Race and Class in American Urban History

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-20^th 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

References

Abrams, Charles. 1955. Forbidden Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing. New York: Harper.

Balderrama, Francisco E., and Raymond Rodríguez. 2010. Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. Revised Edition. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

Baptist, Edward E. 2014. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.

Boshara, Ray, William R. Emmons, and Bryan J. Noeth. 2015. The Demographics of Wealth: How Age, Education and Race Separate Thrivers from Strugglers in Today’s Economy. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Essay No. 1: Race, Ethnicity and Wealth, February 2015. Available online: https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Files/PDFs/HFS/essays/HFS-Essay-1-2015-Race-Ethnicity-and-Wealth.pdf.

Boustan, Leah Platt. 2010. Was postwar suburbanization “white flight”? Evidence from the black migration. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 125(1): 417-443. Available online: http://www.econ.ucla.edu/lboustan/research_pdfs/research02_whiteflight.pdf.

Brown Jr., William H. 1972. Access to Housing: The Role of the Real Estate Industry. Economic Geography 48(1): 66-78.

Badger, Emily. 2016. Why a housing scheme founded in racism is making a resurgence today. The Washington Post, May 13, 2016. Available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/13/why-a-housing-scheme-founded-in-racism-is-making-a-resurgence-today/?utm_term=.7c8ee75cfb5e.

Chinese Exclusion Act. 1882 (An act to inaugurate certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese). Sess. I, Chap. 126; 22 Stat. 58. 47th Congress; approved May 6, 1882. Available online: http://library.uwb.edu/guides/usimmigration/1882_chinese_exclusion_act.html.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2014. The Case for Reparations. The Atlantic (May 21). Available online at: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.

Colbert, Douglas L. 1995. Liberating the Thirteenth Amendment, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 30(1): 1-55. The full text of the article is available online via Google Scholar.

Cutler, David M., and Edward L. Glaeser. 1997. Are Ghettos Good or Bad? Quarterly Journal of Economics 112(3): 827-872. Available online: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic98848.files/cutlerglaeser.pdf.

Cutler, David M., Edward L. Glaeser, and Jacob L. Vigdor. 1999. The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto. Journal of Political Economy 107(3): 455-506. Available online: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2770033/Cutler_RiseandFall.pdf?sequence=4.

Derenoncourt, Ellora. 2014. The Slaver’s Objectivity. Jacobin Magazine, 9-10-14. Available online: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/the-slavers-objectivity/.

Dollard, John. 1949. Caste and Class in a Southern Town. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Emmons, William R., and Lowell R. Ricketts. 2017. College Is Not Enough: Higher Education Does Not Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Wealth Gaps. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review 99(1): 7-39. Available online: https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/review/2017-02-15/college-is-not-enough-higher-education-does-not-eliminate-racial-and-ethnic-wealth-gaps.pdf

Engle, Patricia. 2004. The Origins and Legacy of Justice Marshall’s “New Rule” of Conquest in Johnson v. M’Intosh. In Lehigh University’s The Literature of Justification, Supreme Court -- Essays. Available online: http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/justification/court/essay/.

Florida, Richard. 2016. The Segregation That Zoning Inflicts on Cities. The Atlantic, January 5, 2016. Available online: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/zoning-land-use-segregation/422595/.

Gallay, Alan. 2003. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Gallay, Alan, ed. 2015. Indian Slavery in Colonial America. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Gates Jr., Henry Louis. 2013. What Was Black America’s Double War? The Root, May 24, 2013. Available online: http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2013/05/double_v_campaign_during_world_war_ii_what_was_it.html.

