The Inherent
Incompatibility of Constitutional Principles and Racial Polarization
Introduction
Despite the spoiler in the subtitle,
it seems logical to begin with how I believe our nation is conflicted. Perhaps
the best way to do that is to quote the famous English author, Samuel Johnson, when
in 1775 he reflected on the inherent conflict between early American legal and
moral principles and white supremacy: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps
for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” In 1776, a fellow Englishman, abolitionist,
and author, Thomas Day, used his acid-dipped pen to add an analogous
observation: “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature it is an
American patriot signing resolutions of independency with the one hand and with
the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”
Slavery in the Thirteen Colonies had
been widely accepted for over 200 years before the rebels fought their way to
independence as the United States of America. Thus, even from its first day as
a new nation America and its governing system were in conflict over
irreconcilable moral and legal values: freedom and equality for all under the
law vs. the right of whites to own and breed black slaves and treat them as sub-human
cattle.
The political compromises made by the
powerful white elites who created the Constitution and built a new nation came
at the direct expense of black slaves, who had no voice in those discussions
and whose primary role was to serve their masters until death. Contemporary
Americans should realize that slavery was tolerated in the Colonies and in the
newly formed Republic because it served the interests of a small but enormously
powerful slave-owning class as well as those who benefited from it, including national
and state politicians, bankers, merchants, manufacturers, ship owners, and
ordinary consumers in every part of the country, not just the South.
Evidence that that conflict was
based on a culturally shared preference for whiteness is contained in the
Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted American citizenship to whites only
and which, courtesy of numerous supportive Supreme Court decisions, remained
the rule of law until the 1950s—when the McCarran-Walter Act was passed—systematically
excluding most Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians from citizenship. For
more information, see Takao Ozawa v.
United States, United States v.
Bhagat Singh Thind, United States v.
Wong Kim Ark, Hirabayashi v. United
States, and Korematsu v. United
States, and the Chinese Exclusion Law of 1882.
Although that moral and legal conflict
grew until it boiled over into the Civil War, it survived that War as well as
Reconstruction. Here’s how that happened. When Reconstruction was terminated,
it was critical for the powerful class of Southern plantation owners and
industrialists whose fortunes had been built on the backs of slaves to remain
in control of the newly freed blacks. The total emancipation of the former
slaves would have not only destroyed their personal fortunes but also their “Southern
way of life” that was built on white supremacy. Since neither alternative was
unacceptable, white Southerners waged a brutal war against freedom, the
Constitution, the 13th Amendment, and the very humanity of black Americans with
the sole purpose of maintaining white supremacy and the dominant white culture’s
stranglehold on blacks.
The South that emerged after 1877
almost exactly mirrored the pre-Civil War South in terms of its foundation on
white supremacy, with the exception that black slavery was replaced by a neo-slavery
system of peonage, false imprisonment, convict leasing, and a culture controlled
by intimidation and brutal violence supported by every level of government and
by every element of Southern white society. That system prevailed because 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 Northern States, immersed in their own growing struggles
to keep blacks separate from whites, had little interest in racial issues in
the South and no political stamina with which to address state-sponsored Jim
Crow terrorism because most moderate Republicans and Northern Democrats had
begun to regard blacks as simply another special interest group that had to
stand on its own feet.
As an aside, white supremacy’s reign
as the law of the land was assured by key Supreme Court decisions, including Blyew v. United States, Minor v. Happersett, United States v. Cruikshank, Williams v. Mississippi, Civil Rights Cases, Plessy v. Ferguson, discussed in the following section.
Summary of De Jure Discrimination
A.
After the Civil War, the U.S. Supreme Court quickly
demonstrated it was unwilling to accept blacks as Americans with the full range
of rights guaranteed to white citizens. In Blyew
v. United States (1871), the Court effectively ruled that whites in
Southern and Border states could cheat, rob, or kill black Americans as long as
the only witnesses were black because those states had enacted laws prohibiting
blacks from testifying in court against whites. Thus, no federal prosecution
could result since those acts were the province of the states, not the national
government. In Minor v. Happersett
(1875) the Supreme Court held that the right to vote was not inherent to
citizenship, therefore states could decide which citizens were allowed to vote,
which in the real world meant it was A-Okay for Southern and Border States to ensure
blacks could not vote. In United States
v. Cruikshank (1875), the Court set aside the convictions of three white
men stemming from a horrific massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, in which an armed
white mob killed about 150 freedmen who were defending a local courthouse as
official members of the Louisiana State Militia. Many of those murders occurred
as brutal executions after the freedmen had surrendered and had been disarmed.
In its drive to eviscerate the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the
Constitution, the Supreme Court held that the federal government had no power
to protect newly freed slaves from crimes since those acts were under the
authority of the states, not the federal government.
B.
With the Blyew,
Minor, and Cruikshank decisions, day-to-day federal enforcement of civil
rights came to an abrupt end and organized white terrorism of the KKK and other
armed militias was unleashed on helpless black citizens who had no hope that
any court of any jurisdiction would protect them from state-supported white
terrorism.
C.
After the end of Reconstruction, 34 of the then
40 U.S. states, including every Southern and Border State, passed Jim Crow laws
that prevented contact between blacks and whites as equals and tightly
restricted the lives and freedoms of former slaves and their access to civil
institutions to ensure the continued dominance of white culture and white
supremacy.
D.
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 initiated a physical
and mental reign of terror against black Americans, who the whites felt were
responsible for their loss of political privilege and socioeconomic status:
lynching, firebombing and burning churches and homes, beatings, public
humiliation, false arrests, and numerous other acts of violence and uncounted threats
of violence.
E.
For those who hold
fast to the conviction of the decency and goodness of the U.S. as a governing
institution, it may be instructive that 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 was
ever passed that made lynching illegal because arch-conservative Democratic
Congressmen who controlled the Southern and Border States opposed all legislation
that would have made lynching a federal crime.
F.
