Moving toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing 9780674919891

Citation preview

Moving t­ oward Integration

Richard H. Sander • Yana A. Kucheva • Jonathan M. Zasloff

Moving t­ oward Integration THE PAST AND F­ UTURE OF FAIR HOUSING

Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts, and London, ­England  2018

Copyright © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Sander, Richard Henry, 1956– author. | Kucheva, Yana A., author. | Zasloff, Jonathan M., author. Title: Moving t­ oward integration : the past and ­f uture of fair housing / Richard H. Sander, Yana A. Kucheva, Jonathan M. Zasloff. Description: Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts : Harvard University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017045624 | ISBN 9780674976535 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Discrimination in housing—­United States—­H istory. | Blacks—­Segregation—­United States—­H istory. | United States—­R ace relations. Classification: LCC HD7288.76.U5 S27 2018 | DDC 363.5 / 10973—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2017045624 Jacket design: Tim Jones Jacket art: The Kenilworth Courts housing projects and a neighborhood home on Douglas Street in Washington, DC. © Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post/ Getty Images

From Richard Sander: To my ­father, A. D. Sander (1925–2010), scholar of the past, and my son, R. E. Sander (1990–), citizen of the ­future From Yana Kucheva: To my grandparents, my parents, and my brother From Jonathan Zasloff: To my ­mother, Phyllis B. Zasloff (1930–2010), who taught me about justice We collectively thank Peter Bell for the development of the graphics in this book

Contents

List of ­Tables and Figures

ix

Note on Census Sources

xv

Introduction

1

P A R T I   The Core of the American Dilemma

1 Southern Black Urbanism and the Origins of Fair Housing, 1865–1917

19

2 The Ghetto, 1918–1940

37

3 Shelley v. Kraemer and the Rise of Blockbusting, 1940–1959

62

4 Public Housing, Federal Urban Policies, and the Underclass, 1934–1962

83

5 The Creation of Fair Housing Statutes, 1959–1968

102

P A R T I I   The Impact of Fair Housing Law and the Critical De­cade, 1970–1980

6 Implementation of the Fair Housing Act, 1968–1975

143

7 Black Pioneers in the 1970s and the Segregation Puzzle

166

8 Tipping versus Integration: A Delicate Balance?

199

9 To Leap a Moving Wall: The Inversion of the Dual Housing Market, 1970–1980

213

vii

viii Contents P A R T I I I   The Second Generation of Fair Housing, 1975–2000

10 Exclusionary Zoning and Structural Segregation

233

11 Fair Lending, Redlining, and Black Homeownership, 1970–2000

251

12 The Ethnic Mosaic: Shifting from Two Races to Many

269

13 The Expansion of Federal Fair Housing Law, 1980–1995

283

14 The Slowing of Neighborhood Racial Transition, 1980–2010

301

15 The Reformation of Assisted Housing Programs, 1968–2012

310

P A R T I V   The Twenty-­First ­Century

16 The Effects of Segregation

335

17 The Effect of Diversity on Integration

353

18 Gentrification and the Evolution of White Demand

364

19 The Mortgage Crisis and the ­Great Recession

378

20 Implications of Urban Integration and Segregation in the Twenty-­First ­Century

391

P A R T V  Solutions

21 A Portfolio of Integration Strategies

423

22 Race to the Top

445

23 The Politics of Integration

458

Appendix

467

Notes

493

Acknowl­edgments

559

Index

565

List of ­Tables and Figures

­Tables 0.1 Outcomes for African-­A mericans in moderately vs. very highly segregated metro areas  2 0.2 Proportion of all blacks, and low-­income blacks, living in high-­poverty neighborhoods  4 0.3 Trends in black / white segregation in major metro areas, 1970–2010  10 1.1 U.S. cities with at least twenty-­five thousand blacks in 1910 that ­were at least 15 ­percent black  31 2.1 Ethnic intermarriage in New Haven, 1900–1950  50 2.2 Italian residents in Manhattan / Brooklyn enumeration districts  52 2.3 Black residents in Chicago enumeration districts  52 4.1 Racial occupancy and segregation in Philadelphia public housing for families, 1952–1968  90 4.2 Patterns of owner­ship and home finance in three major cities, January 1934  96 5.1 House­hold occupancy of new housing, by race, illustrative metro areas, 1960  108 5.2 Economic segregation among black families, Chicago, 1950–1970  112 5.3 Proportion of white respondents saying they would not move ­ under two scenarios of racial change  122 6.1 Estimated discrimination rates over four encounters, based on 1977 HMPS: blacks seeking housing in white neighborhoods  164 7.1 Patterns of intra-­metropolitan migration among African-­A merican h ­ ouse­holds, 1950s–1980s  170 ix

