in early North
American history. What a number of contemporary historians have discovered is that
the seeds of the African enslavement system were sown in early European efforts
to exploit Native American labor. That early system of attempting to enslave
Native Americans failed for many reasons, not the least of which was that
Native Americans were, after all, natives, and thus knew the landscape well
enough to beat feet at the first opportunity.
The
main reason I focus on that failed effort to enslave Native Americans is that
it was the forerunner of a much larger and far more successful slave regime and
indicates a critical mindset on the part of a great many European colonists and
their descendants.
When
we turn to the first days of the new U.S.A., we begin by putting the
Declaration's most famous and enduring sentence upfront for all to appreciate
as a not so subtle reminder of its role as a foundational element of most of
our national myths about what we are as a nation and who we are as a people:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.
Although
the far greater majority of Americans know that our founders established a
system of government based on individual freedom and equality, not nearly as
many know, or have any desire to know, the historical details involved in our
progress from newly formed nation to what we are today. As a result, many
Americans tend to uncritically accept the idealism expressed in our founding
documents as lived fact and fail to recognize the intense effort that has been
required on the journey to make those aspirations real. My goal in this section
is to use the historical record to determine how those ideals were grounded in
the real world and whether they have achieved a status other than aspirational.
An
excellent place to start is with our primary legal documents and with slavery,
a condition certainly at direct odds with every “truth” quoted above in the
Declaration of Independence. Upon examination, the U.S. Constitution reveals
itself as trying desperately not to declare either for or against slavery,
never once using the morally laden words “slave” or “slavery” while discussing
human bondage in some detail. Four separate sections of the Constitution deal
with the harsh realities of owning human property.
·
Article I, Section 2, codified and counted each
slave as three-fifths of a person in terms of the apportionment of
representation and taxation in a scheme that favored the Southern states
·
Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 specifically
prohibited Congress from banning the importation of slaves before 1808, a
concession to the Southern slave-owning states.
·
Article IV, Section Two, Clause Three, commonly
known as the Fugitive Slave Clause, one of the most controversial sections in
the Constitution, provided that escaped slaves would be returned to those who
claimed ownership.
·
Article Five describes the process whereby the
Constitution itself may be altered. Most significant to this essay is that
Article shielded certain clauses in Article I from being amended until after
1808, specifically Article I, Section 9, Clause 1, which prohibited Congress
from banning the importation of slaves before 1808, another concession to the
Southern slave-owning states.
Those
Articles tell us that the Framers were sharply divided in their views of
slavery and knew the judgment of history would find them wanting. Why else
would those “held to service or labour” be called persons in the Constitution
and not slaves or chattel/property? Although the words slave or slavery never
appear in the Constitution, their fingerprints and footprints are all over that
document. However, as much as modern conservatives would have us believe that
most of the Framers were rock solid against slavery and wanted desperately to
eliminate it, the undeniable fact was that slavery was the law of the land and
persisted from before our country was formed until December 1865.
Of the first five Presidents—George Washington, John Adams,
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe—only John Adams never owned
human beings. The other four owned slaves before, during, and after serving as
President. Of those four, only Washington set his slaves free upon his death,
or slightly thereafter in accordance with his will.
Historical
documents demonstrate that many of the Founding “Fathers” personally regarded
the peculiar institution of slavery as troubling for moral and political
reasons. Although the Founders may have recognized the many conflicts generated
by white ownership of blacks with respect to rights expressed in the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, they consciously refused to address
those conflicts. For the slave-owning Signers of the Declaration of
Independence and ten of the first 13 Presidents of the United States, the
unalienable rights of all to freedom and justice were trumped by the property
rights, wealth, self-interest, and status of white Americans. Because the very
existence of their world and personal fortunes depended on enslaving blacks, a
great many white Americans elevated personal fortune over morality and
demonstrated that the concepts of unalienable natural rights and liberty were
reserved exclusively for people exactly like themselves.
A better understanding of the manner in which ordinary
people in the Northern States, where the abolition movement was strongest and
the desire to enslave humans weakest, regarded blacks and slavery is provided
by state laws that regulated the ownership of human chattel. For those
interested in what history tells us, it is critical to note that of the
original Thirteen Colonies, only Massachusetts banned slavery as
unconstitutional through combination of its State Constitution that was
approved by voters in 1780 and a complex series of litigations collectively
known as the Quock Walker cases. The other Northern States only issued partial
and limited bans on slavery until the late 1840s or early 1850s. The legal
prohibition of slavery in the Northern States was a very gradual process that
took nearly 65 years to reach fulfillment rather than the abrupt transition
many Americans who love their national myths want to believe.
A final critical point concerning exactly what the Framers
thought about slavery was made in Scott
v. Sandford (1857), when Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote
that the prevailing idea at the time of the Declaration of Independence and
Constitution was that American blacks (slaves and freedmen) “had no
rights which the white man was bound to respect.” I have quoted that decision
as I believe Taney’s words are shocking because they indicate the existence of
a universe parallel to the one we want to believe represents what our founders
thought about freedom and the rights of man.
We
think they [slaves] are not, and that they are not included, and were not
intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the
Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which
that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On
the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior
class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether
emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights
or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might
choose to grant them.” Scott v. Sandford
(1857), pp. 59-60 U.S. 405.
Chief Justice Taney also wrote these memorable words:
In
the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the
language used in the Declaration of Independence, show that neither the class
of persons who had been imported as slaves nor their descendants, whether they
had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor
intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.
It
is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to
that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions
of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence and when the
Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted. But the public
history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be
mistaken.
They
had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior
order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social
or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the
white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be
reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an
ordinary article of merchandise and traffic whenever a profit could be made by
it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion
of the white race. Scott v. Sandford
(1857), p. 60 U.S. 407.
After Lincoln’s assassination and the end of the
Civil War, President Andrew Johnson
and many Congressmen, typically Democrats, fought passage of the proposed
Thirteenth Amendment, arguing that it would lead to full citizenship for
blacks. As Representative Chilton A. White (D-Ohio) put it bluntly before the
U.S. House of Representatives:
What will be the
effect of turning loose this mass of [enslaved black Americans]? Where will
they go? What do you propose to do with them? Do you propose to enfranchise
them and make them, “before the law”, as the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr.
Stevens] says, the equal of the white man and give them the rights of suffrage,
the right to hold office, the right to sit on juries? Do you intend, in other
words, to make this a mongrel government instead of a white man’s government?”
(Blair, J.C Rives,
Bailey, and F. Rives 1865, p. 216; also see Colbert 1995, p. 11).
After the Civil War ended in 1865, the federal
Reconstruction program immediately evolved into an extension of that conflict.
It became a struggle between northern Radical Republicans and their allies who
were committed to punishing both Southern states for traitorous acts and white
supremacists whose culture racial dominance was the foundation of their
Southern “way of life.”
President Andrew Johnson, a conservative Southern War
Democrat from Tennessee, was an open advocate of white supremacy and an
opponent of extending civil and human rights to newly freed blacks. Johnson’s
Reconstruction policies granted amnesty to former Southern rebel soldiers and
permitted only white men to vote or to participate in the framing of the new
state governments. He appointed provisional governors from the white Southern
power elite and outlined steps for the creation of new state governments that
would allow the election of representatives to the U.S. Congress. Johnson
strongly supported state sovereignty and the right of each state to decide how
to treat blacks.