By the late 1800s, Southern states had adopted
new constitutions that disenfranchised nearly all black citizens through
literacy tests (found to be legal by U.S. Supreme Court in Williams v. Mississippi), poll taxes, multiple ballot box laws,
white-only primaries, grandfather clauses, and residency requirements that cut
black voter enrollment to near non-existence. State laws prohibited
inter-racial marriage and co-habitation and required segregation in education,
housing and residential locations, hospitals, commercial transactions,
employment, transportation, hotels and restaurants, and excluded blacks from public
places like parks, swimming pools, and beaches. State funded universities across
the country rejected black applicants solely because of their race; as
examples, the first blacks were admitted to the Universities of South Carolina
and Alabama in 1963, despite the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 prohibiting racial
discrimination in educational institutions.
G.
De jure racial discrimination was ruled
constitutional in the infamous Civil
Rights Cases, which originally were five separate legal cases the U.S.
Supreme Court consolidated into a single ruling on October 15, 1883. The ruling
also declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional and that Congress
lacked the constitutional authority under the 14th Amendment to grant equal
protection under the law to blacks, stating that only states and local
governments had that authority. In that now infamous 8-1 decision, the Court
struck down the following provision in the Civil Rights Act: “… all persons
within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and
equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges
of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of
public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by
law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of
any previous condition of servitude.” In essence, the ruling was a betrayal of
Constitutional guarantees as well as a near mortal blow to the rights and
wellbeing of black Americans. The ruling barred Congress from remedying racial
discrimination and in effect green-lighted state-sponsored Jim Crow violence
without the U.S. Department of Justice blinking an eye and without any white person
being brought to justice (Daniel 1972).
H.
In the South, newly freed blacks were pressured
by law and plantation owners into becoming tenant farmers or sharecroppers who
would receive between 33 to 75 percent of the crops they grew. But that system
involved not free labor but peonage/debt slavery, a type of forced labor
established and imposed by state law and local sheriffs in which workers could
not leave employment until all debts were paid in full. Since newly freed
blacks were totally without assets, they were forced to borrow on credit from
white land owners, merchants, company stores, and other employers the cost of
food, clothing, seed, farm animals, farm implements and equipment, fuel,
medical care, and even the shacks in which they lived to tide them over until
the crops could be harvested or other debt could be paid. The white owners
typically set the cost of those items as well as the price paid for the
resulting crops. As a result, most black tenant farmers, share croppers, and
other employees were shackled by long-term debt and were prevented by state law
from leaving until that debt was paid (Daniel 1972; Myrdal 1944; Ransom and Sutch 1972; Winters
1988).
I.
From the 1880s through the mid-1950s when the federal
Department of Justice finally ended it, Southern states and local political
jurisdictions created a neo-slavery system that falsely convicted well more
than one hundred thousand blacks of trivial or nonsensical offenses and leased them
to industrial enterprises and agricultural plantations where they were subject
to subhuman working and living conditions, starvation, physical torture, and
often early death, proving that black slavery in America did not end with the
Civil War or the 13th Amendment. Hundreds of documents demonstrate that the DOJ
knew what was going on in the horrifically unjust and brutal system of convict
leasing and refused to act until the late 1940s and early 1950s (Blackmon 2008;
Oshinsky 1997).
J.
Unbeknownst to most Americans, in Plessy v.
Ferguson (1896) the Supreme Court also upheld the legality of
state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism and other forms of de jure racial
discrimination on the grounds that segregation in itself did not constitute
unlawful discrimination. That racist ruling stood for the next 70 plus years
and allowed state and local governments throughout the U.S. to legally
discriminate against and oppress black Americans.
K.
Beginning shortly after the termination of
Reconstruction, states and local jurisdictions across the U.S. enacted racially
restrictive ordinances and property covenants that segregated blacks and forced
them to live in areas of substandard housing. By the beginning of the 20th Century,
many if not most states had passed enabling legislation permitting the creation
of racially discriminatory zoning districts by local governments. Although local
jurisdiction zoning based on racial grounds was prohibited by the Supreme Court
in Buchanan v. Warley (1917), many
states either ignored that ruling (examples were still in effect as late as the
mid-1980s, Rothstein 2017, pp. 47-48), or provided work-arounds in the form of racially
restrictive covenants in property deeds and redlining by financial institutions,
insurance firms, and real estate companies to ensure residential segregation by
race remained in effect (Brooks and Rose 2013; Jackson 1985; Lewinnek 2014; Rothstein
2017; Seitles 1998).
L.
The first wave of black migration to northern
industrial cities occurred from 1910 and 1930, when between 1.5 million to two
million blacks fled the state-supported violence of the South. When that first
wave of black migrants arrived in northern cities they found a system of
legally and socially enforced segregation and mostly low-wage, low-skill jobs.
Municipalities had enacted racially restrictive zoning ordinances and property
covenants that required segregation (Jackson 1985; Seitles 1998). The use of
threats and physical violence, such as firebombing residential and office buildings
owned by black Americans to force them from white neighborhoods, was
commonplace. From the late 1890s through the 1960s, state-sanctioned violence
occurred in cities throughout the country, including Chicago, Tulsa, Boston,
New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, Detroit, East St. Louis, Los Angeles, San
Francisco, and dozens of other cities large and small. I use the term
“state-sanctioned” to indicate that state and local police forces failed to
suppress white violence against blacks. That tacit police tolerance of and
indifference to violence by whites that violated the property and human rights
of black Americans was systemic and nationwide (Rothstein 2017).
M.
The first federal government public housing policies/programs
provided white civilian war-related workers and their families with housing during
WWI but specifically excluded blacks (Rothstein 2017).
N.
In 1926, the Supreme Court’s decision in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co.,
272 U.S. 365 (1926) endorsed the right of a municipality 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 openly promoted
class and racial segregation. With the Supreme Court’s blessing, exclusionary zoning
became a legal tool designed to keep people in their proper place in society,
meaning well-to-do whites with well-to-do whites, blacks with blacks, and
ethnics/immigrants with their fellow unwashed masses. With little change, that
form of zoning remains in effect in political jurisdictions throughout the U.S.
and continues to create and perpetuate segregated neighborhoods because it is
based on discrimination by wealth and race/ethnicity.
O.
When President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal initiated
the first national housing programs for non-war worker civilians, the federal
government typically either excluded blacks or segregated them from whites in
inferior housing. Those specific federal housing programs discriminating
against blacks were authorized and implemented by the Tennessee Valley
Authority, Civilian Conservation Corps, Public Works Administration, U.S.