x  List of ­Tables and Figures

7.2 Patterns of intermetropolitan migration among African-­A merican h ­ ouse­holds, 1950s–1980s  172 7.3 Patterns of desegregation in the 1970s across U.S. metropolitan areas  174 7.4 Black distribution in San Diego by neighborhood racial composition, 1970–1990  192 7.5 Black distribution across census tracts in seven metropolitan areas, 1970–1990 (Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Portland, San Antonio, Seattle, Tucson)  192 7.6 Anglo distribution across census tracts in seven metropolitan areas, 1970–1990 (Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Portland, San Antonio, Seattle, Tucson)  193 8.1 White responses to public opinion surveys  200 8.2 Neighborhood racial preferences in and around Schellingville (positing 1,000 incumbent white residents and 1,000 potential black entrants)  201 8.3 Attitudes of Detroit whites ­toward residential integration, 1976  202 8.4 Attitudes of Detroit blacks t­ oward residential integration, 1976  202 9.1 White-­to-­black net replacement estimated at census tract level, 1970–1980  215 9.2 Inflation-­adjusted change in median housing value, 1970–1980  223 9.3 1980 median housing value in Chicago census tracts with average income of $15,000–­$20,000 in 1979  223 10.1 Structural segregation components for African-­A mericans and non-­Hispanic whites, average dissimilarity values for twenty-­five major metropolitan areas, 1960–2000  246 10.2 Black / white patterns of structural and residual segregation in eigh­teen illustrative metropolitan areas  249 11.1 Patterns of home finance for whites and blacks, U.S. total, 1960 and 1971  256 11.2 Successful mortgage origination rates for applicants in Los Angeles County, 1994  266 12.1 Asian-­A merican population in the United States, 1900–2013  273 12.2 Hispanic population in the United States, 1850–2013  275 12.3 Distribution of block-level dissimilarity indices with whites across sixty key metro areas, 1980 and 2010  279 14.1 Trends in resegregation speed, 1940–2010  303 15.1 Comparing rental subsidies  317 15.2 Assisted housing units, 1968–2012 (in millions of ­house­holds)  322

List of ­Tables and Figures  xi

15.3 Comparing neighborhood racial composition and poverty exposure for African-­A mericans across housing programs, Los Angeles City and Los Angeles County, 1995  328 15.4 Neighborhood characteristics of assisted housing units, United States, 2012  330 16.1 Changes in the absolute and relative income of African-­A merican families by level of metropolitan segregation, 1970–1990  341 16.2 Proportion of all blacks, and low-­income blacks, living in high-­poverty neighborhoods, 2011–2015  342 17.1 Ideal neighborhood composition by group membership, Los Angeles, 1991–1992  357 17.2 Patterns of Anglo entry into majority non-­A nglo neighborhoods, 1970–2013  358 17.3 Entry of one hundred or more Anglos into majority-­minority high-diversity tracts, 1970–2013  359 17.4 Volume and stability of integration types, 1970–2013  362 18.1 Relative, average two-­and three-­bedroom home prices in distance zones of major cities  366 18.2 How population composition is changing in major “older” cities, 2000–2015  368 18.3 Distribution of Anglos and African-­A mericans by metropolitan density quartile, 1970–2010  369 18.4 Average h ­ ouse­hold incomes across the density gradient, twenty-five major metro areas, 1970–2010  370 18.5 Direction of change across tracts, by density quartile, metropolitan New York, 1970s versus 2000s  371 18.6 Direction of change across tracts, by density quartile, ten other major metro areas contrasted, 1970s versus 2000s  371 18.7 Anglo move-in rates into integrated neighborhoods  376 20.1 Relative rates of migration into core and outlying areas, 1980–2000  393 20.2 Relative black outcomes in 2015 across metro areas, by level of black / white segregation in 2010  396 20.3 Proportion of all blacks, and low-­income blacks, living in high-­poverty neighborhoods, 2011–2015  397 20.4 Segregation levels of multiracial blacks, 2010  400 20.5 Con­temporary housing and public school segregation levels in nineteen MSAs  405 20.6 Anglo c­ hildren in private schools, by level of metropolitan housing segregation, 2015  407

