Katie Hodgkins African American History Fall 2015

A Systematic Denial of Social Mobility for African Americans: The Parallel Histories of Residential and Educational Segregation

Textbooks, teachers, and proud nationalists alike preach naïve positivity in stating that American society was founded on ideals of democracy, equality, and freedom. In reality, the brutally inconvenient truth prevails that tensions between despotic whites and subordinated, enslaved blacks have shaped all aspects of American life since the 16th century. America’s foundation was not built upon liberty and mutual respect for all human beings, but instead upon hierarchical systems of oppression, racism, and inequality constructed solely to benefit elite white Americans. White hegemony has continued to pervade more recent American history through systematic residential segregation that has confined African Americans to poor, urban communities. Moreover, the American public education system, historically organized and funded through local residential districts, has consequently created deeper racial segregation by denying

African Americans access to quality schools. Throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, both residential and educational policies sought to legally reform segregation; however, they fundamentally failed to fix subtle racist practices and ideologies that still allowed for whites to discriminate, thus coalescing a link between blackness and poverty and limiting opportunities for socioeconomic mobility.

Between World War 1 and World War 2, southern African Americans migrated north as American industrialization created a boom in labor opportunities. Northern whites vehemently rioted against their arrival, dividing communities based on race in a

1 tactic that highlighted how “spatial segregation became the northern answer to the paternalistic Jim Crow laws of the South.”1 These strikingly black – white divisions isolated African American families into all-black ghettos throughout the Progressive Era.

Although this isolation ignited a burst of victorious cultural prosperity during the Harlem

Renaissance, the ensuing Great Depression of the 1930s indicated that “as quickly as the promise of economic and political power arose… it collapsed.”2 The depression disproportionately affected momentarily successful African American communities due to the crumbling of black jobs and businesses isolated within black ghettos. The African

American community was thus swept back to point zero as poverty became concentrated within the same urban ghettos that had once held such encouraging hope.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates astutely writes: “in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife.”3 But alas, the black community did not immediately heal from the metaphorical stabbing of the Great Depression. The emergence of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934 instead carved housing segregation into legal stone through the process of redlining. Black communities across the nation, literally marked in red on maps, became perceived as unstable and dangerous.

This symbolic conflation of black with bad had tangible effects on access to housing through increased loan and mortgage denials nationwide; 1 in 3 African Americans was denied in cities such as Boston, St. Louis, Phoenix, Houston, DC, Baltimore, and

1 Natasha Trifun, “Residential Segregation After the Fair Housing Act,” Human Rights 36 (2009): 15. 2 Douglas Massey & Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 116. 3 Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic (2014).

2 Oakland.4 The undertones of racism that riddled the language of FHA legislation legally justified the racially motivated actions of real estate agents with incentives to “[take blacks] for money and for sport.”5 Thus, the politics of the real estate industry coupled with urban zoning ordinances and deed restrictions acted “as a ‘NIMBY’ (not in my backyard) tool” of exclusion that allowed for white Americans to prosper while black

Americans suffered.6

Such unabashed discriminatory policies began to face challenges in the 1940s, especially through the critical lens of Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 publication An American

Dilemma. Myrdal wrote that racial segregation in housing policy constructs “an artificial city… that permits any prejudice on the part of public officials to be freely vented on

Negroes without hurting whites.”7 Much like Myrdal’s ability to perceive the implications of racialized housing policies, the African American community began to challenge the legal system on the same principle of inequality. In a moment of progressive triumph, the Supreme Court ruled in the 1948 case Shelley v. Kraemer that residential exclusion based on race violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth

Amendment.8

Despite this federal ruling, housing discrimination did not consequently disappear. Instead, it surged. World War 2 veterans had just recently returned home and took jobs in construction, accelerating the process of suburbanization that led to persistent residential segregation. As suburbs grew rapidly, more than 80% of businesses

4 Robert Bollard, “Residential Apartheid in Urban America,” Race, Poverty, & The Environment (1993): 7-8. 5 Coates. 6 Bollard, 8. 7 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1994), 618. 8 Joe T. Darden, “Black Residential Segregation Since the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer Decision,” Journal of Black Studies 25 (1995): 680.