Housing Authority, Federal Works Agency, and the Federal Housing Authority,
agencies that also restricted the access of blacks to the federal programs they
administered or minimized their participation (Jackson 1985; Rothstein 2017).
P.
In 1933, appraisers working for the Federal Home
Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (a federally-sponsored
corporation formed by Congress as part of the New Deal and administered by the
FHLBB) created a mapping system that evaluated neighborhoods by levels of loan
desirability that included homeowner occupation, income, and race/ethnicity as
well as the age and physical condition of structures to reduce subjectivity in
calculating loan risk (Aaronson et al. 2004):
Category A Best
(green): new, homogenous areas (described as “American Business and
Professional Men”), in demand as residential location in good times and bad.
Category B Still
Desirable (blue): areas that had “reached their peak” but were expected to
remain stable for many years.
Category C
Definitely Declining (yellow): neighborhoods that were generally sparsely
populated fringe areas that were typically bordering on all black
neighborhoods.
Category D
Hazardous (red, hence the term “red-lining”): Black and low income
neighborhoods were considered to be the worst for risk and lending.
Q.
In effect, HOLC’s and the Federal Housing Administration’s
use of that risk calculation system allowed racial housing discrimination to be
institutionalized in determining areas of greatest risk to be avoided in
lending and federal mortgage insurance (Hillier 2003). The FHA also created a
“Model” racially restrictive deed covenant and required it to be used as
a condition for obtaining FHA financing (Gotham 2000). In other words, HOLC and
FHA identified blacks as the mortgage risk to be avoided at
all costs; which is how risk in mortgage loans became racialized and how that
racialization was spread throughout the national banking and insurance systems.
The FHA not only used redlining to identify areas where it refused to insure
mortgages to black and poor applicants but also refused to insure mortgages for
whites who lived too close to black areas (Jackson 1985; Mahoney 1995; Massey
and Denton 1998; Rothstein 2017).
R.
State and local laws that restricted black
American’s right to own and lease property, conduct business, and move freely through
public spaces in cities ensured blacks lived separate lives from whites in
areas characterized by dilapidated and deteriorated housing typically without or
with limited indoor plumbing and with minimal urban services (Jackson 1985).
S.
Restrictive racial covenants were recommended by
the FHA to housing developers even after the Supreme Court declared them illegal;
the national real estate industry (National Association of Real Estate Boards
and later the National Association of Realtors) used those covenants until
1977, when it was sued by the Justice Department and forced to abandon that
racially discriminatory technique. It is important to note that as early as
1924 NAREB had adopted and enforced a new Code of Ethics that made it an ethical
requirement
for member real estate agents or brokers to discriminate based on race and ethnicity.
T.
On May 24, 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court
unanimously refused to hear Corrigan v. Buckley (1926), thus upholding
private racially restrictive residential covenants and ensuring more than four
decades of legal, racially motivated housing discrimination throughout the U.S.
As examples of the widespread nature of racially restrictive covenants, by the
1940s about 85 percent of the housing in Detroit and between 75 to 80 percent
of Chicago housing was subject to such covenants (Satter 2010; Sugrue 1996).
Effectively, that meant until the Supreme Court’s 1968 Jones v. Alfred H. 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 hundreds of
thousand 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 (Satter 2010). That situation
still exists in heavily racially segregated cities like Milwaukee (Eligon and
Gebeloffaug 2016).
U.
The FHA’s underwriting manual required a
determination about the presence of “'incompatible racial or social groups”
(Schill and Wachter 1995; Tillotson 2014). If people of color lived in an
otherwise majority white neighborhood, they were literally classified as
nuisances to be avoided along with “stables” and “pig pens.” FHA regulations
and guidance urged developers, bankers, and local government to use zoning
ordinances, restrictive covenants, and even physical barriers (concrete walls)
to protect racial homogeneity by excluding blacks from areas in which new
housing was to be built (Rothstein 2017).
V.
In 1935, to get enough votes to pass the federal
Social Security Bill, President Roosevelt cut deals with conservative Southern
Democrats. Consequently, when the Act was passed it excluded farm workers and
domestic workers from accruing benefits. At that time, most blacks lived in the
South, were illiterate, and possessed few skills other than agricultural or
domestic. As a result, two-thirds of black Americans were intentionally
prevented by law from receiving Social Security retirement benefits.
W.
In 1940, Congress passed the Lanham Act, which
financed housing for workers in defense industries. But, in many cities only
housing for whites was built and in others the housing for blacks was
segregated, even in cities that already had racially integrated residential
neighborhoods (Rothstein 2017).
X.
In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson segregated federal
government agencies, including work places, toilets, and dining areas. Many federal
jobs held by blacks were reduced in status; others were simply eliminated.
Segregation in the federal government persisted until 1941, when President Roosevelt,
under great pressure from noted civil rights leaders Bayard Rustin and A.
Philip Randolph, issued Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination
in the federal government and in private businesses with defense contracts. During
World War I, the American military was segregated into all-white or all-blacks
units, typically with separate, segregated facilities. That segregation
continued throughout WWII until 1948, when President Truman issued Executive
Order 9981 that mandated equality of treatment and opportunity in the U.S.
military regardless of race. Various forms of racial discrimination continued
in the military until the Korean War and in the Veterans Administration for
many years with regard to equal access to medical treatment and educational
benefits provided by the GI Bill.
Y.
The racially restrictive practices detailed
above created a system in which home buyers and sellers, realtors, bankers,
insurers, and land developers worked in concert with federal government regulations
and laws 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 critical post-war suburban
expansion period that all but exploded into existence when military veterans
returned after WWII, the HOLC, FHA, FNMA, Veterans Administration, and private
banks used redlining to systematically exclude homeowners in black
neighborhoods from securing federally-backed mortgages and home improvement
loans (Seitles 1998) and required new suburban housing
developments to be uniformly white before investments would be made or insured (Mahoney
1995). Between 1934 and 1950, three out of five homes purchased in the United
States were financed by the FHA; less than two percent of those loans were made
to non-white buyers (Seitles 1998). By 1948, 85 percent of all new residential
developments in the U.S. were racially restricted (Freund 2007), which meant
that for all practical purposes only new subdivisions built exclusively for
whites were eligible for federal mortgage insurance and for the equity building
and wealth creation that came with homeownership.
Z.