xii  List of ­Tables and Figures

V.1 Patterns of desegregation between 1990 and 2010 across U.S. metropolitan areas  414 22.1 An illustration of the desegregation pro­cess: metropolitan Buffalo, New York  450 22.2 Desegregation initiative bud­get in the Buffalo example  452

Appendix ­Tables 3.1 OLS regressions predicting ­percent black within census tract, Chicago (spatial lag model, N=800)  468 3.2 Demographic overview of mid-­century changes affecting central-­ city blacks in seven major cities  470 3.3 Further mid-­century demographic patterns in seven major cities  471 3.4 Changes in median housing and rent values for census tracts that experienced less than a five-­point change in black population and less than a 50 ­percent increase in white population, seven cities over mid-­century de­cades (spatial lag model)  472 5.1 Models of velocity for owned units in border census tracts in U.S. metropolitan areas, 1959–1960 and 1969–1970  473 7.1 Models of black demand in border census tracts, 1960 and 1970  474 7.2 Models of black demand in border census tracts, 1980 and 1990  475 7.3 Models of desegregation, 1970–1980  476 7.4 Models of desegregation, 1970–1990  478 8.1 Models of velocity for owned units in border census tracts, U.S. metropolitan areas, 1979–1980 and 1989–1990  479 8.2 Models of white owner demand in border census tracts over four de­c ades, late 1950s to late 1980s  480 8.3 Models of white renter demand in border census tracts over four de­c ades, late 1950s to late 1980s  481 8.4 Descriptive statistics of white demand into border and outlying neighborhoods by ­house­hold demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, 1960–1980  483 8.5 Multinomial model of the odds of moving to core and border areas for the white population (movers only, one-­year mobility history)  484 8.6 Models of black demand, 1970–1990, in outlying census tracts that ­were less than 10 ­percent black in 1970  485

List of ­Tables and Figures  xiii

9.1. Models of black / white relative housing values, 1970–1980  485 10.1 Socioeconomic characteristics of the black and Hispanic urban population relative to whites, 1970–2010  486 17.1 Matrix of neighborhood change, U.S. metropolitan areas, 1970–2013  488

Figures 0.1 Sixty major metropolitan areas by level of black / ­white segregation in 2010  3 1.1 Outcomes for African-­A mericans, 1870–1940  21 1.2 Urbanization of blacks and whites, 1870–1990  22 1.3 Distribution of the black population, 1870–1990  22 2.1 Illustrating mea­sures of segregation  39 2.2 Trends in segregation, 1880–1930  43 2.3 Models of urban expansion  59 2.4 Racial covenants in Chicago, 1940  60 3.1 Black “pioneers” on Chicago’s South Side, 1950  78 3.2 Patterns of black expansion in Chicago, 1950–1970  79 4.1 Race and public housing siting in Philadelphia  91 5.1 Three Southern metro areas in 1960  109 6.1 Housing discrimination barred by the Fair Housing Act and Section 1982  151 7.1 Racial change in San Diego, 1970–1990  178 7.2 Racial change in Chicago, 1970–1990  182 7.3 Did more progressive white attitudes foster desegregation, or result from it?  197 8.1 Racial change in four metro areas, 1970–1980  204 8.2 White in-­movers to neighborhoods undergoing racial transition, 1960–1970  208 9.1 Racial change in Milwaukee, 1960–1980  217 9.2 Racial change in Washington, D.C., 1960–1980  218 9.3 Racial change in Los Angeles, 1960–1980  220 13.1 Assessing housing discrimination in national audits: 1989, 2000, and 2012  297 17.1 Neighborhoods by racial composition, 1970 and 2013  354 18.1 Change in attitudes ­toward racially integrated neighborhoods, Detroit-­a rea whites, 1976–2004  375 20.1. For sixty years, black unemployment has been roughly double the white rate  395

xiv  List of ­Tables and Figures

V.1 The broad racial stability of integrated neighborhoods, 2000–2010  416 V.2 Key patterns of racial change in the early twenty-­first c­ entury: the Chicago model revisited  420 23.1 The continuing evolution of white attitudes  460

