American Apartheid: Segregation Outside the South, 1920-1960 (2024)

Preview

In the 1920s, the migration of Black Americans from the South to the rest of the country increased dramatically. They sought to escape a region where slavery had been replaced with a fear-based, neo-slavery regime of subordination, poverty, segregated substandard education, lack of economic opportunity, political exclusion, and violence, reinforced by the Jim Crow legal system. This is known as the “Great Migration” and lasted until 1970.

This module looks at the ways cities and communities across the country responded to the arrival of many thousands of Southern-born Black Americans after 1920, and the conditions in which Black Americans lived outside the South in the mid-twentieth century. It uses the term “Apartheid,” a term for segregation first used in South Africa, to suggest a deeply rooted regime for the purpose of separating Whites from Black and other non-White people—relying on color-based discrimination in laws, policies, practices, and attitudes. American Apartheid affected Black Americans generally by subjecting them to a regime in which it could be very difficult to accumulate wealth, especially through home ownership—a dramatic inequality that continues today. It was most stark and profoundly troubling in the concentrations of Black American communities in urban areas often characterized by joblessness and poverty.

©2019, Robert C. Eager for The RECONCILIATION EDUCATION PROJECT, Inc.

Module Contents (for purposes of navigation)

Activity I: The Great Migration, 1900-1930

Activity II: Redlining and A Raisin in the Sun

Activity III: Redlining and Its Effects Today

Activity IV: Housing and Civil Rights

Activity V: Taking Informed Action

Appendix I: Documents

Appendix II: California State Content Standards and C3 Framework Links

American Apartheid: Segregation

Outside the South (1920-1960)

Purpose

Throughout American history, land and home ownership have been foundations for family security and cohesion, wealth accumulation, and social advancement. The American legal system has been integral to the achievement of these goals for most Americans, but often not for Black Americans or other communities of color. The 1960s Civil Rights Movement led to some positive changes, but significant inequality continues today. This module primarily examines housing and financing discrimination in urban areas, and its effect on Black families. It also briefly considers how the legal system has undermined property ownership by Black Americans in rural areas, especially in the South.

In the 1920s, the migration of Black Americans from the South to the rest of the country increased dramatically. They sought to escape a region where slavery had been replaced with a fear-based, neo-slavery regime of subordination, poverty, segregated substandard education, lack of economic opportunity, political exclusion, and violence, reinforced by the Jim Crow legal system. This is known as the “Great Migration” and lasted until 1970.

This module looks at the ways cities and communities across the country responded to the arrival of many thousands of Southern-born Black Americans after 1920, and the conditions in which Black Americans lived outside the South in the mid-twentieth century. It uses the term “Apartheid,” a term for segregation first used in South Africa, to suggest a deeply rooted regime for the purpose of separating Whites from Black and other non-White people—relying on color-based discrimination in laws, policies, practices, and attitudes. American Apartheid affected Black Americans generally by subjecting them to a regime in which it could be very difficult to accumulate wealth, especially through home ownership—a dramatic inequality that continues today. It was most stark and profoundly troubling in the concentrations of Black American communities in urban areas often characterized by joblessness and poverty.

The module focuses on housing and real property ownership because of the important role of a home as a basis for economic security, wealth creation, family relationships and stability. The country has a substantial social investment in existing housing and the color-based housing patterns that still result in significant segregation in most cities. A myriad of laws and legal practices have helped to shape American urban areas.

This module poses the question of how to move toward a legal system, housing policies and practices that embody genuine equality, opportunity, and freedom for all and that no longer embed separation by color in our cities and communities. While it does not address the issue of reparations for economic inequalities arising from enslavement and the regime of segregation, it provides facts pertinent to consideration of reparations, and asks students to develop proposals addressing inequalities resulting from segregation.

Plan of Instruction

• Activity I—Historical Activity (one 50-minute class period): The Great Migration, 1900-1930
  • Students analyze the Great Migration out of the South, focusing on reasons for moving, scale of movement, destinations, and the economic and social conditions in receiving cities.

• Activity II – Historical and Developmental Activity (one 50-minute class period): Redlining and A Raisin in the Sun
  • Students examine housing discrimination and segregation, including redlining, promoted by federal, state, and local laws; they consider the play A Raisin in the Sun to understand the human dimension of discriminatory laws and practices.

• Activity III—Historical and Issue Activity (one 50-minute class period): Redlining and Its Effects Today
  • Students use online historical maps to examine redlining and its lasting effects on housing patterns, focusing on a particular city outside the South in 1940, 1970, 2000; students research the geographic and economic impacts of segregated neighborhoods.

• Activity IV—Historical and Issue Activity (one 50-minute class period): Housing and Civil Rights
  • Students consider efforts in the 1960-1970s to address housing segregation by reviewing speeches by President Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and provisions of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 and 1978 Community Reinvestment Act.

• Activity V—Taking Informed Action (one 50-minute class period): Solutions to American Apartheid Today
  • Students brainstorm solutions to the legacies of redlining and draft a letter to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

• Extension Activities may be found at: https://www.ownyourhistory.us/
  • Optional Extension Activity I—Historical and Issue Activity: Safe Travel by Black Americans Using the Green Book

Central Questions

• How can a diverse society that respects difference promote equality?
• To what extent were Black Americans treated differently in housing and home finance, schools, job opportunities, etc., from working class Whites in cities and communities outside the South?
• To what extent were differences for White and non-White Americans due to “law,” including statutes or formal rules enacted by the local, state or federal governments, local government practices and law enforcement, or to non-governmental rules or policies adopted by companies or labor unions, “White privilege” practices, or prejudicial attitudes about Black Americans and other non-Whites?
• What are the lasting effects of these mid-twentieth century color-based laws, policies, practices, and attitudes?
• In the twenty-first century, what are the most effective ways to combat the legacy of this American Apartheid?
• In what ways are you and your family personally affected, either positively or negatively, by this American Apartheid?

Outcomes

• Through the examination of primary sources, African American literature, and an interactive mapping activity, students will investigate the history and current state of urban racial segregation and economic inequality and then brainstorm potential solutions. They will advocate changes that will address the legacy of past discrimination and promote greater equality.

Appendices

• Appendix I: Documents
• Appendix II: California State Content Standards and C3 Framework Links

Background Readings and Resources

Books, Articles, and Plays

• Ron Grossman, “50 Years Ago: MLK's March in Marquette Park Turned Violent, Exposed Hate,” The Chicago Tribune (July 28, 2016)
  • https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-mlk-king-marquette-park-1966-flashback-perspec-0731-md-20160726-story.html
• Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
• Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Racist Housing Policy that Made Your Neighborhood,” The Atlantic (May 22, 2014)
  • https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-racist-housing-policy-that-made-your-neighborhood/371439/
• Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liverwright Publishing Corporation, 2017), vii-14, 215-216.
• Lorie L. Tharps, “The Case for Black with a Capital B,” The New York Times (Nov. 18, 2014)
  • https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/the-case-for-black-with-a-capital-b.html

• William A. Darity, Jr., & A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century, (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), pp. 9 - 27.

Online Readings and Resources

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” Atlantic (2014) (Part I: “So That’s Just One of My Losses”)
  • http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
• Victor Hugo Green, The Green Book Archive (1936-1967), New York Public Library Digital Collections
  • https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-green-book#/?tab=about&scroll=15
• Race: The Power of an Illusion (2003) (documentary excerpt discusses the process of redlining neighborhoods based on race)
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmMs8eQP4T0
• Diane Rehm Show, “Housing Discrimination, Racial Segregation, and Poverty in America,” (Sept. 16, 2015) (podcast excerpt: 0:00 – 9:19)
  • http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-09-16/housing-discrimination-racial-segregation-and-poverty-in-america
• “The Long History and Lasting Legacy of Housing Segregation,” (May 10, 2017) (podcast excerpt: 0:00 – 5:45)
  • http://the1a.org/shows/2017-05-10/the-long-history-and-lasting-legacy-of-housing-segregation

ACTIVITY I: Historical Activity – The Great Migration, 1915-1930

Background:

After World War I, hundreds of thousands of Black Americans left the South and travelled across the country in hopes of finding greater equality, safety, and economic prosperity. While some Black Americans in the South had been able to accumulate small amounts of land, sharecropping and tenant farming poverty were widespread among Southern Blacks. They hoped that outside the South, they could escape a social and economic system based on violence, subordination, and Jim Crow segregation.