The complex system of legal racial exclusions, including
Supreme Court decisions that permitted racial segregation and discrimination,
segregated government housing, housing agency regulations that supported home
loans only for whites, redlining by banks and insurance firms and real estate
companies, and racially restrictive covenants that forced blacks to live in
inner city ghettos prevented an entire class of Americans from building wealth
through real estate investments that would appreciate in value, from borrowing
on their equity, from being able to pass that accumulated wealth on to their
children, or from leveraging that wealth into the ability to leave substandard housing
and move to a nicer house in a better location (see Sharkey 2013). That
systemic exclusion, forced ghettoization, blocked mobility, and income
stagnation account for an enormous part of today’s gap between the wealth of
whites and that of blacks (in 2016, the median wealth of white households was
$171,000, or ten times the wealth of black households, $17,600; Kochhar and Cilluffo
2017).
Reflections on Race in America
Although white Democrats are reputed
to be freer from racial animosity than white Republicans, the gap is not nearly
as great as many liberals may want to believe. In 2014, Silver and McCann found
that an index of negative racial attitudes (constructed from an averaged
response to eight General Social Survey questions) stood at 27 percent for
white Republicans and 19 percent for white Democrats; a similar but slightly different
measure put negative racial attitudes at 22 percent for white Democrats and 26
percent for white Republicans, a distinction without a difference. The point is
simple: neither of the major political parties can claim their members are free
of racial bias.
The race issue is complicated as many
Americans are convinced white people are being discriminated against by
government, making anti-white bias a more significant issue for them than
discrimination against blacks, which they discount or even deny. Many of those
whites reject structural or institutional racism as a cause of racial inequities
and put the “blame” on government programs they contend destroy black
initiative and independence. For many of those whites, the causes of black-white
disparities in terms of equality are inappropriate levels of personal effort and
responsibility on the part of blacks and black American culture that is
deficient in many significant ways.
Millions of white Americans also prefer
not to think about or discuss racial issues and are convinced that whatever the
problems are they don’t affect them because they aren’t prejudiced thus aren’t responsible
for racial issues that may affect society.
If most whites wanted to live in
racially integrated neighborhoods, as they claim in national polls, little to no
urban/suburban segregation would exist; but since racially segregated residential
areas are common features of the landscape, the most likely conclusion is that the
far greater majority of whites have no genuine desire to live in neighborhoods where
blacks constitute a significant number (Kryson and Crowder 2017; Kye 2018; Lichter
et al. 2015; Mahoney 1995; Sugrue 2014).
The black-white wealth gap is huge (on
average white wealth is about ten times that of blacks) and demonstrates no
signs of lessening. It doesn’t help that home equity constitutes the vast
majority of black wealth, assets that cannot easily be tapped for medical
expenses, home repairs, food and clothing, or college tuition. In addition, many
black families are so poor their net worth approaches zero and for some is
negative (Hamilton et al. 2015). Understanding the racial wealth gap and how it
came about requires understanding government policies and programs that kept
black incomes low and white incomes high throughout most of the 20th Century. And
that means not only de jure segregation that denied blacks the right to live in
areas with new homes that could appreciate in value and thus grow their wealth
but also the decades-long government-supported dual labor market discrimination
that denied blacks access to federal programs and positions as well as to
private enterprise and labor union employment that paid well (Rothstein 2017).
Black Americans’ fear and mistrust of
police is the result of lived experience. One critical source of black
frustration results from the inability of far too many whites to understand or
even to acknowledge the existence or the subtleties of modern racism (Fulwood
1996).
One must never forget,
underestimate, or ignore America’s nearly bottomless capacity for
self-deception on racial issues. As an example, we, as a nation, have never
demanded that corporate America answer for its overtly racist and government-supported
behavior that enabled and enforced America’s culture of white dominance by
restricting black access to jobs, job-related promotions and advancement,
restaurants, hotels, loans, insurance, private schools, etc. (Blackmon 2008;
Rothstein 2017).
Perhaps the one thing I know with
certainty on the topic of racial polarization is America as a nation has failed
to address three plus centuries of white subordination of blacks. Those with
inquiring minds may want to ask two critical questions: “Why has that happened?”
And, “From what arises our unwillingness to demand that government, which
actively worked with individual and cultural white racism to discriminate
against blacks, exercise the means whereby the long-standing adverse effects of
systemic racism can be remedied?” Those questions deserve serious consideration
and honest answers. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting.
As David Shipler has written so much
better than I: “Everywhere I have looked, I have seen a country where Blacks
and Whites are strangers to each other” (Shipler 1997, p. x).
Concluding Thoughts
Knowledge of American history,
including the brutal conditions of slavery and the nature of state-sponsored Jim
Crow terrorism, has not changed the hearts and minds of whites whose attitudes
regarding blacks range from indifference to hostility, of whites who deny the
existence of racial discrimination, of whites who claim to be “race-neutral”
and “colorblind” about race, or of whites who desire to live only with their
own kind. Although Americans still aspire to the great heights embedded in our
Founding Documents, they cannot agree on how to heal the persistent and
self-inflected wounds of race or on even if those wounds actually exist or are
figments of a warped liberal imagination. Today, numerous polls show white
Americans who claim to be open to integration are in the majority. But reality paints
a far different picture: our cities, suburbs, neighborhoods, schools, and
churches are segregated. Changing that situation seems not to be the concern of
government, society, or supposedly integration-minded whites. Our principles
and racial practices remain in conflict. That wicked problem is one our
Founders would recognize immediately.
Our present condition, where nearly
65 percent of Americans believe racism remains a major problem in our society,
demonstrates the uncomfortable truth that recognizing a problem but doing nothing
to ameliorate it doesn’t result in change. Nor does pretending that that pain
is in the past and blacks should get over it and move on because what’s over is
over. Nor does whites holding up their hands in innocence while righteously
proclaiming no racial group should be given preference under the law, as if the
wounds inflicted on black Americans by federal, state, and local governments
and a racially prejudiced white culture should be ignored or shrugged off with
indifference as unintended adverse consequences irrelevant to today’s America. Too
bad, seems to be the attitude of millions of whites who are doing fine since
those injustices didn’t hurt them or their ancestors.