Note on Census Sources

In Moving ­toward Integration, we draw upon and attempt to synthesize a broad and varied scholarly lit­er­a­ture about housing segregation and fair housing. We also conducted interviews with several key figures in fair housing and conducted primary research in many historical archives, which are described in the acknowledgments. A good deal of the demographic analy­sis in this book is based on our analyses of primary census data. We describe below three impor­tant sources of data used in many of the t­ ables, regressions, and figures in the book.

Longitudinal Census Tract Database, 1940–1970 Using public census tract data for each decennial year from 1940 through 1970, we created a longitudinal database of census tract socioeconomic characteristics in constant census tract bound­a ries. The  U.S. Census redraws census tract bound­a ries before each decennial census to keep up with the changing geographic distribution of the U.S. population, to keep tract populations close to an average of four thousand residents apiece, and to make tract bound­a ries correspond to local landmarks and natu­ral barriers (e.g., major roads, train tracks, and rivers) where pos­si­ble. A majority of tract bound­a ries remain constant over time, but for ­those tracts that changed, we used the tract correspondence ­tables for each year to code tract boundary changes across census years and create consistent tract bound­a ries over time using the lowest common denominator of a tract’s geographic coverage over the entire period. In most cases, this involved aggregating tracts that split up in 1960 or 1970 back to their original geographic extent in 1940 or xv

xvi  Note on Census Sources

1950. In a very small number of cases, we combined tracts that w ­ ere split across census years in a way where ­later tract bound­a ries w ­ ere not fully nested within earlier tract bound­a ries. Our database covers the following central cities: Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Louisville, Miami, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and St. Louis. Some of ­these cities ­were not tracted in 1940 or 1950, so our database for them includes only the available census years.

Geolytics Neighborhood Change Database (NCDB), 1970–2013 The NCDB is the standard data source for longitudinal tract data in the United States post-1970. This is a commercially available database in constant 2010 tract bound­a ries created by Geolytics. All census tract data prior to the 2010 census is spatially smoothed over a continuous surface and interpolated to the 2010 tract grid to create counts of ­people, ­house­holds, and housing units in 2010 census tract units. Thus, unlike our 1940–1970 database, which preserves exact census tabulations, the NCDB uses algorithms and estimates. For the purpose of studying broad trends—­the main purpose for which we use them in this volume—­t he estimates work very well. This database is updated e­ very ten years to accommodate tract boundary changes across decennial censuses and, more recently, to incorporate five-­year ACS tract data.

Restricted Individual-­and Household-­level Census Data Geocoded to the Block Level, 1960–2010 We applied for special permission to analyze restricted individual-­and household-­level census data that are internal to the U.S. Census Bureau and accessible only to census employees or researchers who have under­gone a thorough background check and can demonstrate that their research proj­ect ­will benefit the data collection and statistical missions of the U.S. Census Bureau. ­These restricted datasets are the basis for all Integrated Public Microdata Series (IPUMS) releases with some key differences. First, all restricted microdata are geocoded to the block level, so that we can study neighborhood change with great precision. Second, the restricted data are not suppressed or top-­coded. We obtained access to all decennial census microdata at the ­house­hold and

Note on Census Sources  xvii

individual levels for the years 1960, 1970, 1980, 2000, and 2010. We also obtained access to the 2006–­2010 American Community Survey (ACS) files, since starting with the 2010 decennial census, the U.S. Census Bureau discontinued the long-­form as part of its data collection. Instead, most socioeconomic data, such as income and geographic mobility, now come from the American Community Survey (ACS). The restricted census data allowed us to implement household-­level analyses of geographic mobility given one’s neighborhood racial and socioeconomic composition. We also implemented neighborhood-­level analyses of racial change that are not pos­si­ble with public census data due to the lack of suitable cross-­tabulations of migration by race at the tract level.