These migrations, however, confronted them with new forms of discrimination and unequal opportunities. In cities outside the South, Black Americans confronted racist attitudes, were often barred from well-paying employment, and could often only live in segregated neighborhoods with poor quality housing. Violence at the hands of White residents and police also occurred.

During the 1930s, the newly created Federal Housing Administration (FHA) institutionalized racism by administering discriminatory housing programs and policies across the country, often through an exclusionary process known as “redlining.” In effect, the FHA instituted a set of rules for mortgage lending and housing development that took color and economic status into account. Urban areas with high populations of poor and non-White minorities would not qualify for mortgages or federal housing programs under the FHA’s rules.

Suggested Time Frame: One 50-minute class period.

Key Terms: apartheid; Jim Crow; Great Migration; redlining; housing inequality;

Supporting Questions:

1. What motivated Black Americans to leave the South and migrate to other parts of the United States in the first half of the 20^th century?

Before the Lesson:

1. Review the rise of industries and manufacturing in the North and the draw of jobs in these communities
2. Review the activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920’s in the North and review the Klan’s March on Washington, D.C. in 1925. Was the growth of the Klan in the North a reaction to new migration, or a continued growth nationwide? (Note all of the groups that were opposed by the Klan.)

Procedures:

1. Introduce this module by analyzing the definition of apartheid with students, both in its historical roots of racial segregation in South Africa and its use to describe segregation or discrimination in a variety of situations. Emphasize that this module will consider segregation of Black Americans across the United States.
2. Review with students the economic and social conditions of Black Americans in the South in the final years of the 19^th century.
3. Explain that students will analyze the Great Migration during the first decades of the 20^th century.
   1. Review with students the concept of push and pull factors in migration.
   2. Working in pairs, have students analyze Documents A-C. Call attention to the Optional Document on the 1919 Chicago riots and what it says about the conditions in Chicago, a major destination for the Great Migration.
   3. Have students complete Handout 1: The Great Migration.
4. When finished, have students share their findings from the documents.
   1. In analyzing the maps and graphs, discuss the possible industries, or employment opportunities which would draw Southern migration.
5. Optional Document: Excerpt from Time Magazine Article on Chicago Riots, describing the negative reception Black Americans received outside of the South, may be assigned as homework.

Materials:

• Document A: Overview of the Great Migration
  Document B: Statistics and Map of the Great Migration
• Document C: Excerpt from Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
• Optional Document: Excerpt from Time Magazine Article on Chicago Riots
• Handout 1: The Great Migration

Handout 1: The Great Migration

Working with a partner, analyze Documents A - C (and the Optional Document) and complete the graphic organizer.

ACTIVITY II: Historical and Developmental Activity: Redlining and A Raisin in the Sun

Background:

Since the end of slavery, Black Americans across the South worked hard to advance economically and to achieve security and stability for their families despite racism, segregation, violence, and lack of opportunities. Some were able to acquire land, but the vast majority could not. Those who left the South in the Great Migration took their values of family and habits of hard work to cities in the North and West.

A Raisin in the Sun is an important example of the use of theater to dramatize the lives and options of Black Americans in the face of inequality and discrimination throughout the United States. The play portrays members of the Younger family as they consider whether to use a modest life insurance payment to fund a business opportunity or to buy a better home in a largely White neighborhood. It shows the human dimension of American Apartheid.

Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun during the late 1950s when the American economy boomed and Americans generally looked to the future with optimism. Black Americans, however, were largely excluded from this pervasive prosperity and faced serious obstacles to accumulating any savings or assets, despite hard work and goals of family betterment. While the South still unapologetically embraced Jim Crow segregation, the rest of the country implemented a myriad of laws, policies, programs, and practices based on discrimination and segregation. In this environment, Black American families, like the Youngers, sought to overcome obstacles and work for financial and social advancement.

Suggested Time Frame: One 50-minute class period

Key Terms: push/pull factors; housing inequality;

Supporting Questions:

1. How did urban American Apartheid compare to Southern Jim Crow segregation?
2. How has racism contributed to Apartheid and continued urban crises?
3. To what extent were Black Americans able to become property owners and pass that property (and wealth) to their descendants?
4. To what extent do you think that the Federal Housing Administration and other federal agencies considered the long-term consequences of their policies and programs that created urban segregation and did not address poverty? What alternatives did they have, and why do you think they did not choose these alternatives?
5. In what ways did the U.S. legal system (including laws and policies regarding housing, home finance, home and land ownership, and property inheritance/transfer) contribute to the wealth gap between White and Black Americans that is still very great today?
6. To what extent do you think that racial inequality and economic inequality overlap?
7. What were the policies, programs, or approaches for change advanced by Lorraine Hansberry, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, William Julius Wilson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates? What means for promoting change did each choose?

Before the Lesson:

1. Ensure that the link to the Course Hero summary of A Raisin in the Sun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYtuYHeDvuA) is working. Focus on excerpt 0:00-3:37.

Procedures:

1. Review the Great Migration (including the social and economic status of Black Americans, the reasons for the migration, and the reception of Black Americans in the North).
2. Review the term push/pull as pertaining to migration.
3. Explain that today students will be considering how local laws and policies created obstacles to achieving economic advancement and security through home or land ownership after the Great Migration.
4. Distribute Documents D-G.
5. Working in groups of four, students will read one document from Document D, Document E, Document F, and Document G.
   1. Alternatively, you may do a jigsaw activity. After forming their home groups of four, have students join their Document groups (i.e. all students who were assigned to read Document D in their home group) to read together and analyze each Document. Students then go back to their home groups to share the information. This might give support to students who are struggling with the content.
6. Distribute Handout 2: Housing Policies and Segregation. Have student pairs complete Handout 2 with a partner.
7. When finished reading and Handout 2, hold a class discussion:

1. Why did White communities want to restrict the integration of their neighborhoods? Give specific examples.
2. How did communities legally restrict housing integration? What examples can you cite from the reading?
3. What were (and are) obstacles to continuing ownership of homes or land by Black Americans?
4. What evidence can you cite that these practices are no longer in effect? Or are there other ways these practices are still in effect by tradition, community understandings, or overt behavior? Cite evidence in the readings. (Use the historical thinking skills of contextualization, corroboration, sourcing and close reading for these readings)

1. Emphasize for students the human dimension urban life after the Great Migration. Explain the background to the play A Raisin in the Sun, pointing out that it mirrors the actual experiences of Black Americans.
2. Show the short Course Hero summary video A Raisin in the Sun. See Document H: Raisin in the Sun infographic for a descriptive infographic of the characters and prominent themes from the play.
   1. A Raisin in the Sun Video (excerpt 0:00-3:37): (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYtuYHeDvuA)
3. Hold a brief discussion about the points of views of the characters. How do the actions and emotions of the characters mirror some of the writings you have read today? Be specific and cite evidence.

Materials:

• Document D: Excerpt from Article, “Redlining was Banned 50 Years Ago. It’s Still Hurting Minorities Today”
• Document E: Article, “Why Los Angeles is Still a Segregated City After All These Years”
• Document F: “The Case for Reparations”
• Document G: “Kicked Off the Land”
• Document H: Raisin in the Sun Infographic
• Handout 2: Housing Policies and Segregation
• Video: A Raisin in the Sun Course Hero Summary (excerpt 0:00-3:37)
  • (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYtuYHeDvuA)

Handout 2: Housing Policies, Property Ownership, and Segregation

ACTIVITY III: Historical and Issue Activity—Redlining and Its Effects Today

Background:

In this activity, students will use computers and online programs to determine the extent to which historical redlining and governmental segregation policies continue to affect contemporary American cities. Student groups will be assigned a city to research on the “Mapping Inequality” database and compare it to current demographic maps. Students will then attempt to discern property values in their cities to see if formerly redlined neighborhoods continue to have lower real estate values. This assignment will help students use digital resources to better understand the American experience.