Here’s a quick synopsis of how we
got to where we are today. Starting with the Founders and continuing through
the 1970s and beyond, a consensus to maintain white privilege permeated the
country. From Boston to Seattle, from Miami to Los Angeles, from New Orleans to
the Twin Cities and all cities in between, whites were united in the determination
to ensure members of their race stayed in control as blacks and others were
subjugated and segregated as inferior lower castes, unworthy of the rights and
privileges guaranteed to all in the Constitution.
Members of that white dominance consensus
included the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress, the Department of Justice, the federal
agencies responsible for racist housing programs, the segregated armed forces, Veterans
Administration, Social Security Administration, state and local governments
that created the peonage/debt slavery and convict leasing system that falsely
imprisoned blacks throughout the South, state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism, state
and local governments that forced blacks to live in ghettos where substandard
housing and schools were the rule, state and local governments that passed and
enforced exclusionary zoning to keep the poor and minorities at bay, developers
of all-white suburbs, national and state banks, the insurance industry, and the
real estate industry and its National Association of Real Estate Boards that
enforced racially restrictive covenants, etc. The list goes on and on. It took that
vast national conspiracy nearly one hundred years to almost completely isolate
the races, forcing blacks into deteriorated and dilapidated inner city ghettos with
substandard schools while subsidizing whites in all-white neighborhoods with
well-funded schools, producing today’s racially polarized America.
The actions of federal housing
agencies and allied banks, real estate firms, and insurance companies with
regard to supporting home mortgages for whites and for white-only subdivisions
combined with government-supported employment discrimination against black
Americans ushered into existence the largest transformation of Americans into a
stable national middle-class characterized by sustained wealth that defined our
country well into the 21st Century. The tragedy is that massive increase in
wealth was built on a white-only foundation that excluded black Americans.
Despite the highly vaunted progress we have made on racial issues in the last
seventy plus years, as a nation we remain locked in a fundamental moral conflict
over high-minded Constitutional principles and real world racial practices
(Fair Housing Justice Center 2018, Rothstein 2017).
We have to ask ourselves: is our
nation trending toward a genuine post-racial future or toward persistent racial
polarization? Consider the following: President Obama’s very citizenship was denied by his
political opponents; a Republican Senate candidate compared Michelle Obama to a
chimpanzee; conservative TV actress Roseanne Barr posted a racist tweet in 2018
claiming that Valerie Jarrett, an African-American senior adviser to President Barack
Obama, was an ape; brown immigrants are categorized by President Trump as terrifying
“others” infused with disease and innate criminality; and where in 2004 and
2012 the overwhelmingly majority of white Alabamans voted to keep the racist
state constitutional ban that prevented white and black children from attending
school together. The answer to the above question is obvious as is the
indisputable fact that the far greater majority of whites choose to live
segregated lives and have no lasting personal relationships with blacks
(diAngelo 2018 and 2019).
If the above examples are not enough
to persuade, consider that in an interview with the New York Times in January 2019 a white Republican Congressman
wondered how the term “white supremacy” could be offensive, and in 2018 in his
hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, a black medical doctor, Naval Academy
graduate, and retired Navy medical officer who honorably served two active duty
tours in Afghanistan was denied admission to a private, all-white social club.
Will those Americans who claim to be
“race-neutral” and “colorblind” about race ever open themselves to historical
evidence of more than a hundred years of governmental and cultural suppression
of the property and human rights of blacks, recognize the moral conflicts embedded
in their beliefs, and become part of the effort to resolve persistent problems
like the racial wealth gap or racial polarization? Although I am not optimistic
given the current political environment, recent research (Broockman and Kalla
2016) on reducing intergroup prejudices showed that a brief intervention technique
lowered anti-transgender prejudice for three months, hinting that similar
intervention may work on racial prejudice. But, given our history of failing to
address the quintessential American incompatibility between principles and racial
practice, I remain pessimistic.
The white Americans who are closet racists,
or who are indifferent to the struggles of blacks to achieve equality, or who believe
treating blacks differently under the law is wrong have exhibited no desire to
address racial discrimination and polarization and are determined their elected
representatives will do nothing to remedy what they refuse to believe are government-supported
injustices. Thus, the wounds black Americans have suffered as consequences of
governments at all levels acting in concert with a culture of white domination to
deny their constitutionally guaranteed property and human rights will continue
untreated and will intensify. As long as that inequity defines our status quo, the
future of America is that of a nation locked in irreconcilable conflict.
Suggested Readings
Although I often despair in private
of Americans reading anything on the nature, origin, and real world
consequences of our racial conflicts, here I take the optimistic step of
listing and commenting, albeit briefly, on various important and even several outstanding
sources that address those conflicts objectively and not polemically. For those
who might not be enamored with academic literature, the first five listings are
from popular but very different online journals, Vox, Chicago Magazine, The Smithsonian, FiveThirtyEight, and The Guardian. The first of those
listings is about white, suburban communities and integration. The second is a
discussion of how local techniques to keep blacks separate from whites were
pioneered in Chicago. The third is an interview with Richard Rothstein, a
historian who investigates educational and racial issues. The fourth article is
by the well-known pollster, Nate Silver, and a colleague who analyze numerous
national polls to determine whether white Republicans are more racist than
white Democrats. The fifth article, by Robin diAngelo, examines the role whites
being nice to blacks plays in not bringing racism to the table and by
reinforcing white solidarity and white silence on race. The remaining sources
in the list are largely by academics in various fields specializing in American
racial issues. If a listing is not annotated, it simply is a reference in the
text.
Popular Sources
Alvin Chang. Vox;
July 31, 2018. “White America Is Quietly Self-Segregating.” Available
online: https://www.vox.com/2017/1/18/14296126/white-segregated-suburb-neighborhood-cartoon
Whet Moser. Chicago
Magazine. March 31, 2017. “Chicago Isn’t Just Segregated, It Basically
Invented Modern Segregation.” Available online:
https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/March-2017/Why-Is-Chicago-So-Segregated/
Katie Nodjimbadem. Smithsonian.com;
May 30, 2017. “The Racial Segregation of American Cities Was Anything But
Accidental.”