Moving t­ oward Integration

Introduction

A

merica’s most challenging social issue is widening in­equality, and perhaps the most troubling manifestation of that in­equality is the wide chasm between typical white and black outcomes. Along many dimensions, the United States has made breathtaking pro­gress in eliminating the racial caste system that disfigured the country, in one form or another, for three centuries. Even the most buoyant optimists of the civil rights era would not have soberly predicted that the nation would elect a black president as early as 2008, or that interracial marriage would become commonplace and unremarkable, or the dozens of other phenomena that signify a working multiracial society. For social and economic outcomes, however, black / white gaps have stubbornly persisted. The ratio of black-­to-­white median h ­ ouse­hold income was 58 ­percent in 1965, and is 60 ­percent t­ oday.1 The relative test score per­for­ mance of black high school students ­rose rapidly in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, but the black / white gap has now hovered at one standard deviation for nearly thirty years.2 The disparities between average black wealth and average white wealth, or between black and white hom­i­cide rates, or the gap between black out-­of-­wedlock births and white out-­of-­wedlock births: all of ­these have stagnated or widened in Amer­i­ca as a ­whole. 3 Why? ­There are many small answers, but we believe t­ here is one g­ iant answer: housing segregation. For most of the twentieth ­century, nearly all urban African-­A mericans lived in highly segregated conditions. Since the end of the 1960s, when Congress passed fair housing laws, intense black / white segregation has declined—­slowly in most large metropolitan areas, but more rapidly in some ­others. By the 1990s, the differences between cities that 1

2 Introduction TABLE 0.1   Outcomes for African-­A mericans in moderately vs. very highly segregated

metro areas Moderate black /  white segregation: Dissimilarity  .80

Black level

Relative to Anglo level

Black level

Relative to Anglo level

Comparison group

Indicator

Black men ages 25–34

% Unemployed Median earnings Median income Median income

10.1% $24,000 $75,200 $102,000

1.44 68.6% 83.6% 89.4%

17.4% $20,000 $75,000 $105,000

3.48 47.6% 68.8% 75.0%

% headed by single parent Age-­adjusted mortality (per 100,000)

54.5%

2.06

61.6%

3.22

826

1.14

957

1.42

Black married couples Black married c­ ouple with at least one college degree All black ­house­holds with c­ hildren All blacks

Data sources: American Community Survey (ACS) 2015 1% sample; Compressed Mortality File (CMF), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 201. Mortality levels are based on the county containing each metropolitan area’s principal city; other calculations are based on metropolitan areas defined by 1980 Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) bound­a ries.

remained highly segregated for blacks, and ­those that ­were now only moderately segregated, w ­ ere large enough to attract scholarly attention, and even then analysts faced formidable challenges of separating out cause and effect (Chapter  16). Only twenty years ago did social scientists develop the first convincing evidence that high metropolitan levels of segregation had a power­ful depressing effect on black outcomes, but since then—­a nd especially in the past four or five years—­the evidence has steadily mounted. ­There is still a ­great deal that is unknown—­particularly about the exact causal mechanisms—­but we believe the effects of housing segregation are so large and pervasive as to leave l­ittle doubt that housing segregation is a major contributor to con­temporary black / white in­equality. Figure 0.1 shows how sixty major metropolitan areas in the United States mea­sure up on the black / white index of dissimilarity, a standard mea­sure of segregation in which “1” represents complete separation of the races, and “0” represents uniform integration. In the United States ­today, careful mea­sure­ ment of segregation shows major urban areas falling between 0.5 and 0.9 on black / white dissimilarity, with most of the largest metro areas near the higher

Introduction  3 FIGURE 0.1.