Glaeser, Edward L.; Gyourko, Joseph. 2002. The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability. Policies to Promote Affordable Housing. Working Papers. Sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the New York University School of Law. National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Available online: https://law.yale.edu/system/files/documents/pdf/hier1948.pdf

Glaeser, Edward L., Matthew E. Kahn, and Jordan Rappaport. 2000. Why Do the Poor Live in Cities? The Role of Public Transportation. Journal of Urban Economics. Working Papers. 63(1): 1-24. Available online: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2958224/why%20do%20the%20poor%20live%20in%20cities.pdf?sequence=2.

Gotanda, Neil. 1991. A Critique of “Our Constitution Is Color-Blind.” Stanford Law Review 44(1): 1-68.

Greenwald, Anthony G., and Thomas F. Pettigrew. 2014. With Malice toward None and Charity for Some: Ingroup Favoritism Enables Discrimination. American Psychologist 69: 669-684. Available online: http://faculty.washington.edu/agg/pdf/Greenwald&Pettigrew.MaliceTowardNone.AP.2014.pdf.

Harris, Cheryl I. 1993. Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review 106(8): 1707-1791. Available online: http://sph.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/Harris_Whiteness%20as%20Property_106HarvLRev-1.pdf.

Hayden, Delores. 2004. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000. New York: Vintage Press.

Hayward, Clarissa R. 2013. How Americans Make Race: Stories, Institutions, Spaces. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hench, Virginia E. 1998. The death of voting rights: The legal disenfranchisement of minority voters. Case Western Reserve Law Review 48(4): 727-798. Available online: http://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/caselrev/vol48/iss4/3/

Hirsch, Arnold R. 1983. Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940–1960. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Hodgson, Godfrey. 2010. The Myth of American Exceptionalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Ikeda, Sanford, and Emily Hamilton. 2015. How Land-Use Regulation Undermines Affordable Housing. George Mason University, Mercatus Center Research Paper, November 4, 2015. Available online: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/Ikeda-Land-Use-Regulation.pdf.

Jackson, Kenneth T. 1980. Race, ethnicity, and real estate appraisal: The Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration. Journal of Urban History 6(4): 419-452.

Jackson, Kenneth. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jargowsky, Paul. 2015. Architecture of Segregation: Civil Unrest, the Concentration of Poverty, and Public Policy. New York: The Century Foundation and Camden, NJ: Rutgers University Center for Urban Research and Education. Available online: https://tcf.org/content/report/architecture-of-segregation/.

Johnson Jr., Alex M. 1995. How Race and Poverty Intersect to Prevent Integration: Destabilizing Race as a Vehicle to Integrate Neighborhoods. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 143: 1595-1658. Available online: http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3576&context=penn_law_review.

Johnson, Rucker C. 2014 (Revised from 2011). Long-Run Impacts of School Desegregation and School Quality on Adult Attainments; Working Paper 16664, National Bureau of Economic Research. Cambridge, MA: NBER. Available online: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/johnson_schooldesegregation_NBERw16664.pdf.

Jones, Janelle. 2017. The racial wealth gap: How African-Americans have been shortchanged out of the materials to build wealth. Economic Policy Institute, February 13, 2017. Available online: http://www.epi.org/blog/the-racial-wealth-gap-how-african-americans-have-been-shortchanged-out-of-the-materials-to-build-wealth/.

Karlan, Pamela S. 1993. The rights to vote: Some pessimism about formalism. Texas Law Review 71: 1705-1740. Available online: http://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/karlan_draper_hills_readings_2015.pdf

King, Martin Luther Jr. 1963. Letter from a Birmingham Jail. April 16, 1963. Available online: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/letter-birmingham-jail

Kochhar, Rakesh, and Richard Fry. Wealth Inequality Has Widened along Racial, Ethnic Lines Since End of Great Recession. Pew Research Center, Fact Tank. December 12, 2014. Available online: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gaps-great-recession/.