Available
online: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-government-intentionally-racially-segregated-american-cities-180963494/
Nate Silver and Allison McCann. 2014. “Are White
Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats?” FiveThirtyEight (April 30, 2014). Available online:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-white-republicans-more-racist-than-white-democrats/
Robin diAngelo. The
Guardian; January 16, 2019. White People Assume Niceness Is the Answer to
Racial Inequality. It's Not. Available online:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/16/racial-inequality-niceness-white-people?utm_term=RWRpdG9yaWFsX0Jlc3RPZkd1YXJkaWFuT3BpbmlvblVTLTE5MDExNg%3D%3D&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=BestOfGuardianOpinionUS&CMP=opinionus_email
Mostly Academic Sources
Aaronson, Daniel, Daniel Hartley, and Bhashkar
Mazumder. 2018. The Effects of the 1930s HOLC “Redlining” Maps. Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Working
Paper No. WP-2017-12; revised August 2018. Technical analysis of how HOLC
created residential security maps for over 200 cities to grade the riskiness of
mortgage lending to residential neighborhoods. The authors trace the effects of
those maps by linking geocoded HOLC maps to both Census and modern credit
bureau data. They conclude by stating: “Our results provide strongly suggestive
evidence that the HOLC maps had a causal and persistent effect on the
development of neighborhoods through credit access.” Available online:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3038733
Blackmon, Douglas A. 2008. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the
Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday. Blackmon, the Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau
chief, reveals a sordid, morally repugnant, and one of the most shameful
chapters in American history: the neo-slavery, human trafficking/convict
leasing system organized by Southern state and local governments after the
Civil War. This little known facet of state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism in the
Deep South involved state laws that were passed specifically to subjugate over
a hundred thousand black Americans who were arbitrarily arrested for trivial
and even nonsensical pseudo-offenses, charged enormous fines as well as the
costs of their own arrests, sold by county sheriffs as forced laborers to industrial
operations and plantations, and treated as sub-humans. This book is a terrible
shock to the conscience of all who believe in liberty, the rule of law, and
human rights. A MUST read.
Broockman, David, and Joshua Kalla. 2016. Durably
Reducing Transphobia: A Field Experiment on Door-To-Door Canvassing, Science
352(6282): 220-224. Available
online: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6282/220.full
Brooks, Richard, and Carol Rose. 2013. Saving the Neighborhood: Racially
Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press. This
penetrating legal history documents the rise, fall, and persistence of racially
restrictive residential covenants by whites to maintain racial segregation in
the mid-20th Century. The authors argue that local political jurisdictions and
white neighborhood organizations turned to racially restrictive covenants when
large populations of black migrants from the South threated to upset already
existing social norms of racial segregation in urban middle-class
neighborhoods. This excellent, well-written book targets a non-academic
audience.
Daniel, Pete R. 1972. The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969. Champaign,
IL: University of Illinois.
DiAngelo, Robin.
2018. White Fragility: Why It's so Hard
for White People to Talk about Racism. New York: Beacon Press.
Eligon, John
and Robert Gebeloffaug. August 20, 2016. New
York Times. “Affluent and black, and still trapped by segregation.” Available
online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/milwaukee-segregation-ealthy-black-families.html?_r=0
Fair Housing Justice Center. 2018. Building the
Beloved Community Interfaith Initiative. A great introduction to racial discrimination
throughout American history. Available
online:
http://www.bbcfairhousing.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/History-1.1.pdf
Feagin, Joe R. 2014. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations.
New York: Routledge; 3rd Edition. Feagin ‘s research into the
intersections of race and power in the U.S. presents an unvarnished view of the
conflicted worlds we live in regarding race, focusing on issues involving
racism, white racial frames, and government policies that explicitly or
implicitly facilitate systemic racism.
Foner, Eric. 2004. Give
Me Liberty! An American History. New York: W.W. Norton. Foner’s
historical research focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and 19th
Century America. He has served as president of the Organization of American
Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American
Historians. His book focuses on the social conditions that made freedom
possible, and the shifting meaning of freedom from our Colonial Era to the 21st
Century. Foner is a distinguished professor of history at Columbia University.
Foner, Eric. 2010. The
Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W.W. Norton. Foner’s
broad-ranging knowledge of 19th Century U.S. history enables him to create a
detailed account of Lincoln’s often contradictory attitudes toward slavery,
which he opposed but also regarded black slaves as physically and mentally
inferior to whites. Foner puts into context Lincoln’s now repugnant beliefs
that blacks, even if freed, could never live on equal terms with whites and
should be deported to Africa or Central America to rid the country of an
intractable problem.
Freund, David M. P. 2007. Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban
America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fulwood III, Sam. 1996. Waking from the Dream: My Life in the Black Middle Class. New York:
Anchor Books. In
the journalist Sam Fulwood’s autobiography, he describes coming to
consciousness as a black person with great potential for success in mainstream
white society. But in contrast to that expectation, his adult life experiences
proved disheartening. If you read this book you’ll discover that Fulwood attributes
his anger to the inability of whites to recognize or to acknowledge the power or
the effects of modern racism.
Gotham, Keith F. 2000. Urban Space, Restrictive
Covenants and the Origins of Racial Residential Segregation in a U.S. City,
1900-1950. International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research 24(3): 616-633.
Hamilton, Darrick, Tressie McMillan Cottom, William
Darity, Jr., Alan A. Aja, and Carolyn Ash. 2014. Still We Rise: The Continuing
Case for America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The American Prospect 25(4). Available
online:
https://prospect.org/article/why-black-colleges-and-universities-still-matter
Hillier Amy E. 2003. Redlining and the Home Owners’
Loan Corporation. Journal of Urban
History 29(4): 394-420. The article analyzes the impact of the residential
security maps created by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) during the
1930s on residential mortgages in Philadelphia. Abstract only available online.
Jackson, Kenneth T. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New
York: Oxford University Press. If you want to know how federal government policies
created a country of largely white suburbs, kept blacks penned up in central
city ghettos, and why whites on average have high per capita wealth while
blacks have low per capita wealth, this extremely well-documented and
well-written history is for you. If you decide to read two sources on this
list, Jackson’s should be one. A terrific MUST read.