Sixty major metropolitan areas by level of black / ­white segregation in 2010. Seattle Boston Milwaukee Detroit

New York

Chicago

Philadelphia Washington

Denver Nashville Los Angeles

Phoenix

San Diego Very high (.75+) High (.65–.74)

Atlanta Dallas-Ft. Worth Houston

Moderate (.50–.64)

Miami

Data source: Authors’ calculations from block-­level restricted census data.

end of that scale. T ­ able 0.1 provides a s­ imple illustration of how black / white outcomes differ in metropolitan areas near the lower end of this spectrum (black / white dissimilarity below 0.6) with ­those at the high end (black / white dissimilarity above 0.8). The ­table shows both absolute levels experienced by African-­Americans, and the average ratio of levels between African-­Americans and non-­Hispanic whites in t­ hose metro areas. In some cases, such as median income, the differences in absolute levels are unimpressive, largely b ­ ecause the cost of living is much lower in some moderate-­segregation areas (e.g., Phoenix) than some high-­segregation areas (e.g., New York). But the relative black / white levels are striking. In nearly e­ very case, the black / white gap is two to five times smaller in the moderate-­segregation areas. Even in the “ultimate” outcome—­ death rates—­the black / white gap is only one-­third as large in urban areas with moderate segregation as in areas with very high segregation. ­These contrasts are large. Nor are they atypical. Dozens of other outcomes tell the same story. Indeed, on almost any mea­sure one can pick, outcomes for African-­Americans are unambiguously worse—­often dramatically worse— in the highly segregated areas. We cannot attribute all the better black outcomes in moderate-­segregation metropolitan areas to segregation itself.

4 Introduction ­TABLE 0. 2   Proportion of all blacks, and low-­i ncome blacks, living in high-­poverty

neighborhoods Metropolitan areas in 2011–2015 with Outcome % of all blacks in census tracts that are over 40% poor % of low-­income blacks in census tracts that are over 40% poor

Moderate segregation

Very high segregation

8%

18%

17%

33%

Data source: Authors’ calculations from 2011–2015 American Community Survey (ACS). Notes: Moderate segregation areas have an index of dissimilarity below .65. Very highly segregated areas have an index of dissimilarity above .75. Indexes of dissimilarity are computed from restricted 2010 Decennial Census block-­level data based on 1980 SMSA bound­a ries.

Some appear to be due to selective migration, and some pro­gress undoubtedly comes from a feedback loop, in which better black outcomes foster more integration. But several careful studies, and research we pres­ent below (Chapters 16 and 20), make a convincing case that lower segregation is a key driver of better black outcomes. Why does lower segregation improve black outcomes so substantially? Our understanding remains sketchy, especially ­because so many distinct social phenomena affect each other. Greater integration tends to improve black proximity to jobs. It almost always increases school integration (much more reliably than school integration fosters housing integration) and, in general, improves the quality of public ser­vices for blacks. T ­ here is wide agreement that segregation tends to concentrate poverty, and thus, lower segregation sharply reduces the number of blacks living in high-­poverty neighborhoods, as T ­ able 0.2 shows. Such black poverty reduction underlines a key point: the gains that come with lower segregation accrue particularly to the ­house­holds that need it most. The civil rights revolution, and better access to higher education, enabled hundreds of thousands of middle-­class blacks in the 1960s and 1970s to get college degrees, enter professions or managerial jobs, and establish affluent lifestyles. All metropolitan areas with substantial black populations also now have a substantial black upper-­middle class, whose members avoid the worst effects of intense segregation.4 Segregation takes its largest toll among low-­and moderate-­income blacks, and unsurprisingly, they enjoy the most dramatic improvements in more integrated cities.

Introduction  5

The nub of the ­matter is that in metropolitan areas of moderate segregation, the entire spectrum of the black population is gradually converging with white outcomes; we see this convergence in every­thing from test scores5 to life spans.6 In areas of very high segregation, the upper third or so of the black population is experiencing at least some portions of this convergence, but a broad swath of African-­A mericans are stagnating or declining, seemingly stuck in communities with intense poverty, high rates of teenage unemployment and incarceration, and many more single-­parent than two-­ parent families. Most African-­A mericans may be unaware of the statistics, but they are certainly aware of the sense of stagnation; it fuels frustration, racial hostility, a sense of futility. It is also deeply discouraging to policy makers and analysts who are aware of the vast array of initiatives undertaken over the past fifty years in large part to reduce black poverty and racial in­ equality. Indeed, it is not too strong to say that a sense of fatalism pervades much of the policy discussion about black / white gaps in American society. For all t­ hese reasons, the sharp narrowing of black / white differences in metro areas with falling segregation is spectacular news. Not only does it show that substantial convergence is pos­si­ble; it demonstrates the proximate cause of convergence (lower segregation) and the a­ ctual metropolitan areas where it has happened. If we can understand what ­causes housing segregation to fall substantially, while finding no latent, harmful side effects, then achieving similar reductions in other metropolitan areas would seem worthy of becoming a central goal of public policy. This, then, is the rationale for this book: to understand housing segregation well enough so that we can understand what public policies—­loosely speaking, fair housing policies—­have done and can do to reduce segregation and foster a path ­toward greater housing integration. Our book is or­ga­nized historically, and gradually builds up lessons that lead to our policy analy­sis in Part V. In the remainder of this introduction, we explain twelve under­lying themes that inform and shape the approach taken in the rest of the book. 1. The central role of migration. African-­Americans have participated in four major migrations over the past one hundred fifty years: from the rural South to the urban South (starting at the end of the Civil War); from the South to the North (the “­Great Migration,” from the mid-1910s to the late 1960s);