NOTE: As a shorthand, this module will use the word “redlining” not only to apply to lending programs that incorporated segregation, but also to the entire range of federal, state, and local policies and programs that promoted housing segregation.

Suggested Time Frame: One 50-minute class period

Key Terms: redlining; NAREB (National Association of Real Estate Boards); housing inequality;

Supporting Questions:

1. Are the neighborhoods that were “redlined” still largely minority communities? Are the neighborhoods that were given high credit scores mostly White? Have any areas of the city drastically changed? If so, what do you think contributed to change?
2. Is your selected city integrated, or sharply divided?
3. What does rent price tell us about the economic climate of different neighborhoods? Does it correspond to the redlining and demographic maps?

Before the Lesson:

1. Ensure that technology is available and that links are working.

Procedures:

1. Divide students into five groups, assigning each group one of the following major “receiving” cities of the Great Migration: Los Angeles; Detroit; Pittsburgh; New York City; Chicago.
2. Once a city is assigned, have groups access a “dot” demographic map representing the 2010 census data for the same community and compare it with the city’s data from the “Mapping Inequality” database. Students should take note of whether or not neighborhoods that were given a poor mortgage grade on the “Mapping Inequality” database remain racially segregated.
3. Students should next visit PadMapper and look at current rent listings in their cities. Compare monthly rent in neighborhoods that were previously redlined to those that were not. Is there a notable difference in rental costs?
4. Have students consolidate their findings and conclusions and present them to the class (orally or in writing):
   1. To what extent has your assigned city changed, or not, over time?
   2. How do housing history and housing patterns compare among the cities?
   3. What reasons might account for differences or similarities between the data shown in “Mapping Inequality” and the “2010 Census Block Data Map?”
   4. What is the legacy of redlining in these cities?
   5. Personal connection: How diverse is your neighborhood and what are the main characteristics of the people who live there (economic status, color/ethnicity, nationality, religion, age, gender/sexual orientation, or other characteristics? Is your neighborhood stable or changing; if it is changing significantly, how is it changing, any why do you think it is?

Materials:

• Computer lab or laptop computers.
• Access to “Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America" database
  • https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=4/36.71/-96.93&opacity=0.8
• Access to “2010 Census Block Data” color-coded dot demographic map
  • https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/index.html
• Access to “PadMapper” rental database
  • www.padmapper.com

ACTIVITY IV: Historical and Issue Activity—Housing and Civil Rights

Background:

In 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. briefly expanded his attention beyond the South and looked toward the segregated, urban North for his next campaign. He specifically focused on the city of Chicago, where much of the Black population resided in rundown and substantially segregated neighborhoods with major barriers to economic or social advancement.

Government policies and programs and real estate agents and developers in Chicago blatantly continued housing and neighborhood segregation. Despite the general legal right to buy property, redlining rules, zoning policies, and other discriminatory measures prevented Black Americans from purchasing property, or even renting apartments, in predominantly White and more affluent parts of the city.

Moreover, mortgage finance to buy a home was not available to Blacks. in Chicago Black Americans homebuyers had to enter into a purchase contract with the seller, which usually allowed the seller to retake the whole property if a single payment was not paid on time. That meant that the Black family not only lost their home, but also lost all the accumulated wealth they might have in the property. I

White homebuyers usually used mortgage financing provided by a bank or other financial lender to buy the property. The borrower/buyer receives the legal ownership title to the property and is obligated to make monthly payments to the lender. Missed payments can be “cured” by catch-up payments, and foreclosure and loss of the property typically occurs only after an extended delinquency. Falling behind on payments did not immediately affect the ability of the family to live in the house and benefit from increasing property values.

MLK Jr.’s 1966 Chicago campaign, which included a yearlong program of marches and protests, brought public attention to housing discrimination. Although MLK Jr. and his fellow activists could not significantly change the race-based housing system of Chicago, they succeeded in pressuring the Chicago Real Estate Board to end its opposition to fair housing laws, which outlawed discrimination based on color. The campaign also helped advance the enactment of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 under President Lyndon Johnson.

Suggested Time Frame: One 50-minute class period

Key Terms: Martin Luther King; redlining; housing inequality; Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union; A. Philip Randolph; Executive Order 8802; Southern Manifesto on Integration, 1956; Civil Right Act of 1964; Voting Rights Act of 1965; President Johnson’s Kerner Commission; Brown v. Board of Education; Housing and Urban Development Act, 1968; SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Committee); Chicago Freedom Movement

Supporting Questions:

1. How did the Civil Rights Movement address issues raised by redlining?
2. How did the government respond to redlining issues?
3. To what extent did the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 and the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977 remedy redlining and change housing segregation patterns?

Before the Lesson:

1. Ask the students to do a quick write about what they remember about the early civil rights accomplishments in outline form as a homework assignment. They need to be able to identify at least five accomplishments.
2. As homework reading, assign Document I and ask students to identify the key reason for the document.

Procedures:

1. Brainstorm the students’ understanding of non-violent protests by asking the following questions:

1. Why did civil rights activists use nonviolent protests?
2. Does nonviolent protest lead to lasting change?
3. What were the Southern members of Congress seeking to accomplish by issuing the Southern Manifesto?
4. How did the Southern Manifesto justify continued segregation and inequality for Black Americans during the 1950’s and 1960’s?
5. How much power did Southerners have in the Congress at this time?
6. To what extent did the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 and the Community Reinvestment Act in 1978 remedy redlining and change housing segregation patterns?

1. Review the achievements of the early civil rights movements by looking at A. Philip Randolph and The Sleeping Car Porters Union in the 1940's, Executive Order 8802, the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and rejection of desegregation in the Southern Manifesto.
2. In groups of four, have students read Documents J-M. Ask students to read one document each and then summarize the document and discuss with their group.
3. As a class, discuss the following:

1. What types of rhetoric/language is used in each document?
2. Who is the audience of each document? Are the audiences different? Why or why not?
3. What emotional resonance do these documents create?
4. How do the documents differ in policy or program concerning how to address the problem of urban segregation?
5. What do these documents tell us about the differences between community action and government action? Can everything activists want be accomplished through government action?

1. Ask the students, “How effective has federal legislation been in reducing urban housing and neighborhood segregation and improving the ability of Black Americans to accumulate wealth through homeownership?”

1. Working in pairs, have students explore data that address this question by visiting the online resources below:
   1. 1. U.S. Census Historical Income Tables:
         1. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-households.html
      2. Pew Research Center, “On Views of Race and Inequality, Blacks and Whites Are Worlds Apart: Demographic trends and economic well-being:”
         1. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/1-demographic-trends-and-economic-well-being/

1. Summarize the lesson with the class.

Materials:

• Document I: The Southern Manifesto on Integration
• Document J: Speech at Chicago Freedom Movement Rally
• Document K: Remarks Upon Signing the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968
• Document L: Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 and Community Reinvestment Act
• Document M: Kerner Commission Findings Summary
• U.S Census Historical Income Tables
  • https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-households.html
• Pew Research Center, “On Views of Race and Inequality, Blacks and Whites Are Worlds Apart: Demographic trends and economic well-being:”
  • https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/1-demographic-trends-and-economic-well-being/

ACTIVITY V: Taking Informed Action—Solutions to American Apartheid Today

Background:

In the closing activity, students will take informed action by considering the lasting effects of redlining, propose solutions for combatting the legacy of American Apartheid, and draft a persuasive letter outlining their solutions.

Suggested Time Frame: One 50-minute class period

Key Terms: Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; redlining; housing inequality;

Supporting Questions:

1. What are the lasting effects of these mid-twentieth century color-based laws, policies, practices and attitudes?
2. In the twentieth-first century, what are the most effective ways to combat the legacy of American Apartheid?
3. In what ways are you directly affected by this legacy? What change would be most important to you?