Many Radical Republicans became outraged that the recently
defeated but unrepentant Southern rebels were determined to return their former
Confederate leaders to national political power, that none of the Southern
state conventions had granted freedmen the right to vote, and that every
Southern state had immediately passed Jim Crow laws that tightly restricted the
lives and freedoms of former slaves and their access to civil institutions to
ensure the continued dominance of white culture. That Republican anger seemed
more than justified when Benjamin F. Perry, South Carolina’s provisional
governor, declared at the state’s constitutional convention:
. . . this is a white man’s government
and intended for white men only.
After the 1866 election, angry Radical Republicans in
Congress wrested control of Reconstruction from President Johnson, who had
openly rejected the idea that blacks had the same rights of property and person
as whites, passing the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. “White men alone must
manage the South,” was one of President Johnson’s more temperate statements.
To expect Republicans who had just won the Civil War to
surrender national power to a region that had been defeated on the battlefield
and to a population they viewed as traitors was unrealistic. With
Reconstruction and passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth
Amendments, Radical Republicans in Congress focused their efforts on changing
the balance of power in the South and on effecting a political revolution that
they thought necessary to ensure black Americans would be able to achieve the
full freedoms guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution (Smith 1982).
The stakes in controlling the political infrastructure of
the South were extraordinarily high. In effect, passage of the Thirteenth
Amendment increased representation from Southern states in the U.S. House of
Representatives because it made the infamous three-fifths slavery Compromise in
the Constitution meaningless since those who had been slaves would thereafter
be counted as whole persons in apportioning seats in the House. If Congress
seated unrepentant Southerners, national political power would immediately
swing to the Democrats.
As a reminder:
·
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery.
·
The Fourteenth Amendment declares that all
persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens, including African
Americans.
·
The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits each
government in the U.S. from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that
citizen's race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
The judicial branch was far less open to accepting blacks as
Americans with the full array of rights guaranteed to white citizens. In the
Supreme Court set aside the convictions of three white men growing out of a
massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, in which a white mob killed over 150 freed State
militiamen who were defending a local courthouse. Many of those deaths occurred
after the freedmen had surrendered and had been disarmed.
In its drive to eviscerate the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and
Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, the Supreme Court held that the
federal government had no power to protect newly freed slaves from crimes, ever
the murder of about 150 African Americans, since that was the province of the
states, not the federal government. With United
States v. Cruikshank (1875), the day-to-day federal enforcement of civil
rights ended and the organized white terrorism of the KKK and other armed
militias was unleashed on helpless black citizens who had no hope that any
court at any level in the U.S. would protect them from white terrorism.
As painful memories of the Civil War faded, most Northerners
lost interest in maintaining what turned out to be a difficult and prolonged
struggle to ensure black Americans would be granted the freedoms, dignity, and
equality guaranteed by the Constitution. The insurmountable problem was that
the South that emerged after Reconstruction was almost exactly like the pre-war
South in terms of its foundation on white bigotry and supremacy, with the exception
that overt slavery of blacks was replaced by a system of debt peonage and
social controls enforced through intimidation and violence sanctioned by every
level of government and by every element of Southern white society.
The
KKK, White Citizens’ Councils, Red Shirts, Knights of the White Camellia, Sabre
and Rifle Clubs, and other well-armed white supremacist groups in the South and
Border States led the way in a physical and mental reign of violence and terror
against Black Americans, who they felt were responsible for their loss of
political privilege and socioeconomic status, by lynching (nearly 4,750 murders
by 1968), firebombing-burning, beatings, public humiliation, false arrests, and
other acts of atavistic violence.
In 1890, Mississippi adopted a new constitution that
disenfranchised nearly all black citizens through literacy tests (found to be
legal by the U.S. Supreme Court in Williams
v. Mississippi, 1898), poll taxes, multiple ballot box laws, white-only
primaries, grandfather clauses, and residency requirements that cut black voter
enrollment from approximately 147,000 to around 8,600 (Hench 1998; Karlan
1993). When those discriminatory provisions survived legal challenges to a U.S.
Supreme Court that was blind, deaf, and dumb to civil rights violations against
black Americans, nine of the other Southern states adopted similar
constitutions, disenfranchising the far greater majority of their black
American residents.
The Southern disfranchisement movement was so comprehensive
that black people could not vote, serve on juries, or hold political offices,
activities that were exclusively restricted to registered white voters. As a
result, Black Americans were systematically excluded from any role in the
socio-political system other than that of a lower, powerless caste.
As has been noted by numerous observers, the Confederacy may
have lost the Civil War on the battlefield but the South won the struggle to
maintain their white supremacist way of life by oppressing blacks through
intimidation and violence. The result was a century-long campaign of savagery
and terror waged against black citizens by armed Southern whites supported by
local and state governments. An as illustration, Mississippi Governor James
Vardaman famously stated:
There is no use to equivocate or lie
about the matter . . . Mississippi’s Constitutional Convention of 1890 was held
for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics; not the
“ignorant or the vicious,” as some of those apologists would have you believe,
but the nigger . . . Let the world know it just as it is. See: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_williams.html
Many if not all Southern conservatives believed that black
suffrage during Reconstruction had been an enormous political insult because
blacks were inherently inferior, unqualified, and unprepared to assume the
responsibilities of citizenship and, thus, the near total segregation of blacks
from whites was a necessary precondition to eventual citizenship (Kousser
1974).
Although
the Thirteenth Amendment freed blacks from the chains of slavery, they were
uneducated and illiterate, asset-less, and typically unskilled except as
agricultural laborers and faced a country that wanted as little to do with them
as possible other than to ensure their subservience to and separation from
whites.
As an example, in Blyew v. United States (1871), the U.S. Supreme Court
effectively ruled that in Kentucky, and nearly all Southern and Border States,
whites could kill, rob, or cheat Black Americans as long as the only witnesses
were black because those states had laws prohibiting blacks from testifying in
court against whites, thus no prosecution could result.
From 1882 to 1968, approximately 200 anti-lynching
bills were introduced in Congress. Seven presidents and many dozen politicians
fought for anti-lynching federal legislation, but no law that would have made
lynching a violation of federal law was ever passed because through filibusters
Democratic Senators who controlled the Southern and Border States effectively
killed all such legislation.
Most Americans do
not know that prior to the turn of the 20th Century racial ghettos did not
exist, not in the South or in the North. U.S. Bureau of the Census data for
1890 show that on average, urban black Americans lived in districts that were
only 27 percent black (Cutler, Glaeser, and Vigdor 1999). In Columbus, Ohio,
none of the City’s 15 wards had a black population of more than 25 percent and
the ward with the largest black population was only 16 percent black (Hayward
2013).
In
all Southern and Border States, voter registration laws, poll tax laws,
grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and physical violence prevented black
Americans from voting. State laws throughout the U.S. required schools to be
racially separate; schools for black Americans were very inadequately funded
and staffed and were overwhelmingly located in high-poverty areas. Unbeknownst
to most Americans, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the Supreme Court upheld
the legality of Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination on the
grounds that segregation in itself did not constitute unlawful discrimination.
The 7-1 majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown noted that
"in the nature of things it [14th Amendment] could not have been intended
to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as
distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races
unsatisfactory to either." That ruling stood for the next 70 years.
When the Great
Migration of black Americans started around the turn of the 20th Century, 90
percent of all blacks lived in the South. By the 1970s, nearly half of the
country’s 22.5 million African Americans called other states home. Those
migrants sought jobs in booming cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit,
Milwaukee, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Los
Angeles. When that first wave of migrants arrived in northern cities they found
already in place a system of legally and socially enforced segregation and
mostly low-wage, low-skill jobs. During the World War I years, about five
million white young men joined the military. Those suddenly available job
opportunities in the major cities constituted a siren song hundreds of
thousands of job-hungry blacks could not resist.