6 Introduction

from central city ghettos to adjacent “border districts” (starting in 1948); and from northern metropolitan areas to southern and western ones (starting in the late 1960s). Each of t­ hese migrations disrupted existing r­ acial patterns of urban residence and proved to be an engine of change. 2. The significance of fair housing policy. Governments have had conscious fair housing policies since the 1960s, when the federal Fair Housing Act and many similar state laws w ­ ere enacted. But government policies of course had an impor­tant impact on racial access to housing and the contours of segregation long before that. A major goal of this book is to trace the interplay between social and economic forces “on the ground” with government policies, and to determine when and how policy played a central role or a ­peripheral one, and to trace both its intended and unintended consequences. 3. The interplay of economic and social forces at both the neighborhood and metropolitan level. Housing integration happens (or ­doesn’t happen) in neighborhoods. As Thomas Schelling observed nearly fifty years ago, the motives guiding individual decisions about where to live do not aggregate neatly into community outcomes. When “race” strongly influences neighborhood decisions and preferences, even blacks and whites who in princi­ple prefer integrated neighborhoods may fail to achieve them. Throughout most of the past seventy years, the number of black (and white) ­house­holds moving into integrated neighborhoods has greatly exceeded the number who ended up with integrated housing. ­There is a tendency in most of the extant lit­er­a­ture of segregation to divide urban neighborhoods simply into undifferentiated racial regions (“black,” “Hispanic,” and “white” neighborhoods, for example). This is a harmful oversimplification, b ­ ecause it overlooks the specific sorts of neighborhood context that make integration pos­si­ble in one place, and racial transition and resegregation almost inevitable in another. In this work, we w ­ ill generally distinguish between “core” neighborhoods that are already predominantly black; “border” neighborhoods that are all-­white (or at least mostly non-­black) but close to core areas; and “outlying,” predominantly non-­black neighborhoods that are far from core areas. We w ­ ill make other distinctions among neighborhoods, too, and test our accounts of segregation dynamics by estimating the patterns of movement into neighborhoods, based on their general characteristics. This focus on understanding neighborhood patterns of housing demand, and building up to the metropolitan level, is what we call a “microdynamic” approach to understanding segregation.