Procedures:

1. Review the previous activities with students.
2. In groups of four, have students discuss the following questions:
   1. What are the lasting effects of these mid-twentieth century color-based laws, policies, practices and attitudes?
   2. In the twentieth-first century, what are the most effective ways to combat the legacy of American Apartheid?
3. As a class, have the groups share their answers. Chart their responses on the whiteboard.
4. Ask student groups to consider the suggestions for effective ways to address the legacies of redlining, identifying one or two of the best ideas.
5. Working in their groups, have students draft a letter to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
   1. Handout 3: Writing a Persuasive Letter may help students organize their thoughts.
6. For homework, have students proofread their letters and complete a final draft.

Materials:

• Handout 3: Writing a Persuasive Letter

Handout 3: Writing a Persuasive Letter

A persuasive letter encourages the recipient to bring about change through action. Your letter should have the following components:

• Greeting
• Overview of the issue, including historical background
• If the issue is personally important to you or your family, talk about how it is importance to you
• Evidence supporting why this is an issue
• Your proposed solution(s)
• Possible counterarguments (be sure to address significant counterarguments)
• The potential impact of your solution(s)
• Summary of the issue and your solution(s)
• Closure and signature

If useful, use the template below to draft your letter:

Appendix I: Documents

Document A: Overview of the Great Migration (1915-1960)

The Great Migration was the mass movement of about five million southern blacks to the north and west between 1915 and 1960.During the initial wave the majority of migrants moved to major northern cities such as Chicago,Illinois, Detroit,Michigan, Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania, and New York,New York.ByWorld War IIthe migrants continued to move North but many of them headed west to Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco,California, Portland,Oregon, and Seattle,Washington.

The first large movement of blacks occurred during World War I, when 454,000 black southerners moved north. In the 1920s, another 800,000 blacks left the south, followed by 398,000 blacks in the 1930s.Between 1940 and 1960 over 3,348,000 blacks left the South for northern and western cities.

The economic motivations for migration were a combination of the desire to escape oppressive economic conditions in the south and the promise of greater prosperity in the north.Since theirEmancipation from slavery, southern rural blacks had suffered in a plantation economy that offered little chance of advancement.While a few blacks were lucky enough to purchase land, most were sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or farm laborers, barely subsiding from year to year. WhenWorld War Icreated a huge demand for workers in northern factories, many southern blacks took this opportunity to leave the oppressive economic conditions in the south.

The northern demand for workers was a result of the loss of 5 million men who left to serve in the armed forces, as well as the restriction of foreign immigration. Some sectors of the economy were so desperate for workers at this time that they would pay for blacks to migrate north. The Pennsylvania Railroad needed workers so badly that it paid the travel expenses of 12,000 blacks. The Illinois Central Railroad, along with many steel mills, factories, and tanneries, similarly provided free railroad passes for blacks.World War I was the first time since Emancipation that black labor was in demand outside of the agricultural south, and the economic promise was enough for many blacks to overcome substantial challenges to migrate.

In addition to migrating for job opportunities, blacks also moved north in order to escape the oppressive conditions of the south.Some of the main social factors for migration includedlynching, anunfair legal system,inequality in education, anddenial of suffrage [voting].

The Great Migration, one of the largest internal migrations in the history of the United States, changed forever the urban North, the rural South, Black Americans and in many respects, the entire nation.

Source: Stephanie Christensen, The Great Migration (1915-1960). BlackPast, December 6, 2007.

Document B: Demographics and Maps of the Great Migration

Source: US Census Bureau, Data Visualization Gallery, https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/020/, Public Domain

Source: Siegel, Michael, “The Great Migration, 1900-1929,” Digital Public Library of America, http://dp.la/item/be891ab498f510adcf69a5a125f2a711.

Document C: Excerpt from Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

Below is an excerpt from Isabel’s Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. Wilkerson spent years interviewing Black Americans who migrated from the American South to Northern and Western cities searching for opportunity and equality. This excerpt offers a glimpse into the real-life experiences of one Black American migrant.

Chapter 1

Monroe, Louisiana, Easter Monday, April 6, 1953

Robert Joseph Pershing Foster

In the dark hours of the morning, Pershing Foster packed his surgery books, his medical bag, and his suit and sport coats in the trunk, along with a map, an address book, and Ivorye Covington's fried chicken left over from Saturday night.

He said good-bye to his father, who had told him to follow his dreams. His father's dreams had fallen apart, but there was still hope for the son, the father knew. He had a reluctant embrace with his older brother, Madison, who had tried in vain to get him to stay. Then Pershing pointed his 1949 Buick Roadmaster, a burgundy one with whitewall tires and a shark-tooth grille, in the direction of Five Points, the crossroads of town.

He drove down the narrow dirt roads with the ditches on either side that, when he was a boy, had left his freshly pressed Sunday suit caked with mud when it rained. He passed the shotgun houses perched on cinder blocks and hurtled over the railroad tracks away from where people who looked like him were consigned to live and into the section where the roads were not dirt ditches anymore but suddenly level and paved.

He headed in the direction of Desiard Street, the main thorough- fare, and, without a whiff of sentimentality, sped away from the small-town bank buildings and bail bondsmen, the Paramount Theater with its urine-scented steps, and away from St. Francis Hospital, which wouldn't let doctors who looked like him perform a simple tonsillectomy.

Perhaps he might have stayed had they let him practice surgery like he was trained to do or let him walk into the Palace and try on a suit like anyone else of his station. The resentments had grown heavy over the years. He knew he was as smart as anybody else -- smarter, to his mind -- but he wasn't allowed to do anything with it, the caste system being what it was. Now he was going about as far away as you could get from Monroe, Louisiana. The rope lines that had hemmed in his life seemed to loosen with each plodding mile on the odometer.

Like many of the men in the Great Migration and like many emigrant men in general, he was setting out alone. He would scout out the New World on his own and get situated before sending for anyone else. He drove west into the morning stillness and onto the Endom Bridge, a tight crossing with one lane acting like two that spans the Ouachita River into West Monroe. He would soon pass the mossback flatland of central Louisiana and the Red River toward Texas, where he was planning to see an old friend from medical school, a Dr. Anthony Beale, en route to California.

Pershing had no idea where he would end up in California or how he would make a go of it or when he would be able to wrest his wife and daughters from the in-laws who had tried to talk him out of going to California in the first place. He would contemplate these uncertainties in the unbroken days ahead.

From Louisiana, he followed the hyphens in the road that blurred together toward a faraway place, bridging unrelated things as hyphens do. Alone in the car, he had close to two thousand miles of curving road in front of him, farther than farmworker emigrants leaving Guatemala for Texas, not to mention Tijuana for California, where a northerly wind could blow a Mexican clothesline over the border.

Source: Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Penguin Random House, 2011.

The Chicago Race Riot began at the 29th Street Beach, after the drowning death of Eugene Williams, an African-American teenager who had crossed an imaginary boundary in the water separating blacks from whites, July 27, 1919. Source: Chicago History Museum/Getty Images

It was a stifling summer day in Chicago on July 27, 1919, with temperatures rising to 96°F — and tensions rising across the nation.

In the summer following the end of World War I, the American population was rapidly shifting. White immigrants from Europe were entering the country, leaving their impoverished homelands. Meanwhile, African Americans werefleeingthe racism and poverty of the South for new opportunities in northern cities. For many, that meant Chicago. According to theChicagoTribune, the city’s black population swelled from 44,000 in 1910 to 110,000 in 1920.

Those changes were the backdrop for “the largest outbreak of racial violence and domestic unrest” in the United States between the end ofReconstruction and the Civil Rights Era, says Peter Cole, a historian at Western Illinois University who is closely involved with new efforts to memorialize that period. Between April and November of 1919, white people in cities and towns across the country instigated race riots, attacking and often killing their black neighbors. The period would come to be known as Red Summer.