In response to the
increased flow of black migrants, municipalities enacted racially restrictive
ordinances and property covenants that required segregation. As an example,
Louisville, Kentucky, passed an ordinance that prohibited blacks from living on
a block where the majority of residents were white. When that law was
challenged, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down that and similar laws as
unconstitutional in Buchanan v. Warley
(1917) because they violated the Due Process/Equal Protection Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment.
After that ruling,
real estate agents quickly wrote "codes of ethics" that included bans
on selling homes to African Americans outside of black areas. In most large
cities, white residents responded to the arrival of black families with private
racial covenants—legal language in private deeds that barred any subsequent
purchaser from selling to African Americans. The legality of racial restrictive
covenants was affirmed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926) that such
covenants constituted private and not municipal actions and therefore were not
subject to the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Here’s a real
world example: A 1946 Goshen, Indiana, housing development read: “No person of
any other race but the white race shall occupy any building or any lot.” However,
one major flaw of private racial housing covenants was that they were voluntary
and private homeowners often refused to include those restrictions in their
property deeds. Thus, covenants were not a perfect solution to the continuing
problem of black infiltration into previously all-white neighborhoods.
But covenants
weren’t the only racial bans. By law or overt threats of violence, hundreds of
“sundown” towns throughout the U.S. prohibited blacks from being within the
city limits when the sun set. Utica, Ohio; La Crosse, Wisconsin; and Goshen,
Indiana, are examples of “Sundown” towns (Shuler 2017). In addition, in 1924
the National Association of Real Estate Boards changed its official Code of
Ethics by adding Article 34, making it a violation for realtors to try to sell
houses in white neighborhoods to a member of “any race or nationality” that
would “clearly be detrimental to property values.” (Metzger 2000) Those "codes
of ethics" included bans on selling property to African Americans outside
of black areas.
That first major
wave of black migrants was greeted in northern and western cities by threats
and physical violence, such as firebombing residential and office buildings
owned by black Americans to force them from white neighborhoods. That violence was
commonplace and culminated in widespread race riots that killed hundreds of
blacks and dispossessed many thousands more of their homes.
State
and local laws restricted black American’s right to own and lease property,
conduct business, and move freely through public spaces in cities. Banks,
savings and loan companies, mortgage firms, realtors, insurance companies, and federal
housing agencies engaged in a process that came to be known as redlining. In
redlining, no loans or policies were
provided for individuals living within undesirable areas outlined in red.
The effect was to ensure Black Americans lived separate lives from whites in
areas characterized by dilapidated and deteriorated housing that frequently was
without indoor plumbing and with minimal urban services, such as police, fire,
street lighting, street repair, and trash pick-up.
Federal
programs like those run by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), the
U.S.-sponsored Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), Federal Housing Administration
(FHA), Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), and Veterans
Administration systematically fostered racial segregation by refusing, via
federal regulations, to lend money to black people for home purchase or
improvements or to whites who lived in racially integrated areas, and also
promoted racially restrictive housing covenants (Jackson 1980). As early as
1934 and 1935 the FHA underwriting manuals instructed banks to steer clear of
areas with "inharmonious racial groups", and recommended that
municipalities enact racially restrictive zoning ordinances (Light 2011; Schill
and Wachter 2001; see The Special Collections Department - Langsdale Library,
University of Baltimore for additional materials).
By
the time the second and much larger wave of approximately five million black
Americans migrated in 1940 to 1970 from the South to the urban Northeast,
Midwest, West Coast, and Southwest, white America had fine-tuned its de jure
and de facto systems of racial discrimination and segregation. In cities
throughout the U.S., racially restrictive covenants had become private and were
thus legal according to the Supreme Court. Redlining by banks, savings and
loans, mortgage firms, realtors represented by the National Association of Real
Estate Boards, and insurance companies was the rule. Violence and threats of
violence served to maintain all-white residential neighborhoods through the
1970s (Abrams 1955; Brown Jr. 1972). Federal programs like those run by the
Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the U.S.-sponsored Home Owners Loan Corporation
(HOLC), Federal Housing Authority (FHA), and Federal National Mortgage
Association (FNMA) systematically promoted racial segregation by refusing, via
federal regulations, to lend money to black people for home purchase or
improvements unless they lived in all-black neighborhoods, or to whites who
lived in racially integrated areas, and also promoted racially restrictive
housing covenants (Brown Jr. 1972; Hayden 2004; Glaeser and Gyorko 2002;
Glaeser, Kahn, and Rappaport 2000; Jackson 1985; Massey and Denton 1989 and 1998).
In the post-war suburban expansion period, the HOLC, FHA, FNMA, and private
banks required new suburbs to be uniformly white before investments would be
made or insured (Mahoney 1995, pp. 1671-1672) and used redlining to exclude
homeowners in black neighborhoods from securing federally-backed mortgages and
home improvement loans (Seitles 1998).
Effectively
that meant until the Supreme Court’s 1968 Jones
v. Mayer decision, FHA and HOLC regulations stipulated that if housing
developers sold to blacks, they would not be able to sell houses in the same
neighborhood to whites who needed home loans. Home loan programs administered
by the U.S. Veterans Administration had similar if not completely identical
racially discriminatory regulations. In many thousands of cases, black families
unable to obtain a standard conventional or U.S. Government-insured bank
mortgage had no other option but to buy houses in black-only neighborhoods
using a financially punitive housing “contract” system that preyed on poor,
option-less black buyers (Hirsch 1983; Satter 2010).
Under the “contract
system”, the title to and equity in a property would not be transferred to the
buyer until all contract payments had been made over the 20 or 30 year
contract. Contract buyers were charged exorbitant fees for repairs to correct
building code violations, which speculators frequently concealed from them.
Contract buyers who missed or were late on a single payment would be evicted
with no right to recoup prior payments. The property would then be sold to
another black household under the same terms. In Chicago in the 1940s and
1950s, perhaps as many as 85 percent of all homes bought by blacks were under
the contract system. Those homes were frequently repossessed and re-sold dozens
of times by real estate speculators over short periods, generating huge
profits. It was a vicious underworld where blacks desperate to own their own
homes were preyed upon by greedy white real estate speculators (Satter 2010).
As
a result, those practices created a system in which buyers, sellers, realtors,
bankers, insurers, and housing developers worked in concert with the federal
Government to maintain existing all-white neighborhoods and all-black ghettos
and to build all-white suburbs that were largely financed through FHA and VA
programs (Jackson 1985; Mahoney 1995). In the context of VA loans, I must
mention that the one million Black Americans who served in the U.S. military
during WWII were as racially segregated as they were in the Deep South (until
July 26, 1948, when President Harry Truman issued an Executive Order that
integrated the armed forces). They could fight and die for democracy against
totalitarian enemies overseas but were nearly powerless against the overt
racism and bigotry that typified white America. Here’s an example that is both
telling and chilling: in 1942 the American Red Cross refused to accept the
blood of black American volunteer donors for use in hospitals (Gates 2013).
The reality is that
even after redlining and racial covenants were outlawed, real estate and
mortgage firms used the practice of racial steering to ensure prospective black
homeowners were directed toward homes only in predominantly black neighborhoods
and to loans whose terms were predatory when compared to loans available to
whites.
Perhaps
you should think about this real-world situation. Black Americans seeking to
buy homes could only get mortgages if they lived in all-black neighborhoods,
but since all-black neighborhoods were redlined by the HOLC, FHA, VA, FNMA, and
private banks as undesirable areas no federally-insured or conventional
mortgages could be obtained. Local laws/ordinances also prevented low and
moderate income housing from being built for minorities (Southern Burlington
County NAACP v. Township of Mount Laurel).