3 that once made city life so prosperous left to accompany the growth.9 Local governments

enacted strategic policies nationwide to correspondingly confine blacks to urban spaces;

for example, Chicago chose to build public housing units only in all-black

neighborhoods.10 Real estate agents supplemented this confinement by dispersing

viciously deceptive information to African American communities, making “it hard for

them to learn about, inspect, rent, or purchase homes in white neighborhoods.”11 Veiled

under subtle racism, similar policies and practices throughout the nation fabricated the white “belief that having black neighbors undermines property values and reduces

neighborhood safety.”12 African American communities thus became physically

disassociated from indications of prosperity such as “higher home values, safer streets,

higher-quality schools, and better services” that would have equipped them with opportunities to socioeconomically progress.13

These implicitly racist policies became cemented into American neighborhood

composition just as the 1960s Civil Rights Movement gained momentum. President

Lyndon B. Johnson established the Kerner Commission to quell urban rioting over racial

inequities produced by housing segregation. The ensuing national study culminated in

The Kerner Report, which officially cited racialized residential segregation as a crucial

root of continued inequities along a white - black line.14 These findings sought to enact

“new attitudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will” from every American; yet,

they ironically emerged amidst a Senate filibuster attempting to prevent new civil rights

9 Darden, 684. 10 Coates. 11 Massey & Denton, 97. 12 Massey & Denton, 94. 13 Massey & Denton, 14. 14 Massey & Denton, 3.

4 legislation.15 This juxtaposition symbolically underscored a starkly divided American

public along racial-ideological lines.

To honor the findings of The Kerner Report, the government took action by

enacting the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which sought to obliterate legal discrimination in

housing on the federal level. However, the act was pitifully enforced and did not address

problems such as a “lack of infrastructure… and racial disparities in subprime lending.”16

Throughout the rest of the 20th century, America continued to operate under a façade of

equality despite numerous civil rights legislations.17 The Urban Development Act of

1968 sought to expand access to mortgages. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 legally banned racism in mortgages. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 legally banned redlining. The Fair Housing Amendments of 1988 enacted more severe legal punishments for discrimination in real estate. Yet, despite the progressive intentions of these reforms, they ultimately did little to alter the deeply ingrained image linking black skin with concepts of poverty, danger, illiteracy, unemployment, and criminality. The sad truth remains that neighborhoods in metropolitan areas throughout the nation such as

New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia are still to this day vastly segregated along

W.E.B. DuBois’ color line.18

This deeply rooted residential segregation has negatively impacted the American

public education system. In fact, the two systems entail an interconnected history of

discrimination and failed policies, beginning with the emergence of free public schooling

15 “Primary Documents: National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (The Kerner Report), 1967,” (New York: Bantam Books, 1968). 16 Trifun, 14. 17 Darden, 681. 18 Paul A. Jargowsky, “Segregation, Neighborhoods, and Schools,” in Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools, ed. Annette Lareau and Kimberly Goyette (Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), 105.

5 in New England in the early 19th century. White southerners objected to providing free

and equal education for all Americans, as such a system would fundamentally undercut

the hierarchical structure of slavery that sustained their economy. Public education was

thus imbued with racial tension from its inception and was only implemented nationwide

through the accord struck in the culmination of the American Civil War.

In order to appease white opponents, southern progressive educational campaigns

advocated for tax funding based upon locality; only “when white voters could be assured,

via disenfranchisement, that their increased local taxes would go to white schools but not

to black schools, educational ‘progressivism’ succeeded.”19 By allocating property taxes to fund public schools, the American government caused the quality of education to differ drastically based on location; wealthy communities that generated more property tax than low-income communities maintained higher-quality schools for their children. Adding insult to injury, the Supreme Court constitutionally defended racial segregation in schools in the 1896 case Plessey v Ferguson. The intention to promote equality of opportunity through a public education system was thus relegated back to the realm of pure theory. In reality, American public education ironically served as a legal and political foundation to unequally fund schools, unequally educate students, and divide communities racially up until the mid-twentieth century.

In 1954, in perhaps the most widely renowned progressive educational policy in

American history, the Supreme Court discarded this Plessey v Ferguson separate but equal “formula, which had long proved self-defeating,” and mandated the integration of

19 Pamela B. Walters, “Educational Access and the State: Historical Continuities and Discontinuities in Racial Inequality in American Education,” Sociology of Education (2001): 40.