By the time the hottest weekend of the season came around, Chicago had already seen two dozen bombings of black residents, none of which was solved by the cops. So the city was already a powder keg of racial resentment when a group of teenage boys decided that they wanted to go for a swim.

Eugene Williams, a black 17-year-old originally from Georgia, was among those boys. He and his friends had built a raft to play on in Lake Michigan. While most public accommodations in Chicago were not legally segregated, the beaches around Lake Michigan were the site of strong informal segregation. And as Williams and his friends swam and dove off their raft, they unknowingly drifted into the white section of the water.

Contemporary reports from theChicagoEveningPoststate that white people in the water and on the beach grew agitated when they saw black teenagers in “their” section of the lake. A 24-year-old white man named George Stauber began throwing rocks at the boys. It is unclear exactly what happened next — some witnesses saw Williams get hit by the rocks and fall into the water; others say he ducked under to avoid getting hit. But accounts agree that Williams drowned in Lake Michigan as a result of Stauber’s racist harassment.

According toJohn Turner Harris, a friend of Williams who was interviewed decades later by historian William M. Tuttle, when it became clear that Williams was dead, a black police officer attempted to arrest Stauber. A white cop intervened and did not allow the arrest. An argument broke out between the two officers and Williams’ friends ran to notify other African Americans. According to contemporary reports by theChicago Commission on Race Relations, a thousand black Chicagoans gathered following the news of the drowning. An altercation between that group and the police resulted in the death of James Crawford, a black man.

Emotions remained elevated for the rest of the day, eventually escalating into violence. “Irish-American gangs of young men in so-called athletic clubs were the initial cause of the riots,” said Cole. The night after Williams’ death, Irish Americans crossed over from their neighborhood, Bridgeport, into the African-American neighborhoods of Chicago’s south side. “They invaded the neighboring black areas and started attacking,” says Cole.

For the next week, battles raged in Chicago. The death toll of the riots was 38 people. Additionally, over 500 people, most of whom were black, were injured and over a thousand people were left homeless. As the violence wore on, the Illinois Reserve Militia was called in to ease the riots. On July 31, the day after the militia entered the city, the violence eased but destruction continued, with arson destroying dozens of homes. The militia remained in Chicago until August 8. It was “the deadliest incidence of racial violence ever” in Chicago, says Cole.

The effects of those July altercations have reverberated across history and continue to affect Chicagoans to this day. According to Cole, the riots were a major factor in the expansion and the hardening of racial segregation in Chicago, which is now thesecond mostsegregated city in the United States, following Detroit. One mechanism by which the city got that way is a legal tool called a restrictive covenant, which was used to bar African Americans from owning or renting certain properties. “After the riots there’s a massive increase of the use of this legal tool,” Cole says. “That further contains African Americans because they literally cannot move into many neighborhoods because that’s the law.”

By the time the Supreme Court declared such covenants unconstitutional in 1948, millions of homes were already restricted, making it effectively impossible for African Americans to move outside of their segregated Chicago neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were never equitable when compared to white neighborhoods, and as the city’s black population grew in size, they offered no room to expand geographically. Landlords were able to take advantage of these circ*mstances, exploiting black tenants who paid more money for worse conditions. “There was no incentive to maintain quality housing because there’s huge demand and not enough supply,” Cole says.

Document D: Excerpt from Article, “Redlining was Banned 50 Years Ago. It’s Still Hurting Minorities Today”

Racial discriminationin mortgage lending in the 1930s shaped the demographic and wealth patterns of American communities today, a new study shows, with3 out of4 neighborhoods “redlined” on government maps 80 years ago continuing to struggle economically.

Thestudyby the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, released Wednesday, shows that the vast majority of neighborhoods marked “hazardous” in red ink on maps drawn by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corp. from 1935 to 1939 are today much more likely than other areas to comprise lower-income, minority residents.

“It’s as if some of these places have been trapped in the past, locking neighborhoods into concentrated poverty,” said Jason Richardson, director of research at the NCRC, a consumer advocacy group.

Researchers compared the HOLC maps, the most comprehensive documentation of discriminatory lending practices, with modern-day census data to determine how much neighborhood demographics have changed in 80 years. The findings have implications for today’s political debates over housing, banking and financial regulation, as well as civil rights, as Congressseeks to weakenthe government’s ability to enforce fair-lending requirements. Policies that influence access to capital and credit have long-lastingeffects on residential patterns, neighborhoods’ economic health and household accumulation of wealth, the report said.

In the 1930s, government surveyors graded neighborhoods in 239 cities, color-coding them green for “best,” blue for “still desirable,” yellow for “definitely declining” and red for “hazardous.” The “redlined” areas were the ones local lenders discounted as credit risks, in large part because of the residents’ racial and ethnic demographics. They also took into account local amenities and home prices.

Neighborhoods that were predominantly made up of African Americans, as well as Catholics, Jews and immigrants from Asia and southern Europe, were deemed undesirable. “Anyone who was not northern-European white was considered to be a detraction from the value of the area,” said Bruce Mitchell, a senior researcher at the NCRC and one of the study’s authors.

Loans in these neighborhoods were unavailable or very expensive, making it more difficult for low-income minorities tobuy homes and setting the stage for the country’s persistentracial wealth gap. (White families today have nearly 10 times the net worth of black families and more than eight times that of Hispanic families, according to the Federal Reserve.)

“Homeownership is the number-one method of accumulating wealth, but the effect of these policies that create more hurdles for the poor is a permanent underclass that’s disproportionately minority,” said John Taylor, president and chief executive of the NCRC.“I think most people believe the problem is not with the rules but with the people. Most middle-class whites in America don’t have empirical observations of what happens in underserved neighborhoods or understand the historical treatment of poor and minority communities.”

Example of the original 1938 HOLC “Residential Security” map of Atlanta with color-coded gradation of neighborhoods by risk level. Source: Mapping Inequality Project, University of Richmond.

The Federal Housing Administrationinstitutionalized the system of discriminatory lending in government-backed mortgages, reflecting local race-based criteria in their underwriting practices and reinforcing residential segregation in American cities. The discriminatory practices captured by the HOLC maps continued until 1968, when the Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in housing.

But 50 years after that law passed, the lingering effects of redlining areclear, with the pattern of economic and racial residential segregation still evident in many U.S. cities — from Montgomery, Ala., to Flint, Mich., to Denver.

Nationally, nearly two-thirds of neighborhoods deemed “hazardous” are inhabited by mostly minority residents, typically black and Latino, researchers found. Cities with more such neighborhoods have significantly greater economic inequality. On the flip side, 91 percent of areas classified as “best” in the 1930s remain middle-to-upper-income today, and 85 percent of them are still predominantly white.

Researchers found that redlined neighborhoods in the South and the West are more likely today to be home to a largely minority population. Neighborhoodsin the South and Midwest display the most persistent economic inequality.

Source: Tracy Jan, “Redlining was Banned 50 Years Ago. It’s Still Hurting Minorities Today,” The Washington Post, March 28, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/03/28/redlining-was-banned-50-years-ago-its-still-hurting-minorities-today/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.52053fdf18af
Document E: Article, “Why Los Angeles is Still a Segregated City After All These Years”

Every metropolitan area in the nation is racially segregated, and Los Angeles is no exception. We tolerate residential segregation because we're convinced that it happened informally — because of personal choices and private discrimination. But what cemented our separate neighborhoods is something most of us have forgotten — government's unconstitutional and systematic insistence on segregated housing in the mid-20th century, establishing patterns that persist to this day.

The 2010 census data show that 60% of Los Angeles's African Americans live in neighborhoods where few whites are present. The exposure of blacks to whites is as minimal as it is in Chicago or Newark; concentrated African American poverty is as common in L.A. as in New York or Pittsburgh.