Kochhar, Rakesh, and Anthony Cilluffo. November 1,
2017. How Wealth Inequality has Changed in the U.S. since the Great Recession,
by Race, Ethnicity and Income. Pew
Research Center, November 1, 2017. Available online: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/01/how-wealth-inequality-has-changed-in-the-u-s-since-the-great-recession-by-race-ethnicity-and-income/
Kryson, Maria and Kyle Crowder. 2017. Cycle of Segregation: Social Processes and
Residential Stratification. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Even when
predominantly white suburbs are surrounded by more racially and ethnically
diverse communities, the authors found that white families aren't as
comfortable moving into those nearby areas and that “growing concentrations of
non-white minority residents in nearby tracts significantly increase the
likelihood that whites will leave their neighborhood of residence.” They
conclude: “Our results suggest that white flight in its most basic form remains
a defining feature of the American urban landscape.” An informative work with high
relevance.
Kye, Samuel H. 2018. The Persistence of White Flight
in Middle-Class Suburbia. Social Science
Research 72: 38-52. Kye
focuses on white flight in suburban neighborhoods in the country's 150 largest
metropolitan areas. In his research Kye found that, “relative to poorer
neighborhoods, white flight becomes systematically more likely in middle-class
neighborhoods at higher thresholds of black, Hispanic, and Asian population
presence.” Meaning white flight is real and not imagined. Sadly, except for the
abstract, this on-target article is not available online.
Lewinnek, Elaine. 2014. The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of
American Sprawl. New York: Oxford University Press. Lewinnek, an
urban historian, writes about the various and many factors that were part of the
formation of the first suburbs and the struggle of the real-estate lobby to
secure single-race, single-use residential spaces to lessen risk and ensure
property values would increase, especially in suburbs built exclusively for
working whites. Consequently, when the Great Migration of blacks from the Deep
South got under way, Lewinnek demonstrates Chicagoans had both the motive and
the means to segregate the city and its new suburbs.
Lichter, Daniel T., Domenico Parisi, and Michael C.
Taquino. 2015. Toward a New Macro-Segregation? Decomposing Segregation within
and between Metropolitan Cities and Suburbs. American Sociological Review 80(4): 844-873. According to
principal author Lichter, “You've got one group of white Americans who are
comfortable with diversity and integrating with minorities, including blacks
and Hispanics and Asians, and another America that is hunkering down in
overwhelmingly white areas in overwhelmingly white places—and you see them
moving further out.” Lichter also found that whites are leaving areas that are
diversifying and are being replaced by blacks. Behind a paywall but well worth
it if you can obtain a copy.
Mahoney, Martha R. 1995. Segregation,
Whiteness, and Transformation. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 143(5):
1659-1684. This
extraordinary article examines a factor in housing segregation most of us never
question or even think of: white preference for other whites in which vacancies
in integrated residential neighborhoods created by whites leaving for areas
that have higher percentages of white residents are filled by blacks rather
than whites. In that scenario, racial transition is a naturalized process, in
which white preference for white neighbors is less examined in social science
research than hostility to black neighbors. Available online:
http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3577&context=penn_law_review.
Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. 1998. American Apartheid: Segregation and the
Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The authors
demonstrate that is race and class are considered together, blacks face levels
of segregation significantly higher than any other group in American history.
Massey and
Denton determined a combination of prejudice and discrimination force blacks to
remain in segregated communities, a situation they claim is analogous to
apartheid. A MUST read.
Myrdal, Gunnar (with the assistance of Richard Sterner
and Arnold M. Rose). 1944. An American
Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York, Harper and
Brothers. A
great historical resource written by a noted Swedish economist, university
professor, and later Nobel Prize winner (1974). However, contrary to what
Myrdal wrote and apparently believed, Americans were not and are not a common
folk united by egalitarian national ideals that superseded racial hostility.
Witness our present condition. The book, published in 1944, may not be readily
available, so here’s a link to an excellent online background review and
summary issued by the foundation responsible for the study: https://www.carnegie.org/media/filer_public/98/65/9865c794-39d9-4659-862e-aae1583278a8/ccny_cresults_2004_americandilemma.pdf
Oshinsky, David M. 1997. Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. New
York: Free Press.
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.
Rothstein, Richard. 2017. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated
America. New York: Liveright Publishing (division of W.W. Norton). As someone who
has spent the greater part of his professional life as a university professor
and an urban planner, it is my opinion that Rothstein’s book is easily one of
the most critical sources of information on how legislation, regulations, programs,
and policies passed and enforced by federal, state, and local governments systematically
denied blacks the free exercise of their constitutionally guaranteed property
and civil rights by segregating them in central city ghettos while subsidizing
white flight into white-only suburbs, thus creating a system that made the gap between
white and black wealth inevitable. Rothstein takes great pains to document how
those adverse effects remain in place today and will be in place in the future
unless that government-enforced racial discrimination and its adverse effects
are ameliorated. A brief summary can be found online at: https://reason.com/archives/2019/01/21/washington-forced-segregation. If you are going to read only one of the sources on this list, READ
THIS ONE or Satter’s Family Properties.
Satter, Beryl. 2010. Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate
Transformed Chicago and Urban America. New York: Metropolitan Books
(Macmillan). This
incredible, eye-opening book serves up heartbreaking personal stories (Satter’s
father was a crusading attorney who fought all his professional life for the
property rights of poor Chicago blacks) as well as painstaking legal and
historical research into the brutal reality of greedy real-estate speculators
and racist Chicago housing laws. This book is an urban history of how raw
financial exploitation ruled the roost for decades. A MUST read that Ta-Nahisi
Coates credits as the basis of his article in The Atlantic on racial reparations. If you are going to read only
one of the sources on this list, READ THIS ONE or Rothstein’s The Color of Law.
Schill, Michael H. and Susan M. Wachter. 1995. The
Spatial Bias of Federal Housing Law and Policy: Concentrated Poverty in Urban
America. University of Pennsylvania Law
Review 143: 1285-1342. The authors reported that the FHA's underwriting
manual required a determination about the presence of “incompatible racial or
social groups.” People of color were literally classified as nuisances to be
avoided along with “stables” and “pig pens.” Another eye-opener. Available
online: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=3566&context=penn_law_review
Seitles, Marc. 2018. The Perpetuation of Residential
Racial Segregation in America: Historical Discrimination, Modern Forms of Exclusion,
and Inclusionary Remedies. Florida State
University Journal of Land Use and Environmental Law: 14(1): 89-124,
Article 3. To be honest, I
selected this article not because of its sharp focus on the causes and effects
of housing segregation but because it identifies doable ways to remedy those
adverse effects, in this case inclusionary zoning techniques. Available online:
https://ir.law.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1191&context=jluel
Sharkey, Patrick. 2013. Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward
Racial Equality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shipler, David K. 1997. A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. A
review by Publishers Weekly calls this book timely and perceptive, and it is
all that and much more as Shipler carefully lays bare the attitudes dividing
whites from blacks. Another MUST read that is full of
first-class information, much of which was collected via face-to-face
interviews with blacks and whites.