State laws also prohibited
inter-racial marriage and co-habitation and required segregation in education,
housing, hospitals, commercial transactions, employment, transportation, hotels
and restaurants, and public places like parks, swimming pools, and beaches.
Publicly funded universities across the country rejected black American
applicants solely because of their race. As examples of racial discrimination
in higher public education despite the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, on
October 1, 1962, after Army troops took control of the university, James
Meredith became the first African-American student to enroll at the University
of Mississippi. And in 1963, the first black students were admitted to the
Universities of South Carolina and Alabama.
It’s Not Only Race
But race isn’t the
only factor that has affected the structure and character of American cities. As
an urban planner I would be remiss if I failed to tell you that economic discrimination
and segregation in American cities would not have risen to today’s level without
the direct intervention of state enabling legislation and municipal regulations
governing zoning. And that’s exactly what brings us to the consideration of
social class as a formative factor in the evolution of American cities.
The concept of
class is more than somewhat like that of race since neither has a great deal of
scientific weight behind them. Class is more undefined than race in that no two
sociologists will have the same definition. Although no matter how class is
defined, that definition will include a varying blend of social, economic,
educational, lifestyle, and status/attitudinal factors. In the past several
decades, mostly under the influence of economists, income is typically used as
a surrogate for class owing to the ease in tracking that statistic.
Here’s a fairly
brief summary of how class has become a critical formative force in cities.
Although the first
comprehensive zoning ordinance was enacted in New York City in 1916, the first
big legal test of zoning came in 1924, the Ambler Realty Company contested a
newly adopted Euclid, Ohio, zoning ordinance, claiming it violated the
Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by depriving them of liberty and
property without due process of law, denying them the equal protection of the
laws, and violating the Ohio Constitution. The complaint sought an injunction
restraining enforcement of the zoning ordinance. In 1924 the lower federal
court held in Ambler Realty Co. v.
Village of Euclid that the ordinance was unconstitutional and thus void. That
federal judge specifically found that the ordinance was written “to classify
the population and segregate them according to their income or situation in
life.” In effect, the judge ruled that the ordinance excluded poor people from
upper class neighborhoods, which it undeniably did, a situation he found
violated the U.S. Constitution.
In 1926, the
Supreme Court considered the Village of Euclid’s appeal in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926). Their ruling
endorsed the right of local municipal authority to designate zones for certain
types of buildings and dictate restrictions on lot and building sizes. By
upholding local zoning power, the Supreme Court endorsed what has become known
as “Euclidian Zoning” even though that specific zoning code unashamedly promoted
economic and social (class and racial) segregation. With little change, that
form of zoning remains in effect in municipalities throughout the U.S. and continues
to create and perpetuate segregated housing because it is based on discrimination
of wealth and race/ethnicity.
The Supreme Court’s
1926 ruling held that apartments were often nothing but “parasites” and near nuisances
that degraded detached single-family residences by cutting off light and air,
totally ignoring that those single-family zones segregated people by
race/ethnicity and class, even though neither the poor or a lower class was
mentioned in the ruling. Thus, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, Euclidian
zoning became a legal tool designed to keep people in their proper place in
society, meaning well-to-do whites with their fellow whites, blacks with
blacks, and ethnics/immigrants with their fellow unwashed masses.
I have no doubt
that much of urban social order embodied in in today’s zoning ordinances was and
is based on explicit and implicit white desirability/superiority and black
undesirability/inferiority that is inherent in zoning ordinances since the
Euclid decision.
In 1977, the
Supreme Court’s decision in Arlington
Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. institutionalized that
loophole by asserting that exclusionary zoning is not unconstitutional. Why is
this American history of racial discrimination and segregation important today?
Because that history in creating majority black areas in central cities has led
to lower land values, less money for public education, reductions in school
quality, constrained local employment opportunities, and fewer commercial
amenities located in and around segregated black neighborhoods. Which means
that all black Americans have been and are adversely affected by highly-deleterious
racial segregation and racial prejudice.
The discriminatory
combination of government policy and individual actions by white homeowners,
realtors, appraisers, banks/mortgage firms, and insurance companies and was
aided and reinforced by economically and racially segregative zoning
regulations. The resulting rate of racial segregation in the United States has been
quite high and racially integrated neighborhoods continue to be an anomaly.
Racial segregation indices have improved slightly, though primarily in areas
with military installations, which tend to be more integrated.
The
existence of overt racial bigotry and bias in relations between dominant whites
and sub-dominate people of color in the U.S. is well-documented in our history
and our daily lives. Here’s how I think it worked.
· Because white rights took precedence, in 1790
the U.S. Government was able to restrict citizenship only to whites of good
character, a legal restriction that lasted until the mid-1900s.
· Because white rights took precedence, white
Americans could deny citizenship to blacks and Native Americans, Hispanics, and
Asians and not recognize the astounding divergence of those actions with ideals
expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
· Because white rights took precedence, the U.S.
Government was able to break its sworn word (statutory obligations) to
indigenous peoples and take land promised in Senate ratified treaties would be
tribal property in perpetuity and give it to white Americans and not feel
dishonorable or treacherous.
·
Because white rights took precedence, white
Americans could enslave and torture blacks and not feel legal or moral
obligations to treat them as human rather than as chattel.
· Because white rights took precedence, white
Americans felt no guilt in amassing the collective power of federal, state, and
local governments to oppress black Americans freed from the chains of slavery
and force them by law into a racially separate and inferior world.
· Because white rights took precedence, in the
1930s between 500,000 and two million Mexican-American citizens and legal
residents were deprived of due process and forcibly and illegally deported to
Mexico by the U.S. and state governments in a policy/program policy, authorized
by President Herbert Hoover.
· Because white Americans—whether Supreme Court
justices, Congressmen, land-hungry settlers, or men and women in the
streets—were confirmed in their superior station over subordinate persons of
color, they knew their actions regarding them were right and just.
The
U.S. has never adequately faced its history of institutional racism or
inequality. The very real problem is that millions of white Americans most
likely never will address that history because they deny the existence of
institutional racism and inequality and are comfortable with the present
situation.
The
fault, many Americans claim, lies with the millions of Native and black
Americans who have willfully chosen not to participate in the quintessential
American Dream and thus are personally responsible for such shortcomings as
laziness/no work ethic/lack of initiative, dependence on government hand-outs,
poverty, poor education, unemployment, etc. Those Americans hold tight to their
glorification of our country as having been made Exceptional through our unique
democratic spirit and therefore worthy of uncritical love, devotion, and
patriotism and completely reject historical and structural causes of inequity.
Nor
has the federal government ever addressed the results of callously throwing
five million newly freed, illiterate, asset-less, and basically unskilled
blacks into the cauldron of American society and then ignoring its
responsibility to incorporate them into that society and to protect them from
the very people and states that had been their enslavers and oppressors.
Moreover, the federal Government has never addressed the multitude of adverse
effects of federal, state, and local laws and majority white culture that
intentionally discriminated against and oppressed black Americans for well more
than 100 years.
Although
the consequences of being forced to live in marginal urban areas are numerous,
severe, and long-lasting, I’ll only briefly demonstrate one of those critical
outcomes: financial. But before we look at that outcome, I ask you to keep in mind
two critical considerations.
First,
homeownership typically helps to build individual and familial wealth. When generations
of black American were denied that asset-creating tool, adverse consequences
were passed down to generation after generation. And second, homes in
communities of color are valued less initially and appreciate less in value
over time.