The New Deal created the nation's first civilian public housing in the 1930s, segregated not only in the South, but nationwide. In his autobiography, the African American poet Langston Hughes recounted his adolescence in World War I Cleveland, where he dated a Jewish girl and his best friend was Polish. But during the Depression, the Public Works Administration demolished a part of that mixed neighborhood and built separate white and black projects, creating segregation where it hadn't previously existed.

During World War II, more than 10,000 African American families moved to Los Angeles for jobs in military production, and government-mandated segregation moved west. Desperate for labor, companies were hiring black workers for the first time, yet unless these migrants could find housing, war mobilization would stall. Although the city's public housing authority had vacancies in white neighborhoods, it denied them to African Americans. The federal government had to intervene.

Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica employed 44,000 workers. When Washington proposed a Venice housing project, white residents objected to African Americans living nearby. When one was planned in Compton, also then all-white, there were more protests. The government relocated both projects to Watts. Before the war, Watts had been integrated, with about equal numbers of whites, blacks and Latinos. By 1958, it was 95% black. Public housing policy was largely responsible for this segregation.

Suburban expansion financed by the Federal Housing Administration, another New Deal agency, was also discriminatory. In the Los Angeles area, Panorama City, developed by Henry J. Kaiser in the late 1940s, and Lakewood, developed by Mark Taper and his partners, were FHA-supported on explicit condition that African Americans be barred. FHA rules stated that "incompatible racial elements" would disqualify builders from essential federally backed loans. The FHA also frequently required that property deeds prohibit resale to African Americans.

Other federal programs reinforced segregation. The IRS should have denied tax-exempt status to nonprofit institutions that discriminated on the basis of race, yet it systematically did the opposite in Los Angeles and elsewhere. The pastor of the Wilshire Presbyterian Church led a campaign to bar African Americans from his congregation's neighborhood, and he personally sued to evict a black war veteran who had moved there in violation of a racial deed restriction. Whittier College, historically a Quaker school, participated in a neighborhood compact in which homeowners agreed not to sell property to African Americans. Both church and college kept their tax exemptions.

In smaller ways, local government contributed. In 1943, Culver City convened a meeting of air raid wardens whose job was to ensure that families dimmed evening lights to prevent Japanese bombers from finding targets. The city attorney instructed the wardens also to press homeowners to sign pledges never to sell to African Americans.

In 1948, a black family moved to all-white Eagle Rock. A police officer led a mob that included Chamber of Commerce members and the local Kiwanis president to burn a cross on an adjacent lot. The officer was in uniform, confident that his superiors approved. From 1950 to the 1965 Watts riots, more than 100 bombing and vandalism incidents attempted to eject African Americans from white L.A. neighborhoods, but just one arrest and prosecution resulted, and that happened only because the California attorney general intervened when local prosecutors claimed police could not identify the perpetrators.

In 1968, Congress adopted the Fair Housing Act, prohibiting discrimination in the sale and rental of housing; it added enforcement procedures 20 years later. But the law only affected future discrimination; it did nothing to undo the segregation that government had spent the previous 35 years imposing.

Nationally, homes in FHA subdivisions built in the mid-20th century typically sold for about $100,000 in today's currency; they would have been affordable to black working-class families. But, denied the opportunity to buy them, most African Americans were forced to rent, often in cities from which jobs subsequently disappeared. White homeowners gained, over succeeding generations, hundreds of thousands of dollars from rising equity; African American renters did not. Today, average national black income is 60% of whites' but average black wealth is only 7% of whites', a disparity mostly resulting from unconstitutional federal housing policy. (Those mid-century FHA homes, which today sell for $300,000 and often much more, are now out of reach for working-class families of any race.)

Our entrenched residential segregation exacerbates serious political, social and economic problems. It traps the most disadvantaged young African American men in high-poverty neighborhoods, with inadequate access to good jobs or education, where police function as an occupying force. It impedes upward mobility: Low-income African American children in segregated neighborhoods are more likely to remain poor as adults than similarly low-income African American children raised in more diverse neighborhoods.

And segregation defeats efforts to close the black-white academic gap. Teachers can devote special attention to a few children who are in poor health, or stressed because of family economic instability, or who have had inadequate early childhood learning experiences. But in schools where most pupils suffer from such challenges, instruction becomes mostly remedial and behavioral problems erode teaching time.

To overturn these patterns requires measures designed specifically to remedy government's earlier imposition of segregation. For example, municipalities should repeal zoning laws that use criteria such as density level and lot size to prohibit apartments and even modest single-family homes and townhouses from being built in affluent white neighborhoods. Rental subsidies need to be set on a sliding scale so low-income families can afford to live in middle-class communities.

We should now insist on integration as aggressively as we did segregation in the last century. To achieve that, politically and legally, we have first to acknowledge that our government, to a substantial degree, created our racial inequality. Letting bygones be bygones is not a valid, just or defensible policy.

Source: Richard Rothstein, “Why Los Angeles is Still a Segregated City After All These Years,” Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2017, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rothstein-segregated-housing-20170820-story.html

Document F: Article, The Case for Reparations

The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law.

Clyde Ross was among them. He came to Chicago in 1947 and took a job as a taster at Campbell’s Soup. He made a stable wage. He married. He had children. His paycheck was his own. No Klansmen stripped him of the vote. When he walked down the street, he did not have to move because a white man was walking past. He did not have to take off his hat or avert his gaze. His journey from peonage to full citizenship seemed near-complete. Only one item was missing—a home, that final badge of entry into the sacred order of the American middle class of the Eisenhower years.

In 1961, Ross and his wife bought a house in North Lawndale, a bustling community on Chicago’s West Side. North Lawndale had long been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but a handful of middle-class African Americans had lived there starting in the ’40s. The community was anchored by the sprawling Sears, Roebuck headquarters. North Lawndale’s Jewish People’s Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a “pilot community for interracial living.” In the battle for integration then being fought around the country, North Lawndale seemed to offer promising terrain. But out in the tall grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale kleptocrat, were lying in wait.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market.

Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.

The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary toldThe Chicago Daily Newsof her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.”

Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.

Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.

* * *

The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago. The humiliation ofwhites onlysigns are gone. Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows—and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed. And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them.

This is not surprising. black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity strikes—a medical emergency, divorce, job loss—the fall is precipitous.

And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. “Blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods,” Sharkey writes, “that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children.”

Source: Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

Document G: Article: Kicked Off the Land

In the spring of 2011, the brothers Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels were the talk of Carteret County, on the central coast of North Carolina. Some people said that the brothers were righteous; others thought that they had lost their minds. That March, Melvin and Licurtis stood in court and refused to leave the land that they had lived on all their lives, a portion of which had, without their knowledge or consent, been sold to developers years before. . . .

Their great-grandfather had bought the land a hundred years earlier, when he was a generation removed from slavery. The property—sixty-five marshy acres that ran along Silver Dollar Road, from the woods to the river’s sandy shore—was racked by storms. Some called it the bottom, or the end of the world. . . .

[Melvin and Licurtis’s grandfather Mitchell Reels] didn’t trust the courts, so he didn’t leave a will. Instead, he let the land become heirs’ property, a form of ownership in which descendants inherit an interest, like holding stock in a company. The practice began during Reconstruction, when many African-Americans didn’t have access to the legal system, and it continued through the Jim Crow era, when black communities were suspicious of white Southern courts. In the United States today, seventy-six per cent of African-Americans do not have a will, more than twice the percentage of white Americans.

Many assume that not having a will keeps land in the family. In reality, it jeopardizes ownership. David Dietrich, a former co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Property Preservation Task Force, has called heirs’ property “the worst problem you never heard of.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture has recognized it as “the leading cause of black involuntary land loss.” Heirs’ property is estimated to make up more than a third of Southern black-owned land—3.5 million acres, worth more than twenty-eight billion dollars. These landowners are vulnerable to laws and loopholes that allow speculators and developers to acquire their property. Black families watch as their land is auctioned on courthouse steps or forced into a sale against their will.

