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

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