Sugrue, Thomas J. 2014. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.
Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press. In this incisive book, Sugrue documents the
structural roots of urban poverty and inequality found in Detroit today that were
present in the 1940s and 1950s. A very detailed urban history, the book is
another MUST read.
Tillotson, Amanda. 2014. Race, Risk and Real Estate:
The Federal Housing Administration and Black Homeownership in the Post World
War II Home Ownership State, DePaul Journal
for Social Justice 8(1): 25-52. Tillotson’s research on race, property,
and risk offers this targeted conclusion: “the FHA was created in a financial
and legal environment that was pervaded by a racialized notion of risk. The FHA
did not originate the notion that race exacerbated lending risks, but it
legitimized and reproduced these understandings at a critical period in the
history of American home ownership.” Available online: https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1099&context=jsj
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.
Relevant Legal Cases and Laws
Listed by decision
dates
Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856). In this infamous case, the
Court held that slaves “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.” Available
online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/60/393/
Blyew v. United States, 80 U.S. 13 Wall. 581 581 (1871). In this case, 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 since
those acts were the province of the states, not the federal government.
Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/80/581/.
Minor v.
Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875). In this
decision, the Supreme Court held that the right to vote was not inherent to
being a citizen, and that states could decide which citizens could vote,
meaning in the real world it was A-okay for Southern and Border states to not
let blacks vote. Available online:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/88/162/
United States v.
Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542
(1875). The Supreme Court held
that the federal government had no power to protect newly freed slaves from
crimes such as murder since those acts were under the authority of the states,
not the federal government. Available online:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/92/542/case.html
Civil Rights
Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883)
(Consolidating: United States v. Stanley,
United States v. Ryan, United States v. Nichols, United States v. Singleton, and Robinson and wife v. Memphis &
Charleston R.R. Co. Available
online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/109/3/
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). This Supreme Court decision
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 noted that “in the nature of things it
[the 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 as
law for the next 70 years. Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/163/537/
Williams v.
Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213
(1898). In 1890, Mississippi
adopted a new constitution that disenfranchised nearly all black citizens
through literacy tests that the ever obliging U.S. Supreme Court found to be
legal in this decision. Available online:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/170/213/
Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917). In this decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down municipal
racially restrictive zoning ordinances and property covenants as
unconstitutional. However, real estate agents quickly wrote “codes of ethics”
that included bans on selling homes to African Americans (and other people of
color) outside of black ghettos. In many cities, white residents responded to
the arrival of black families with private racial covenants—legal language in
private property deeds that barred any subsequent owner from selling to anyone
but whites. Available online:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/245/60/case.html.
Takao Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178
(1922). The
Supreme Court in this decision 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 this
specific case, certainly not Japanese. Available online:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/260/178/case.html
United States v. Bhagat
Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204
(1923). In this case the Court
ruled that Hindus were not Caucasians as was commonly understood and thus were
not "free white persons" and were racially ineligible for
citizenship. Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/261/204/case.html
Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323 (1926). The legality of racial
restrictive property covenants was affirmed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
in in this case that such covenants constituted private and not municipal
actions and therefore were not subject to the Due Process clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment. It wasn’t until Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of
1968 that racial housing covenants were finally outlawed after more than four
decades of legal, racially motivated housing discrimination throughout the U.S.
Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/271/323/.
Hirabayashi v.
United States, 320 U.S. 81
(1943) and Korematsu v. United States,
323 U.S. 214 (1944). In these two linked decisions,
more than a hundred thousand Japanese-American citizens and legal residents
were forced by Presidential order and the U.S. military to relocate to
concentration camps where they were incarcerated until the end of WWII as the
Supreme Court intentionally refused to consider the Constitutional issue of
imprisoning a known class of U.S. citizens without due process of law.
Hirabayashi is available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/320/81/case.html.
Korematsu is available online:
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/323/214/case.html
Shelley v.
Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948). In a unanimous
opinion, the Supreme Court held that although racially restrictive real estate
covenants were not per se illegal, since they did not involve state action,
courts could not enforce them under the Fourteenth Amendment. Private parties
may abide by the terms of such a covenant, but they may not seek judicial
enforcement of such a covenant, as that would be an impermissible state action.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/334/1/
Loving v.
Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967). In this long overdue landmark
decision the Court unanimously struck down all state laws (“anti-miscegenation”
statutes) banning interracial marriage. It’s important to note that in the
1950s, more than half the states—including every Southern state—still restricted
marriage by racial classifications. In 2000, Alabama became the last state to
officially remove an 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-marriage. Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/388/1/
Milliken v.
Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974). In this
decision, the Supreme Court upheld the lower courts' finding that the Detroit
public school system was segregated de jure, but reversed the lower court's holding
that the metropolitan desegregation remedy was both mandated by the
Constitution and lay within the equity powers of federal district courts.”
Available online:
https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1082&context=hlr
Naturalization Act of 1790. Available
online: http://rs6.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=001/llsl001.db&recNum=226
Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14 Statutes 27–30. Available
online: https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/39th-congress/session-1/c39s1ch31.pdf
Civil Rights Act of 1875, 18 Statutes 335-337. Available
online: http://legisworks.org/sal/18/stats/STATUTE-18-Pg335a.pdf
Chinese Exclusion Act. 1882 (An act to inaugurate
certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese). Session I, Chapter 126; 22
Statute 58. 47th Congress; approved May 6, 1882. Available online: http://library.uwb.edu/guides/usimmigration/1882_chinese_exclusion_act.html.
McCarran-Walter Act, 166 Statute 163, 8 U. S. C. §§
1101-503 (1952). Available
online:
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-66/pdf/STATUTE-66-Pg163.pdf; for a
historical explanation of the context of the Act, see: U.S. Department of
State, Office of the Historian: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952
(The McCarran-Walter Act). Available online:
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/immigration-act.