Between 1910 and 1997, African-Americans lost about ninety per cent of their farmland. This problem is a major contributor to America’s racial wealth gap; the median wealth among black families is about a tenth that of white families. Now, as reparations have become a subject of national debate, the issue of black land loss is receiving renewed attention. A group of economists and statisticians recently calculated that, since 1910, black families have been stripped of hundreds of billions of dollars because of lost land. . . .

By the time of Melvin and Licurtis’s hearing in 2011, they had spent decades fighting to keep the waterfront on Silver Dollar Road. They’d been warned that they would go to jail if they didn’t comply with a court order to stay off the land, and they felt betrayed by the laws that had allowed it to be taken from them. . . .

Licurtis Reels, left, and Melvin Davis, right, on Silver Dollar Road. Photograph by Al J. Thompson for The New Yorker

Land was an ideological priority for black families after the Civil War, when nearly four million people were freed from slavery. On January 12, 1865, just before emancipation, the Union Army general William Tec*mseh Sherman met with twenty black ministers in Savannah, Georgia, and asked them what they needed. “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land,” their spokesperson, the Reverend Garrison Frazier, told Sherman. Freedom, he said, was “placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor.” Sherman issued a special field order declaring that four hundred thousand acres formerly held by Confederates be given to African-Americans—what came to be known as the promise of “forty acres and a mule.” . . .

The promises never materialized. In 1876, near the end of Reconstruction, only about five per cent of black families in the Deep South owned land. But a new group of black landowners soon established themselves. Many had experience in the fields, and they began buying farms, often in places with arid or swampy soil, especially along the coast. By 1920, African-Americans, who made up ten per cent of the population, represented fourteen per cent of farm owners in the South.

A white-supremacist backlash spread across the South. . . .

Ray Winbush, the director of the Institute for Urban Research, at Morgan State University, told me, “There is this idea that most blacks were lynched because they did something untoward to a young woman. That’s not true. Most black men were lynched between 1890 and 1920 because whites wanted their land.”

By the second half of the twentieth century, a new form of dispossession had emerged, officially sanctioned by the courts and targeting heirs’-property owners without clear titles. These landowners are exposed in a variety of ways. They don’t qualify for certain Department of Agriculture loans to purchase livestock or cover the cost of planting. Individual heirs can’t use their land as collateral with banks and other institutions, and so are denied private financing and federal home-improvement loans. They generally aren’t eligible for disaster relief. . . .

Heirs are rarely aware of the tenuous nature of their ownership. Even when they are, clearing a title is often an unaffordable and complex process, which requires tracking down every living heir, and there are few lawyers who specialize in the field. . . .

One of the most pernicious legal mechanisms used to dispossess heirs’-property owners is called a partition action. In the course of generations, heirs tend to disperse and lose any connection to the land. Speculators can buy off the interest of a single heir, and just one heir or speculator, no matter how minute his share, can force the sale of an entire plot through the courts. . . .

The lost property isn’t just money; it’s also identity. In one case that I examined, the mining company PCS Phosphate forced the sale of a forty-acre plot, which contained a family cemetery, against the wishes of several heirs, whose ancestors had been enslaved on the property.

Source: Lizzie Presser, “Kicked Off the Land: Why so many black families are losing their property.” The New Yorker, July 22, 2019 Issue

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/22/kicked-off-the-land

Document H: Raisin in the Sun Infographic: Characters and Themes

Source: Course Hero, https://www.coursehero.com/lit/A-Raisin-in-the-Sun/infographic/

Document I: The Southern Manifesto (1956)

NOTE: This document was issued by Senators and Representatives from Southern states in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case that held unanimously that school segregation violated the U.S. Constitution.

THE DECISION OF THE SUPREME COURT IN THE SCHOOL CASES ­ DECLARATION OF CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLES

Mr. [Walter F.] GEORGE. [D-Georgia] Mr. President, the increasing gravity of the situation following the decision of the Supreme Court in the so-called segregation cases, and the peculiar stress in sections of the country where this decision has created many difficulties, unknown and unappreciated, perhaps, by many people residing in other parts of the country, have led some Senators and some Members of the House of Representatives to prepare a statement of the position which they have felt and now feel to be imperative.

I now wish to present to the Senate a statement on behalf of 19 Senators, representing 11 States, and 77 House Members, representing a considerable number of States likewise. . . .

DECLARATION OF CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLES

The unwarranted decision of the Supreme Court in the public school cases is now bearing the fruit always produced when men substitute naked power for established law.

The Founding Fathers gave us a Constitution of checks and balances because they realized the inescapable lesson of history that no man or group of men can be safely entrusted with unlimited power. They framed this Constitution with its provisions for change by amendment in order to secure the fundamentals of government against the dangers of temporary popular passion or the personal predilections of public officeholders.

We regard the decisions of the Supreme Court in the school cases as a clear abuse of judicial power. It climaxes a trend in the Federal Judiciary undertaking to legislate, in derogation of the authority of Congress, and to encroach upon the reserved rights of the States and the people.

The original Constitution does not mention education. Neither does the 14th Amendment nor any other amendment. The debates preceding the submission of the 14th Amendment clearly show that there was no intent that it should affect the system of education maintained by the States.

The very Congress which proposed the amendment subsequently provided for segregated schools in the District of Columbia.

When the amendment was adopted in 1868, there were 37 States of the Union. . . .

Every one of the 26 States that had any substantial racial differences among its people, either approved the operation of segregated schools already in existence or subsequently established such schools by action of the same law-making body which considered the 14th Amendment.

As admitted by the Supreme Court in the public school case (Brown v. Board of Education), the doctrine of separate but equal schools "apparently originated in Roberts v. City of Boston (1849), upholding school segregation against attack as being violative of a State constitutional guarantee of equality." This constitutional doctrine began in the North, not in the South, and it was followed not only in Massachusetts, but in Connecticut, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other northern states until they, exercising their rights as states through the constitutional processes of local self-government, changed their school systems.

In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 the Supreme Court expressly declared that under the 14th Amendment no person was denied any of his rights if the States provided separate but equal facilities. This decision has been followed in many other cases. It is notable that the Supreme Court, speaking through Chief Justice Taft, a former President of the United States, unanimously declared in 1927 in Lum v. Rice that the "separate but equal" principle is "within the discretion of the State in regulating its public schools and does not conflict with the 14th Amendment."

This interpretation, restated time and again, became a part of the life of the people of many of the States and confirmed their habits, traditions, and way of life. It is founded on elemental humanity and commonsense, for parents should not be deprived by Government of the right to direct the lives and education of their own children.

Though there has been no constitutional amendment or act of Congress changing this established legal principle almost a century old, the Supreme Court of the United States, with no legal basis for such action, undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land.

This unwarranted exercise of power by the Court, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the States principally affected. It is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.

Without regard to the consent of the governed, outside mediators are threatening immediate and revolutionary changes in our public schools systems. If done, this is certain to destroy the system of public education in some of the States.

With the gravest concern for the explosive and dangerous condition created by this decision and inflamed by outside meddlers:

We reaffirm our reliance on the Constitution as the fundamental law of the land.

We decry the Supreme Court's encroachment on the rights reserved to the States and to the people, contrary to established law, and to the Constitution.

We commend the motives of those States which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means.

We appeal to the States and people who are not directly affected by these decisions to consider the constitutional principles involved against the time when they too, on issues vital to them may be the victims of judicial encroachment.

Even though we constitute a minority in the present Congress, we have full faith that a majority of the American people believe in the dual system of government which has enabled us to achieve our greatness and will in time demand that the reserved rights of the States and of the people be made secure against judicial usurpation.

We pledge ourselves to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.

In this trying period, as we all seek to right this wrong, we appeal to our people not to be provoked by the agitators and troublemakers invading our States and to scrupulously refrain from disorder and lawless acts.

Signed by:

MEMBERS OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE

Walter George, Richard B. Russell, John Stennis, Sam J. Ervin, Jr., Strom Thurmond, Harry F. Byrd, A. Willis Robertson, John L. McClellan, Allen J. Ellender, Russell B. Long, Lister Hill, James O. Eastland, W. Kerr Scott, John Sparkman, Olin D. Johnston, Price Daniel, J.W. Fulbright, George A. Smathers, Spessard L. Holland.