Okay,
keeping those two major factors in mind, let’s look at some additional real
world facts. In 2013, the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances analyzed
family net worth in the U.S.
Median
net worth for white families $141,900
Median
net worth for black families $11,000
Median
white family assets were 13 times greater than those of black families.
Net
assets for families whose head of household was a college graduate:
Median
net worth for white families $180,500
Median
net worth for black families $23,400
For
families whose head of household was a college graduate, median white family
assets were 11 times greater than those of black families.
Net
assets of families whose head of household had earned a graduate or
professional degree:
Median
net worth for white families $293,100
Median
net worth for black families $84,000
For
families whose head of household had earned a graduate or professional degree,
median white family assets were nearly 3.5 times those of black families (see Boshara,
Emmons, and Noeth 2015; Emmons and Ricketts 2017; Meschede, Taylor, Mann, and
Shapiro 2017; and Jones 2017).
The
inequity resulting from that discrimination is also highlighted in research by
sociologists and economists at numerous universities (Shapiro, Meschede, and
Osoro 2013) and more recently by Kochhar and Fry (2014) of the Pew Research
Center who reported the median household net worth for whites in 2013 was
$141,900 and $11,000 for blacks, a wealth gap of nearly 1,300 percent. Their
research found that from 2010 to 2013 “the median wealth of non-Hispanic white
households increased from $138,600 to $141,900, or by 2.4 percent” while during
the same period the median wealth of non-Hispanic black households fell 33.7
percent, from $16,600 to $11,000.
Unless
broad public policy and institutional changes are initiated at the federal
level to address racial disparities in homeownership, education, employment,
income, wealth, and inheritance, closing the black-white inequity gap will be
an unfulfilled dream (Shapiro 2004 and 2006; also see Johnson 2014; Jargowsky
2015; Rigsby 2016).
The
socioeconomic playing field was not designed from the birth of this country to
be level for people of color. That discrimination resulted in inequities that
are present today and has denied them opportunities other Americans enjoy.
Because federal and state laws and regulations produced this situation, it is
obvious those governments have the ability to undo the results of that
creation. But, absent political will, that change seems well-nigh impossible.
All Americans are aware of the horrific struggle of blacks
to be treated equally under the law, to be treated as full-fledged American
citizens. Today, when we justly say that things have certainly changed for the
better in terms of race relations, most of us mean in terms of that struggle.
After all, lynching and overt physical violence as an accepted way for whites
to control blacks is illegal. Overt racism is frowned on though it is alive and
well in some circles. The black vote is no longer as constrained as it once was
though several states are trying very hard to return to those times.
We, as a nation, have changed for the better in the sense
that racial discrimination and segregation are no longer matters of law or government
regulation, even though in many ways they are still part of American culture.
But, at the same time that civil rights for blacks were improving, other
changes that were not nearly so beneficial have come to dominate our urban
landscapes.
Those changes are matters of law in all states and nearly
all municipal jurisdictions. Under President Lyndon Johnson, three pieces of
important legislation were passed by Congress, the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. All three were
widely heralded as presaging a new day for people of color in terms of reducing
racial discrimination. In terms of enforcement, the first succeeded moderately
well, the second hit the ball out of the park until the Supreme Court
eviscerated it in Shelby County v. Holder
(2013), and the last failed miserably. The question we should ask is why the
Civil Rights and Voting Acts came to be enforced at least fairly vigorously and
the Fair Housing Act never has been.
My take is that unlike voting or
job discrimination, residential locational decisions are based intensely
personal factors, including cost, availability, nearness to work/transit,
desirability, etc. It’s about where you and your family live. It’s about where
you relax with friends and neighbors, people you identify with. It’s about you
huddling in the nest with people exactly like you against the Dangerous Others.
If you look at research into the
persistence of urban segregation you’ll see that American cities that were
segregated in the 1960s were just as segregated or even more so in the 2010s.
Why? The answer is obvious: most whites do not want to live with or even in
close proximity to people of color, especially blacks.
In a detailed investigation,
ProPublica (an independent non-profit news organization that produces
investigative journalism) discovered only two occasions since George Romney's
tenure at HUD in which the Department withheld money from communities for violating
the Fair Housing Act. Records even show HUD has given housing grants to
communities after they've been found guilty by courts of promoting segregated
housing or have been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice. New Orleans, for
example, has continued to receive HUD housing grants after the Justice
Department sued it for violating that Fair Housing Act by blocking a low-income
housing project in a wealthy historic neighborhood.
In case some of you may have only partly understood the real
world effects of redlining and racial discrimination, in 1968, the year
Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, the city of Dearborn, Michigan, had zero
black homeowners. The city of Livonia had one. And Warren, Michigan, a city
whose population hit nearly 180,000 in 1970, had a grand total of four black
homeowners.
Real World Solutions, But No Magic
Although I am certain that solutions are out there in terms
of how we as a nation can constructively address racial discrimination and urban
residential segregation, I am still up in the air about how to access those
solutions, especially at this point in our history.
Perhaps the questions we should be asking are whether
America has the capacity to be honest about the adverse effects our history of
racial prejudice and discrimination have had on cities and on the lives of poor
people and people of color. Perhaps we should be asking whether we have the
political will to finally address those problems. Even with the gift of 20/20 foresight,
predicting the future political will of the American people is much like
predicting the price of oil 15 or 20 years from the present.
The problem is many of us are desperate for certainty, for
the confidence of experts who know exactly what to do that will bring the best
results and will lead us out of the darkness we now inhabit. But you of all
people know the real difficulties of any community development that is
associated with the often dreaded words, Fair Housing.
Often you hear that all politics are local and therefore you
should start by focusing on local solutions to your problems. In this case I
believe that is bad advice because from where I stand this problem has a geographic
dimension that extends beyond local or regional or even state government.
Let me ask you this: how was the terrorism and brutality of
Jim Crow defeated? Did the citizens of Birmingham or Montgomery or Selma
suddenly see the light of morality and justice and open their arms to black
people? We don’t have to pick on Southern cities when we have nearly equally
bad examples closer to home. Do any of you remember the rallies in Cincinnati,
Ohio, supporting Alabama Governor George Wallace who ran for President in 1968
on a platform supporting racial segregation? Do you remember Wallace’s campaign
slogan at those rallies? "Stand Up for America!" Or his infamous
pledge at those rallies: "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow,
segregation forever."
In Boston, the struggle to desegregate city schools started
in the 1950s and lasted through the 1980s and resulted in widespread violence
by white groups that regularly made national news headlines and horrified
millions.
When after World War II black Americans in Chicago began a
public struggle to end racial discrimination in the city, white people fought
back with hostile demonstrations but eventually demonstrated with their feet,
abandoning the city for the all-white suburbs. Similar stories abound
throughout the U.S.
The reality is with barely 50 years of practically
non-existent enforcement of fair housing laws this country has not been able to
achieve significant racial and economic integration. After all has been said
and done, we as a nation have not been able to wish away the persistent effects
of 300 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow violence, and over 80 years in
which local, state, and federal regulations resulted in forced racial
segregation in urban housing and education.
Here’s just one example of the mountain of ideological
resistance ahead. As Stella Morabito, senior contributor to The Federalist (see:
http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/30/american-exceptionalism-human-exceptionalism/),
put it succinctly in August 2016:
America is exceptional because it is the
first nation to codify and embrace the understanding that every human being—no
matter one’s nationality—is endowed with something unique to offer and is
therefore exceptional. No exceptions.
If you take Morabito seriously, you have one very
substantial problem: the country that Morabito (and millions of like-minded
conservatives) is fantasizing about never existed. Here’s a brief outline of
the country she apparently does not know exists:
· From the get-go, America’s Constitution
permitted the enslavement of blacks by the millions.