6 public schools in Brown v Board of Education.20 This triumphant federal victory of civil

rights leadership proved logistically deficient, however, because schools were still

structured and maintained on the state level. Therefore, discretionary local politics and

school boards controlled the extent to which Brown was implemented. “Six years after

Brown, in the 18 states… that had legally segregated schools prior to 1954, only 6.4

percent of black students attended schools that enrolled any whites at all.”21 Even a decade later, by 1964, the statistics were still vastly underwhelming.22 Despite federal

support of integration, local governments dragged out the implementation process to

sustain educational inequality under omnipresent racism.

In an attempt to remedy this problem and enforce desegregation under Brown’s

federal mandate, Congress enacted the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)

in 1965 to federally fund public schools throughout the nation. ESEA highlighted the

reality of racism, as “most of the ESEA funds… were apportioned on the basis of the size

of the low-income population” and directly “targeted toward improving education” for

African American children.23 However, even though ESEA federally slashed delayed

integration in schools, white opponents in the American North and South still

manipulated the legal loophole of residential segregation to funnel the black community

into a perpetual cycle of poverty and stagnation.

While the North continued to take advantage of segregation through

suburbanization, the South strategically intertwined suburbanization with privatization.

20 Charles E. Williams, “Implementation of the Supreme Court’s Decision on Racial Segregation in Public Education,” AAUP Bulletin 43 (1957): 296. 21 Walters, 43. 22 Erica Frankenberg, “Metropolitan Schooling and Housing Integration,” Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law 18 (2009): 193. 23 Walters, 43.

7 Southern white families turned their backs on public schools to instead “patronize private

white schools… [establishing] ‘segregation academies,’ often affiliated with local

churches.”24 Low-income African Americans became logistically annexed from these

private schools due to economic obstacles such as transportation and tuition.25 African

Americans who attempted to assimilate into wealthier white communities only

perpetuated the evasive tactic of gentrification that persists to this day. Through this

“white flight,” white residents moved from urban centers into suburbia, taking away

money that had originally supported urban public school systems. Even more

detrimentally, they took away their businesses. This strategy has served to “lower [each]

city’s tax base and jeopardize the availability of municipal services… further

constraining fiscal resources [that] perpetuate the cycle of urban decay.”26 If every child

were to simply enroll in the public school associated with the district in which his or her

family lives, the depreciation of poor urban districts with large African American

populations would be far less debilitating.27

Unfortunately, misguided political policies and ideologies have instead

exacerbated the prevalence of suburbanization, privatization, and gentrification. The

initially progressive implementation of busing in the 1960s, for example, sought to

remedy the problems of unequal education by transporting children from low-income communities to public schools in wealthier communities. However, the policy failed to take into consideration residential obstacles because just as “there [was] an increase in racial segregation between school districts,” there was “a concurrent decline of

24 Walters, 43. 25 Jargowsky, 129. 26 Trifun, 16. 27 Salvatore Saporito and Deenesh Sohoni, “Coloring Outside the Lines: Racial Segregation in Public Schools and Their Attendance Boundaries,” Sociology of Education 79 (2006): 84.

8 segregation within districts.”28 Socioeconomically stable white families who deserted

public schools by moving to the suburbs or enrolling their children in private schools

ultimately rendered desegregation efforts through busing ineffective.

A similarly misguided neoliberal rhetoric emerged in the 1980s in support of free market choice and school deregulation. Proponents of the ideology, however, failed to account for residential segregation in advocating for their stance. By endorsing privatization and subsequently denying responsibility for racial impacts, neoliberals have

ignored the power, granted to each individual state, of creating school district boundaries;

this state power controls the true organization of funding and inhibits genuine school

choice for families isolated within low-income districts.29 Families lacking the

socioeconomic capital needed to choose private schools are thus obliged to subject their

children to public schools in their low-income districts that grapple with limited resources, low academic expectations, chaotic social environments, and high rates of behavioral issues.30 Students in wealthier neighborhoods are notably not burdened by

these same impediments to learning. The ignorance of neoliberal ideology thus

exemplifies how residential segregation exacerbates inequalities in education that

disproportionately suppress low-income African Americans.