Kousser, J. Morgan. 1974. The shaping of southern politics: Suffrage restrictions and the establishment of the one-party South, 1880-1910. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Krauthamer, Barbara. 2013. Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Lai, Calvin K., Maddalena Marini, Steven A. Lehr, Carlo Cerruti, Jiyun-Elizabeth L. Shin, Jennifer A. Joy-Gaba, Arnold K. Ho, Bethany A. Teachman, Sean P. Wojcik, Spassena P. Koleva, Brian A. Nosek, et al. 2014. Reducing Implicit Racial Preferences: I. A. Comparative Investigation of 17 Interventions. Journal of Experimental Psychology General 143(4): 1765-1785. Online First Publication, March 24, 2014. Available online: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~mrbworks/articles/2014_Lai_JESPG.pdf.

Lens, Michael, and Paavo Monkkonen. 2016. Do Strict Land Use Regulations make Metropolitan Areas more Segregated by Income? Journal of the American Planning Association 82(1): 6-21.

Leonardo, Zeus. 2004. The Color of Supremacy: Beyond the Discourse of “White Privilege”. Educational Philosophy and Theory 36(2): 137-152.

Light, Jennifer. 2011. Discriminating Appraisals: Cartography, Computation, and Access to Federal Mortgage Insurance in the 1930s. Technology and Culture 52(3): 485-522. Available online: http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/DiscriminatingAppraisals.pdf.

Lipsitz, George. 2007. Testimony before the 2007 National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. Available online: http://www.prrac.org/projects/fair_housing_commission/chicago/chicago_briefing.pdf. Cited in: Fulwood III, Sam. The United States’ history of segregated housing continues to limit affordable housing. Center for American Progress; December 15, 2016.

Mahoney, Martha R. 1995. Segregation, Whiteness, and Transformation. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 143(5): 1659-1684. Available online: http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3577&context=penn_law_review.

Mangin, John. 2014. The New Exclusionary Zoning. Stanford Law and Policy Review 25(1): 91-120. .Available online: https://journals.law.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/stanford-law-policy-review/print/2014/01/mangin_25_stan._l._poly_rev_91.pdf.

Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. 1989. Hypersegregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas: Black and Hispanic Segregation along Five Dimensions. Demography 26(3): 373-391.

Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. 1998. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

McIntosh, Peggy. 1988. White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack. Available online: https://www.isr.umich.edu/home/diversity/resources/white-privilege.pdf.

McPherson, James M. 1988. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Volume Six, Oxford History of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

Meschede, Tatjana, Joanna Taylor, Alexis Mann, and Thomas Shapiro. 2017. “Family Achievements?”: How a College Degree Accumulates Wealth for Whites and Not For Blacks. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review 99(1): 121-137. Available online: https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/review/2017-02-15/family-achievements-how-a-college-degree-accumulates-wealth-for-whites-and-not-for-blacks.pdf.

Metzger, John T. 2000. Planned Abandonment: The Neighborhood Life-Cycle Theory and National Urban Policy. Housing Policy Debate 11(1): 7-40.

Mintz, Steven, and Sara McNeil. 2013. Digital History. Available online at: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu.

Myrdal, Gunnar. 1944. An American Dilemma, Volume 1: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Row.

Naturalization Act of 1790 (An act to establish a uniform rule of naturalization). Sess. II, Chap. 3; 1 stat 103. 1st Congress; March 26, 1790. Available online: http://www.indiana.edu/~kdhist/H105-documents-web/week08/naturalization1790.html.

Newell, Margaret Ellen. 2015. Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Perry, Mark J. Acceptance rates at US Medical Schools in 2014 Reveal Ongoing Discrimination against Asian-Americans and Whites. American Enterprise Institute. January 4, 2015 11:38 pm. Available online: https://www.aei.org/publication/acceptance-rates-us-medical-schools-2014-reveal-ongoing-racial-profiling-affirmative-discrimination-blacks-hispanics/.

Ransom, Roger L. and Richard Sutch. 1972. Debt Peonage in the Cotton South After the Civil War. The Journal of Economic History 32(3): 641-669.