· From 1790, American law excluded all but whites (and
blacks since 1870) as citizens until the mid-1900s.
·
The federal government systematically coerced Native
Americans into selling their land at bargain basement prices, only allowing
them as a people to become citizens in the mid-20th Century.
·
Federal government and federal courts permitted
Southern and Border States to terrorize millions of black Americans through Jim
Crow laws, thousands of lynchings, and other forms of atavistic violence and
overt racial bigotry for well over 100 years.
·
Federal and state governments, agencies, and
courts at all levels permitted blacks to be segregated in central city slums by
means of laws/regulations that denied their property and civil rights.
Now, go back and re-read what Morabito wrote and see if her
idealized conception of America corresponds with our history as lived.
How is change to be achieved when all Democratic Presidents
since LBJ have moved so far to the center they are little more than what were
formerly known as moderate Republicans?
I do not apologize for believing Republican Presidents would
never, at least in my lifetime, lead the charge to enforce the Fair Housing Act
since that view is based on political reality, not partisanship.
For many who have assembled in this conference, a primary
goal is to overcome our historical racial economic, education, and housing
discrimination and the resulting disparities that we have experienced with our
lives and craft a solution that embodies progress in reducing racial
discrimination.
Here’s a picture of American urban reality. Our large cities
are characterized by segregation, poverty, disinvestment, depopulation, and
crime. We haven’t tried to change that picture because we are either too entrenched
in ideological worldviews to address means of effective change or we simply
don’t care. The sad truth is the political and moral will to change that
picture is largely absent in the general public.
But despite our historical lack of the national political
will to ground in action the aspirational message contained in the Declaration
of Independence, in the last 60 plus years things have changed for the better,
at least in part. The KKK and the Jim Crow South are gone, at least in terms of
effective social movements. Overt racism is no longer tolerated in public
discourse, although it is alive and well in many circles. It’s no longer a
cultural imperative that black Americans are treated like second- or
third-class citizens.
What prompted those changes? The simple answer is belief in
the words enshrined in the Declaration of Independence forced President Lyndon
Johnson to commit political suicide (and for the foreseeable future to change
America’s political landscape) when he forced passage of laws protecting black
Americans from white racism.
And change America he did. Here’s one measure of that racial
change. If Dylan Roof, the unrepentant white supremacist who murdered nine
innocents at the Emanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, had
acted in the 1930s, he would have been celebrated as a hero by his fellow white
South Carolinians. That’s real change.
Let’s not be romantic about our history. It wasn’t John or
Robert Kennedy who changed America with transformative civil rights
legislation. The truth is that both brothers were very reluctant to push for
the civil rights of black Americans because they saw the looming white backlash
and correctly estimated the political cost they would have to pay for supporting
the movement. It was Lyndon Baines Johnson who sacrificed the future of his Party
by forcing the civil rights platform into legislation. He did that while being
pushed and shoved in the right direction by Martin Luther King Jr. and his
associates by using the televised white-inflicted violence in Southern cities
to show America what it had become. To their credit, most white Americans
outside the South were repulsed by that hatred.
What was it that changed America? The Civil Rights Act of
1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. It may
surprise the seasoned community and economic development specialists in the
audience that I included the Fair Housing Act in that list. People certainly
can argue that although the Civil and Voting Rights Acts have been effective
means of change in America, the Fair Housing Act cannot by any measure be
included in that group. But consider this point: passage of the Civil and
Voting Rights Acts did not immediately work wonders in our political landscape.
Effective enforcement took many years and later amendments to the Acts,
particularly after the early 1970s. Those Acts ultimately succeeded because of
the nationally televised brutality and terrorism of the Jim Crow South was
morally and legally indefensible and turned our collective stomachs.
Lest we forget, the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not repeal
anti-miscegenation laws found in 16 states that prohibited blacks and whites
from co-habiting or marrying, including every Southern state plus Oklahoma,
Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Delaware. In 1967, those laws
were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in Loving v. Virginia. Years prior to that
ruling, 41 of the then 48 states had passed anti-miscegenation laws. Alabama
continued to enforce their prohibition of inter-racial marriages until 1970. In
2000, Alabama became the last state to officially remove their
anti-miscegenation provision from its Constitution. Although 60 percent of
those voting approved that ballot measure, nearly 526,000 Alabamans, the
remaining 40 percent, voted to continue the prohibition of racial
inter-marriages.
Lesson: White supremacy dies hard.
Or as Martin
Luther King Jr. said on that topic: “History is the long and tragic story of
the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily”
(MLK, Letters from a Birmingham Jail).
However, the Fair Housing Act was never enforced effectively
in terms of barring housing discrimination and "affirmatively" advancing
residential integration. The Act was no more than six months old when LBJ was
succeeded by Richard Nixon and he adamantly refused to allow his HUD
Secretaries to enforce the Act, even firing his first HUD Secretary, George
Romney, because he insisted on real enforcement of the Act. No President since
then has actively supported enforcement of the Act, not even Barack Obama, who
most of us hoped would have been its champion. But he was too busy playing Sidney
Poitier or Harry Belafonte to care about something as prosaic as the Fair
Housing Act.
In terms of the historical obstacles to racial integration
and equality, it seems that four possible real world solutions should be considered.
·
First, we’ll always have to live with something like
or similar to our existing urban racial discrimination and segregation.
·
Second, overcoming racial discrimination and
segregation on a voluntary, city by city basis over many decades may eventually
be partially successful.
·
Third, prepare the best legal case for Fair
Housing enforcement and bring suit in federal court to establish precedent
nationally.
·
Fourth, overcoming the many obstacles to fair
housing will require real world enforcement of the federal Fair Housing Act over
the next several generations.
As a person whose optimism has always been grounded in the
real world, I have to reject the first two options. The first is morally
repugnant and must be rejected by those who value justice and believe the
promises in the Declaration of Independence. The second is exactly the solution
to Jim Crow racial segregation and discrimination proposed by prominent
conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s and should be rejected now as it was then
as offensive to the American Constitution. The third option has a certain
amount of merit but would require nearly a perfect storm of causes to be
effective. In addition, the Supreme Court is notoriously unfriendly to such
cases.
Please note that none of the above potential solutions
involve judicial action. I’d like to remind you that the U.S. Supreme Court as
an institution cannot be relied upon to acknowledge fair housing as a value
protected by the Constitution. After all, the Supreme Court ruled that Dred
Scott and his brothers and sisters were doomed to a life of enslavement by
superior whites. In Blyew v. United
States (1871), the Supreme Court ruled that in Southern and Border States
whites could kill or injure blacks as long as no whites were around to testify
to the crime.
In United States v.
Cruikshank (1875) the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had
no power under the Constitution to protect newly freed slaves from being
murdered by whites since that was the province of states. In Plessy v. Ferguson the Supreme Court that
ruled that Jim Crow bigotry was perfectly legal. In Corrigan v. Buckley (1926) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled racially
restrictive covenants constituted private actions and therefore were not
subject to the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. (1926)
the Supreme Court ruled that residential zoning excluding poor people was
perfectly legal, going so far as to imply the people living in apartments were
parasitic nuisances that degraded detached single-family residences, totally
ignoring that single-family zones effectively segregated people by
race/ethnicity and class. In Korematsu v.
United States (1944) the Supreme Court closed its eyes when
Japanese-American citizens were denied access to due process when they were
forced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt into concentration camps at the
beginning of World War II. And in countless decisions courts across the country
have ruled that exclusionary residential zoning is perfectly legal as long as
the reason for excluding people is based on class rather than race, which means
that excluding lower class people has simply become a legal way to keep blacks
out.