MEMBERS OF THE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Alabama: Frank W. Boykin, George M. Grant, George W. Andrews, Kenneth A. Roberts, Albert Rains, Armistead I. Selden, Jr., Carl Elliott, Robert E. Jones, George Huddleston, Jr.

Arkansas: E.C. Gathings, Wilbur D. Mills, James W. Trimble, Oren Harris, Brooks Hays, W.F. Norrell.

Florida: Charles E. Bennett, Robert L.F. Sikes, A.S. Herlong, Jr., Paul G. Rogers, James A. Haley, D.R. Matthews.

Georgia: Prince H. Preston, John L. Pilcher, E.L. Forrester, John James Flynt, Jr., James C. Davis, Carl Vinson, Henderson Lanham, Iris F. Blitch, Phil M. Landrum, Paul Brown.

Louisiana: F. Edward Hebert, Thomas Hale Boggs, Edwin E. Willis, Overton Brooks, Otto E. Passman, James H. Morrison, T. Ashton Thompson, George S. Long.

Mississippi: Thomas G. Abernathy, Jamie L. Whitten, Frank E. Smith, John Bell Williams, Arthur Winstead, William M. Colmer.

North Carolina: Herbert C. Bonner, L.H. Fountain, Graham A. Barden, Carl T. Durham, F. Ertel Carlyle, Hugh Q. Alexander, Woodrow W. Jones, George A. Shuford.

South Carolina: L. Mendel Rivers, John J. Riley, W.J. Bryan Dorn, Robert T. Ashmore, James P. Richards, John L. McMillan.

Tennessee: James B. Frazier, Jr., Tom Murray, Jere Cooper, Clifford Davis.

Source: Congressional Record, 84th Congress Second Session. Vol. 102, part 4 (March 12, 1956). Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1956. 4459-4460.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Speech at Chicago Freedom Movement Rally, July 10, 1966 (Excerpt)

“We are here today because we are tired. We are tired of being seared in the flames of withering injustice. We are tired of paying more for less. We are tired of living in rat-infested slums and in the Chicago Housing Authority’s cement reservations. We are tired of having to pay a median rent of $97 a month in Lawndale for 4 rooms while whites in South Deering pay $73 a month for 5 rooms.”

SOURCE: “Address by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Chicago Freedom Movement Rally,” (July 10, 1966), The King Center.

Chicago Freedom Movement Demands for Open Housing (Excerpt)

From the Real Estate Boards and Brokers:

1. All listings immediately available on a non-discriminatory basis. This means that no realtor or real estate broker will handle a property that is not available to anyone, without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin.

From the Banks and Savings Institutions:

1. Public statements of a non-discriminatory mortgage policy so that loans will be available to any qualified borrower without regards to the racial composition of the area, or the age of the area, a policy that takes into account years of discrimination against Negro borrowers.

From the Chicago Housing Authority:

1. Program to rehabilitate present public housing.
2. No more public housing construction in the ghetto until a substantial number of units are started outside of the ghetto.

From the Governor of Illinois:

Enforcement of his Fair Practices Code, especially by revoking the licenses of real estate brokers who discriminate.

From the Federal Government:

1. Passage of the 1966 Civil Rights Act with a provision to make it illegal to discriminate in the sale or renting of property on the basis of race, color, creed, or national origin.

From Advertising Media:

No advertising media will list either housing or jobs not available for every man.

SOURCE: “Program of the Chicago Freedom Movement, July 10, 1966,” (pp. 9-10). https://www.crmvet.org/docs/66_cfm_program-july.pdf

This legislation represents the single most important breakthrough in the last 40 years.

The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 retains, and expands, and improves the best of the tested programs of the past.

It opens the way for a more orderly and cohesive development of all of our suburbs; and it opens the door to thousands of our veterans who have been unable to obtain the benefits of a federal housing program.

It extends and enlarges and improves the urban renewal program so that we can more effectively challenge and defeat the enemy of decay that exists in our cities.

It faces the changing challenge of rural housing. It continues the loan programs to assure the needed dormitories on our college campuses, and decent housing at decent costs for the elderly and the handicapped and those of lower income.

This imperative housing will be built under the sponsorship of private organizations. It will make use of private money, and it will be managed by private groups. With supplements paid by their government, the private builders will be able to move into the low-income housing field which they have not been able to penetrate or to serve effectively in the past.

This measure votes "no" on "America the Ugly"--and it votes "yes" on preserving, for our posterity, "America the Beautiful."

Source: Lyndon B. Johnson, “Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965,” (August 10, 1965), LBJ Presidential Library, http://www.lbjlibrary.org/mediakits/hud/p6.html

Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, Public Law 90-448 (8/1/68)

1. Reaffirms the national goal of the 1949 Act of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.
2. Determines that it can be achieved within the next decade by the construction or rehabilitation of 26 million housing units, including six million for low- and moderate-income families.
3. Authorizes the new Section 235 Homeownership program for lower-income families, which provides subsidies to reduce mortgage interest rates to as low as 1%.
4. Authorizes a new credit assistance homeownership program for lower-income families who are unable to meet the credit requirements generally applicable to FHA mortgage insurance programs.
5. Authorizes Federal guarantees of the borrowings (including borrowings on the bond market) of private developers of sites for new communities.
6. Authorizes supplementary grants for these new communities in connection with federally aided water, sewer, and open-space land projects.

Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (Title VIII of Housing and Community Development Act of 1977, Public Law 95-128 (10/12/77) (12/12/77)

1. Its aim is to stop the discrimination known as redlining, named for the practice of drawing red lines around sections of cities where financial institutions refuse to make home mortgage loans.
2. It requires federal bank regulators to assess the extent to which FDIC-insured banks meet the credit needs of all the areas they serve, such as by making loans on fair terms in all neighborhoods where they take deposits from residents.
3. Banks are required to develop a written plan for serving credit needs in areas historically subject tio redlining and discrimination and to actively implement that plan.

Source: “Major Legislation on Housing and Urban Development Enacted Since 1932,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, (pg. 6) https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/LEGS_CHRON_JUNE2014.PDF

https://www.ffiec.gov/cra/history.htm

Document M: Kerner Commission Finding Summary, 1968 (Excerpt)

HOUSING

After more than three decades of fragmented and grossly underfunded federal housing programs, nearly six million substandard housing units remain occupied in the United States.

The housing problem is particularly acute in the minority ghettos. Nearly two-thirds of all non-White families living in the central cities today live in neighborhoods marked with substandard housing and general urban blight. Two major factors are responsible.

First: Many ghetto residents simply cannot pay the rent necessary to support decent housing. In Detroit, for example, over 40 percent of the non-White occupied units in 1960 required rent of over 35 percent of the tenants' income.

Second: Discrimination prevents access to many non-slum areas, particularly the suburbs, where good housing exists. In addition, by creating a "back pressure" in the racial ghettos, it makes it possible for landlords to break up apartments for denser occupancy, and keeps prices and rents of deteriorated ghetto housing higher than they would be in a truly free market.

To date, federal programs have been able to do comparatively little to provide housing for the disadvantaged. In the 31-year history of subsidized federal housing, only about 800,000 units have been constructed, with recent production averaging about 50,000 units a year. By comparison, over a period only three years longer, FHA insurance guarantees have made possible the construction of over ten million middle and upper-income units.

The Commission recommends that the federal government:

* Enact a comprehensive and enforceable federal open housing law to cover the sale or rental of all housing, including single family homes.

* Reorient federal housing programs to place more low and moderate income housing outside of ghetto areas.

* Bring within the reach of low and moderate income families within the next five years six million new and existing units of decent housing, beginning with 600,000 units in the next year.

Source: “Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders,” 1968, Eisenhower Foundation. http://www.eisenhowerfoundation.org/docs/kerner.pdf

Appendix II: California State Content Standards and C3 Links