Reece, Jason, et al. 2009. People, Place and Opportunity: Mapping Communities of Opportunity in Connecticut, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, The Ohio State University. A Report Commissioned by Connecticut Fair Housing Center, November 2009.

Reséndez, Andrés. 2016. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Resseger, Matthew. 2013. The Impact of Land Use Regulation on Racial Segregation: Evidence from Massachusetts Zoning Borders. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, November 26, 2013. Available online: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/resseger/files/resseger_jmp_11_25.pdf.

Rigsby Elliott Anne. 2016. Understanding Exclusionary Zoning and Its Impact on Concentrated Poverty. New York: The Century Foundation, June 23, 2016. A Available online: https://tcf.org/content/facts/understanding-exclusionary-zoning-impact-concentrated-poverty/.

Rushforth, Brett. 2012. Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Satter, Beryl. 2010. Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America. New York: Metropolitan Books (Macmillan).

Saunt, Claudio. 2005. Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.

Schuessler, Ryan. 2014. The Ferguson Next Door in Missouri Holds Powerful Lesson. Al Jazeera America, December 21, 2014. Available online: //america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/12/21/a-neighboring-missouritownmightholdlessonsforferguson.html.

Seitles, Marc D. 1998. The Perpetuation of Residential Racial Segregation in America: Historical Discrimination, Modern Forms of Exclusion, and Inclusionary Remedies. Journal of Land Use and Environmental Law 14(1): 89-124. Available online: http://www.law.fsu.edu/journals/landuse/Vol141/seit.htm.

Shapiro, Thomas M. 2004. The Hidden Cost of Being African American. New York: Oxford University Press.

Shapiro, Thomas M. 2006. Race, Homeownership and Wealth. Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 20(1): 53-74. Available online: http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1242&context=law_journal_law_policy.

Shapiro, Thomas M., Tatjana Meschede, and Sam Osoro. 2013. The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide. Brandeis University Institute on Assets and Social Policy; Research and Policy Brief, February 2013. Available online at: http://iasp.brandeis.edu/pdfs/Author/shapiro-thomas-m/racialwealthgapbrief.pdf.

Schill, Michael H. and Susan M. Wachter. 2001. Principles to Guide Housing Policy at the Beginning of the Millennium. Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research 5(2): 5-19.

Schleicher, David. 2013. City Unplanning. Yale Law Journal 122(7): 1670-1737. Available online: http://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/city-unplanning.

Shuler, Jack. 2017. 'Sundown towns': Midwest confronts its complicated racial legacy. Christian Science Monitor. March 27, 2017 Available online: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2017/0327/Sundown-towns-Midwest-confronts-its-complicated-racial-legacy.

Smith, Page. 1982. Trial by fire: A people's history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Snyder, Christina. 2010. Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Special Collections Department - Langsdale Library, University of Baltimore, Archives, Racial Content of FHA Underwriting Practices. Available online: http://archives.ubalt.edu/aclu/pdf/Plex48.pdf.

Spring, Joel. 1994. Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc.

Steinberg, Stephen. 1995. Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy. Boston: Beacon Press.

Sugrue, Thomas J. 1996. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press (Princeton Studies in American Politics).

The Guardian. 2017. The Lovings, a Marriage that Changed History – in Pictures. March 29, 2017. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2017/mar/29/the-lovings-in-pictures.

Valenciana, Christine, and Rosario Ordonez-Jasis. 2012. Unconstitutional Deportation of the 1930s: Learning from the Voices of the Past. Social Studies 103: 81-89.

Wilson, William Julius. 2009. More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. Poverty and Race 18(3): 1-11. Available online: http://www.prrac.org/pdf/WJWMayJune2009PRRAC.pdf.

Winters. Donald L. 1988. Postbellum Reorganization of Southern Agriculture: The Economics of Sharecropping in Tennessee. Agricultural History 62(4): 1-19. Presidential Address to the Agricultural History Society.