The lesson we must learn is that expecting judicial relief
from racial segregation and discrimination is at best a faint hope and at worst
a dangerous delusion.
However, economic discrimination and segregation supposedly
based on class is not only the darling of the Supreme Court it is the law of
the land in zoning ordinances found across the country that are cleverly
crafted to keep poor folks as far away as possible from middle-to upper-class
people (Lens and Monkkonen 2016; for a popular but well-researched and
well-written summary, see Florida 2016; see also Resseger 2013).
It’s not simply that people innocently choose to live among
those who have similar incomes, education, and occupations. It’s that they are
choosing to live where excluding people who do not meet those criteria is legal.
That’s a type of discrimination the courts have allowed to flourish to the
point that most people accept it as a normal and even natural part of the
urban-suburban landscape.
Since the courts have consistently come down favoring class
discrimination, the only real tool that can address the issue is federal and
state law (see Ikeda and Hamilton 2015; Mangin 2014). That leaves us with the
failed legacy of the Fair Housing Act. I’m sure I do not have to go into the
pitiful litany of low life expectancy, child poverty, educational, and
employment issues that characterize the many failures of that legislation (Jargowsky
2015; Reece et al. 2009; Rigsby 2016).
Other interesting potential solutions include regulatory
budgets, zoning budgets, the use of Tax Increment Local Transfers (TILTs), and
moving land use decisions from the local to the state level, where lawmakers
are less affected by NIMBY pressures and more likely to favor economic growth
factors. Part of the reason I’m not a big fan of those measures is the
practical difficulty of persuading homeowners and the politicians they control
to make decisions that are not in their interests, at least in their short-term
interests (Schleicher 2013). For example, RTAAs and TILTs that literally pay
nearby homeowners to support affordable housing development that they would
otherwise likely have opposed, may seem to be a great idea but it almost
certainly will conflict with other deeply held homeowner attitudes and values,
such as class and racial animus, in-group loyalty/identity, etc.
The big challenge is how today’s class discriminatory
housing system can be changed in an ideological climate where conservatives
claim that the numerous social ills affecting blacks and Latinos are
self-inflicted and that the efforts of the federal government to address that
situation are ill-considered social engineering and intrusion into a free
market most whites believe is functioning well.
Complex problems seldom have simple solutions may not be what
you want to hear. But it is reality.
That does not mean we should abandon the effort to create
solutions to American housing problems but that we should respect the inherent
difficulty of that task. Right now, in a conservative-transcendent America, the
search for genuine solutions does not look promising. My best guess is Donald
Trump will not be a force for Fair Housing progress, nor will Ben Carson, the
newly nominated HUD Secretary, who was by all accounts a brilliant neurosurgeon
but hasn’t shown much consideration for poor black folks.
My point is racial discrimination and segregation are not
local issues to be solely addressed at the local level. They are national in
scope and can be best addressed at the national level, which means by federal
law. But, you say, we already have Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
That’s the problem and perhaps a potential solution.
For me, the only viable solution to racial discrimination
and segregation is one that occurs at the national level, which means we have
to elect a President and a Congress that cares enough about justice to insist
on enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. And how probable is that? After all, no
Democratic President since LBJ cared enough to be its champion because the
political risks of alienating white voters were simply too great.
But voting seems to be the best alternative we have. Talk of
a social justice revolution is mental masturbation. If we want real change
we’ll have to get out and work hard for the right candidate.
Now, at this point you might be feeling a little down,
especially since we have a President who may be intent on getting the Fair
Housing Act repealed. But in a bitter way I’m a little okay with Trump being in
office. Because my hope is a nationwide backlash will in 2020 sweep in a
candidate who will be a Fair Housing champion.
My great hope is that Trump’s election encourages citizens
to get off their duffs and smell the coffee that has been brewing for years.
National leaders starting with Ronald Reagan and continuing through Bill
Clinton, the two Bushes, Obama, and Hilary crawled in bed with Wall Street and
the Big Banks and turned their backs not only on Main Street America but also
on poor people everywhere and blacks specifically. It’s not enough to elect a
President who talks the talk and claims to share your worldview while blowing
smoke up our collective skirts with campaign promises that turn to dust the day
after the election. What’s critical is to elect a President who pushes for
real-world actions focused on justice and equal treatment under the law in the
housing arena. What we need is a President and a Congress that will put in
place institutional measures that will result in long-term enforcement of the
Fair Housing Law. Period.
I’m not proposing a feel-good, romantic, Hollywood solution
to our centuries old racial problem but one that requires old fashioned hard
work. It’s called campaigning and voting for a candidate who believes in
justice for all Americans, in recognizing how our history of racial
discrimination affects people today and is determined to change it.
To demonstrate that conservatives and liberals believe in
the same America, I quote Harry Jaffa, a conservative political philosopher who
in 1964 was a speechwriter in Barry Goldwater’s Presidential campaign and was
passionate about the principles of the Declaration of Independence; he believed
its main contention that "all men are created equal" should be held dear
by every American:
"Extremism in the defense of
liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is not a virtue."
Now is when I ask you to recall the proposition we started
with:
Our cities are what they are today because, as a nation, we
want them that way.
I believe that statement is true because if we wanted our
cities to be different than they are, we would have taken specific steps to
ensure the necessary changes were made. But we didn’t take those steps, thus we
are, as a collective, either okay with today’s situation, or we are indifferent
to the condition of our cities. I am convinced that many Americans are okay
with the structure/condition of our cities because that structure/condition
benefits them in many ways.
We made sure our cities developed as we wanted through
ordinances that intentionally segregated blacks from white, deed restrictions
that prevented sales to anyone but whites, redlining by federal government
agencies and the entire banking and insurance sector that kept black citizens
out of the housing market, exclusionary zoning that has dominated the structure
of cities for nearly a hundred years by ensuring middle- and upper class whites
never have to live with large numbers of poor people, especially poor black
Americans.
What I believe many if not most white Americans want today
is a . . .
Separate and Who Gives a Damn if It’s an Equal World
. . . despite that
option having bitten the legal dust many decades ago in Brown v. Board of
Education of Topeka (1954).
For many whites, the beauty of our legal system is they have
that Separate and Unequal World courtesy of government-sponsored racial
ghettoization coupled with the Supreme Court’s decisions that allow people with
resources to exclude poor people from their landscapes.
As we have seen today in our examination of American
history, powerful institutions controlled by whites, namely the federal, state,
and local governments, real estate industry, banks, insurance firms, and many
others shaped urban landscapes in their favor, restricting by law and custom
where and under what conditions people of color could live. For nearly 200
years of American history, racial discrimination has been intentional and
systemic policy.
You in the audience know that housing discrimination is not
a thing of the past, in 2009 the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a
lawsuit against leading mortgage lender Wells Fargo, alleging the company
steered Black and Latino homebuyers into riskier subprime loans and charged
them more than it did white customers. Wells Fargo settled the suit in 2012 by
agreeing to pay $175 million in damages. In December 2012, the DOJ settled a
similar lawsuit with Bank of America for $335 million over loan discrimination
by its Countrywide Financial unit. In June 2014, the city of Miami sued
JPMorgan Chase, accusing the bank of engaging in discriminatory lending
practices in minority neighborhoods since at least 2004 in violation of the
U.S. Fair Housing Act. In November 2014, the city of Los Angeles filed similar
claims of predatory mortgage lending in minority neighborhoods against JPMorgan
Chase for allegedly steering minority buyers into high risk loans they could
not afford. In mid-January 2017, the U.S. Justice Department accused JPMorgan
Chase & Co of violating the U.S. Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit
Opportunity Act between 2006 and 2009. The lawsuit stipulated that JPMorgan
Chase showed "reckless disregard" for the rights of at least 53,000
African American and Hispanic borrowers by allowing mortgage brokers to charge
them more for home loans than they did for other borrowers. On the same day the
DOJ suit was filed, the bank agreed to pay $55 million to settle the suit while
maintaining it had not discriminated against minority borrowers.