Furthermore, this inability to access quality education in childhood engenders

long-term negative effects. Statistics indicate that while effective schooling yields better

academic and professional opportunities, “attending a ‘disadvantaged school’ – one with

a disproportionate population of poor and minority students and high drop out rates – is

28 Saporito & Sohoni, 84. 29 Walters, 44. 30 Jargowsky, 99 and 128.

9 as important a predictor of ending up in poverty as measured intelligence.”31 Regardless

of race or socioeconomics, all children have higher chances of success when provided

with a stable educational foundation that furnishes academic potential. And yet, African

American children have been unfairly denied this foundation specifically because of their

residential annexation from quality public and private schools. Intergenerationally, this

has served to perpetuate a cycle of poor education and poverty within the African

American community. Despite a long history of policies enacted to create more racial

equality of opportunity, American schools and neighborhoods are more segregated now

than ever before.32

In 2014, the Frontline documentary Separate and Unequal exposed the most recent attempt to perpetuate inequality in education based on race. Under the guise of escaping inadequate schools, a white residential faction of Baton Rouge, Louisiana attempted to break from their community to create not only a separate school system, but an entirely new town called St. George. Advocates were shameless in seeking to advance the prosperity of white students while confining black students to the already failing

Baton Rouge public school system. Their actions confirmed the ideology that “whenever one social group derives systematic benefits from an institutionalized system of subordination, its members can be expected to resist efforts to dismantle the system despite its injustice.”33 Instead of attempting to work together to fix the school system,

the mentality of segregation and fear of the black community further ingrained reliance

upon detachment and disassociation in both physical locality and educational quality.

31 Walters, 37. 32 Frankenberg, 193. 33 Douglass Massey, “Racial Discrimination in Housing: A Moving Target,” Social Problems 52 (2005): 150.

10 White Americans continue to discover legal loopholes that allow them to socially

control and suppress the African American community into a perpetual state of

subordination. Residential and educational policies have merely camouflaged the

intention of racism throughout history and therefore still produce widespread racial segregation in the structural frameworks of the nation. As Coates edifies, “we believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.”34 In order to truly address contemporary racial

inequities, however, American society and policy must in fact look at the reality of white

superiority and a historically ubiquitous, systematic denial of social mobility for African

Americans. Without addressing persistent discriminatory mentalities, nationwide

desegregation of American schools and communities will remain precarious, as legal

changes will only continue to place a perennial Band-Aid on the surface of racism

without actually healing its injustices and eradicating the consequences.

34 Coates.

11 Bibliography

Bollard, Robert D. “Residential Apartheid in Urban America.” Race, Poverty, & the Environment 3/4, (1993): p. 7-8.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic, June 2014 Issue. Accessed October 29, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.

Darden, Joe T. “Black Residential Segregation Since the 1948 Shelley V. Kraemer Decision.” Journal of Black Studies 25 (6). Sage Publications, Inc., (1995): p. 680–691.

Fairchild, Gregory. “Racial Segregation in the Public Schools and Adult Labor Market Outcomes: The Case of Black Americans.” Small Business Economics, 33(4), (2009): p. 467–484.

Frankenberg, Erica. “Metropolitan Schooling and Housing Integration.” Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law, 18(2), (2009): p. 193–213.

Frontline Documentary. “Separate and Unequal” (2014) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/separate-and-unequal/

Jargowsky, Paul A. “Segregation, Neighborhoods, and Schools”. In Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools, edited by Annette Lareau and Kimberly Goyette, Russell Sage Foundation, 2014: p. 97–136.

Massey, Douglas S. “Racial Discrimination in Housing: A Moving Target.” Social Problems 52, (2005): p. 148-151.

Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), p. 618.

“Primary Documents: National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (The Kerner Report), 1967.” (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), pp. 1-29. Accessed from the University of Washington: History Department, December 2, 2015. http://faculty.washington.edu/qtaylor/documents_us/Kerner%20Report.htm

Reardon, Sean F. et. al. “Implications of Income-Based School Assignment Policies for Racial School Segregation.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 28 (1), (2006): p. 49–75.

12 Saporito, Salvatore, and Sohoni, Deenesh. “Coloring outside the Lines: Racial Segregation in Public Schools and Their Attendance Boundaries.” Sociology of Education, 79(2), (2006): p. 81–105.

Trifun, Natasha M. “Residential Segregation After the Fair Housing Act.” Human Rights 36 (4). American Bar Association, (2009): p. 14–19.

Walters, Pamela B. “Educational Access and the State: Historical Continuities and Discontinuities in Racial Inequality in American Education.” Sociology of Education 74, (2001): p. 35-49.

Williams, Charles E. “Implementation of the Supreme Court's Decision on Racial Segregation in Public Education.” AAUP Bulletin, 43(2), (1957): p. 295–305.

13