Today white people no longer have to rely on redlining,
restrictive covenants, or overt racial discrimination to keep the races
separate. Today we have more subtle legal mechanisms like exclusionary zoning
that protect us from being blamed for segregation and housing discrimination.
We aren’t the Jim Crow Southerners, the KKK, the horrid race baiters. We
publically repudiate overt racism as something from the past. We had nothing to
do with that ugliness. But whites do not want to admit they have created a
situation of plausible deniability, a narrative of racial innocence that allows
them to benefit from discrimination and segregation but to avoid the guilt and
the blame.
Saying the U.S. has racial problems ignores the reality that
what we have is a persistent, centuries old, white supremacy problem that
started in our Colonial Period and continues today. Whether we change that
present and our future is up to us.
Many people who believe in political correctness would
rather I use the kinder, gentler term, white privilege. But that term does not
and cannot convey the systemic domination of blacks by white Americans
throughout our history. By white supremacy I am not referring to the KKK or
various neo-Nazi or White Power groups but to the dominant American culture.
Skeptics might ask as to what specific evidence documents
the white supremacy that supposedly afflicts our country? The answer should be
obvious and starts with our enslaving Native Americans and then black Africans,
and continues with the Naturalization Acts that denied citizenship to anyone
but whites, with the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands
that violated their Congressionally-guaranteed treaty rights in ethnic
cleansing that provided American settlers with basically free land, with Jim
Crow terrorism and racial discrimination and segregation, with the Chinese
Exclusion Law (1882) that prevented Chinese from immigrating to the U.S. and from
becoming citizens once here, with the forced relocation and imprisonment of
American citizens of Japanese descent in concentration camps during WWII as the
Supreme Court refused to consider the Constitutional issue of incarcerating
U.S. citizens without due process, or with the multi-century bigotry against
Hispanics in the Southwest, including the illegal, forced removal of about
600,000 U.S. citizens of Mexican heritage in the Southwestern states to Mexico
in the early 1930s (Balderrama and Rodriguez 2010); and with our centuries-long
treatment of women as second-class citizens.
I do not want anyone to have the false impression that states in the West were largely free from prejudice against black Americans. To illustrate that point, in 1859, when Oregon was admitted as a state, its constitution explicitly prohibited blacks from living and working in the State, owning property, and executing legal contracts. Until 1926, it was illegal for blacks to even move into the State and for decades was a bastion of Ku Klux Klan activity. Racially offensive language in the state constitution was not removed until 2002. History matters to today’s reality as in 2018 the Oregon population was 84 percent white and two percent black; Portland remains one of the most segregated cities north of the Mason-Dixon Line and is the whitest major city in the U.S. with a population that is 72.2 percent white and only 6.3 percent black.
Concluding Thoughts
Not only do most middle- and upper-class Americans not want
to live anywhere near blacks specifically or poor people in general, but they also
want to keep themselves secure in residential areas where black folks weren’t.
To do that they created municipal zoning regulations that made it difficult if
not downright impossible for poor people with skin colors darker than peaches
and cream to relocate to the milk and honey suburbs.
The U.S. has a history of public policy discrimination
against people of color. But, if you take a dispassionate look at American
history, you’ll see a nation of citizens who are deeply conflicted. They
desperately want to believe the aspirational words enshrined in the Declaration
of Independence have always been this country’s reality. But they also don’t
want to live next to, or have their children go to school with, or, far, far
worse, marry blacks. Actually, what many white Americans truly want is a Separate
and Who Gives a Crap if It’s an Equal World, despite that option having
bitten the legal dust many decades ago in Plessy
v. Ferguson (1896).
The means of effective community and economic development
are not beyond our reach, our imagination, or our understanding. Changing
cities is not an exercise in high-energy physics or brain surgery. It only
requires a nationally-based political will and that, as of this time, is sadly
in short supply.
One approach to American history is to see it as a precious
gem with many facets. Some people holding conservative views see only certain
facets of that gem, the ones where the glorious words of the Declaration of
Independence reside and everyone lives in a blissful state of unfettered liberty;
the facet where property rights are king and our innate goodness makes us a
shining city on a hill. The facet where America was the first nation to codify
and embrace the concept that every human is endowed with unique natural rights
that cannot be taken away without due process. The facet where the power of our
unique new nation came directly from "the consent of the governed.” In
that approach, intentions are more valued than actions.
Others holding progressive worldviews may see completely different
facets of that gemstone, the ones where our flaws and miscues reside, flaws
like slavery, our callous appropriation of the lands of native peoples, our
white-only mentality, the horrors of Jim Crow and separate and unequal,
Government-sponsored redlining and ghettoization, and our willingness to
discriminate against people based on income and class. In that approach,
actions are more valued than intentions.
If Thomas Jefferson was right when he said “knowledge is
power, knowledge is safety, and knowledge is happiness,” I challenge you to
learn all you can about your country’s history, not just the praiseworthy or
the dishonorable, but the totality.
I encourage all of you to embrace the many facets of our
history, to take the approach where both intentions and actions are valued, and
to see America for the complex gem it is, a great country founded on an
extraordinary philosophy of liberty and justice that was compromised by the
clay feet and mistakes of the flawed humans who made our nation what it is.
Seeing only a select few facets of our complex history does a major disservice
to the past and puts our future in jeopardy.
No one should forget that although racism may be systemic in
America, bigotry and prejudice are personal attitudes that are distributed
across the socio-political spectrum. Saying the U.S. has racial problems ignores
the reality that fundamentally what we have is a white problem.
I close with two of my favorite messages from James Baldwin
and El Hajj Malik el Shabazz, who, thirty years after their deaths, still have
much to teach us.
Not everything that is faced can be changed . . . but nothing can
be changed until it is faced.
James Baldwin
“ . . . tomorrow belongs to those who
prepare for it today.”
El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X)
Legal
Cases
Ambler Realty Co. v. Village of Euclid, Ohio, 297 F. 307 D.C. Ohio (1924).
Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Dev. Corp., 429 U.S. 252 (1977). Available
online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/429/252/case.html
Blyew
v. United States, 80 U.S. 13 Wall. 581 581 (1871). Available
online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/80/581/
Brown v. Board of
Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Available online:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/347/483/
Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/245/60/case.html
Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323
(1926). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/271/323/
In re
Ah Yup, 5 Sawy. 155 (1878). For more information, see: https://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/ncc375/rp/index.html
Jones v. Alfred H.
Mayer Co.,
392 U.S. 409 (1968). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/392/409/case.html
Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/323/214/case.html
Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/388/1/
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537
(1896). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/163/537/
Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393
(1856). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/60/393/
Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. ___ (2013). Available online:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/570/12-96/
Southern Burlington
County NAACP v. Township of Mount Laurel, 119 N.J. Super. 164 (1972) 290 A.2d 465.
Available online: http://law.justia.com/cases/new-jersey/appellate-division-published/1972/119-n-j-super-164-0.html
United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875), Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/92/542/case.html
Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926). Available
online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/272/365/
United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649
(1898). Available online:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/169/649/case.html
Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213
(1898). Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/170/213
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