Introduction  7

4. The need for an interdisciplinary approach. Understanding the sort of patterns we describe requires, of course, the combination of several disciplines. We need to link together demographic forces, the operation of housing markets, po­liti­cal pressure, and ­legal pre­ce­dent. Most of all, we need to approach the subject historically, ­because, as we ­will see, each step in the development of segregation powerfully ­shaped the steps that followed. From a policy perspective, what makes this lengthy investigation worthwhile is our conclusion that we can set even our most highly segregated metropolitan areas on a path ­toward much more moderate levels of black / white segregation—­a nd do so more easily than most observers might imagine. 5. From the 1970s until recent years, both scholarship and politics on housing ­segregation have tended toward pessimism. Strikingly, for a long time a serious pursuit of housing integration seemed like a nonstarter, for both intellectual and policy reasons. From the 1980s u ­ ntil fairly recently, two dominant narratives about segregation have driven academic discussion. One narrative, perhaps best captured in the influential American Apartheid, by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton (1993),7 contended that white racism has relentlessly constrained the urban housing options of racial minorities—­especially African-­Americans—­ever since whites began to perceive blacks as an urban threat in the 1910s. Massey and Denton argued that fair housing laws have had only marginal effects on discrimination, so that racism continues to force most blacks and an increasing proportion of Hispanics into ghettos. Such a view implies a deep pessimism about the possibility of achieving integration without a fundamental reboot of white character. A second narrative, advanced in the 1970s and 1980s by Richard Muth (1986) and William Clark (1986, 1988, 1992), and l­ ater elaborated and refined by several economists (in par­tic­u­lar, Cutler, Glaeser, and Vigdor [1999]), agreed that widespread discrimination created housing segregation, but contended that discrimination became at most a secondary ­factor ­after the passage of fair housing laws. Segregation continued ­after 1970, they say, as a result of individual choices: whites have a stronger preference for housing in white neighborhoods than blacks do (in part ­because of weak preferences among blacks for integration), and thus generally outbid them for housing in predominantly white neighborhoods. In other words, segregation derives not from active discrimination against blacks, but rather white avoidance of integrated neighborhoods and insufficient black demand for housing in predominantly white neighborhoods. Policy intervention, in this view, is a

8 Introduction

solution in search of a prob­lem: at best irrelevant and at worst unpop­u­lar social engineering. Po­liti­cal leaders matched such scholarly pessimism in their reluctance to touch—­much less tackle—­the prob­lem of housing segregation. ­A fter all, one of the most toxic po­liti­cal ­battles from the late 1960s through the early 1980s was over court-­ordered busing to achieve school desegregation, where integration proponents repeatedly cut their own po­liti­cal throats with poorly conceptualized and often blatantly unfair strategies. Anyone (such as us) advancing an integrationist agenda bears the burden of showing why housing desegregation strategies should work any better. 6. The new scholarship and the new activism. In recent years both the academic and po­liti­cal discussions have changed. As the analy­sis of segregation became more sophisticated and made use of better data, more academics became skeptical about the adequacy of standard theories. Ingrid Gould Ellen, for example, demonstrated that racially integrated neighborhoods ­were becoming more common over time, and less prone to neighborhood transition. She showed that “white avoidance” was contextual, often linked more closely to concerns about crime and school quality than race per se. As if to underline the point, white migration to dense, central city neighborhoods grew rapidly a­ fter 2000, as violent crime in many metro areas dropped to levels not seen since the 1950s. Intensive national fair housing “audits” conducted in 2000 and 2012 provided compelling evidence that racial discrimination in housing markets was moderate and continuing to decline. Stephen Ross, who played an impor­tant role in developing and evaluating the results of discrimination studies, concluded in 2008 that the discrimination paradigm could no longer explain, in the face of substantial declines in discrimination rates, per­sis­tently high levels of segregation.8 A host of innovative housing segregation scholars have recently generated work that transcends the “discrimination” or “white avoidance” paradigms. Many of ­these scholars, like John Logan, Allison Shertzer, and Leah Boustan, have significantly improved the quality of data available to study segregation. They and ­others, including Lincoln Quillian, Lance Freeman, Elizabeth Bruch, and Robert Sampson, have emphasized the importance of considering neighborhood-­ level migration dynamics and summing ­these up to the metropolitan level, rather than focusing on aggregate patterns of segregation. John Goering, a leading fair housing policy analyst,

Introduction  9

has called for better theories of segregation that can explain the evolutionary paths of segregation and tell us concrete ­things about the effects of policy. Meanwhile, in the wake of the G ­ reat Recession, rising levels of economic in­equality have assumed, for the first time in de­cades, heightened importance in public debate. Such importance has, in turn, generated more attention to and discussion of housing segregation, even as more and better research was documenting segregation’s effects upon racial differences in outcomes. In June 2015, the Supreme Court gave an expansive interpretation to a portion of the Fair Housing Act, noting the significance of its interpretation as a tool in combating segregation. The following month, the Obama Administration unveiled federal regulations that, for the first time, nudged local governments t­ oward the development of comprehensive strategies for reducing housing segregation.9 7. Attempting a new synthesis. ­These many developments make this an ideal time to synthesize and integrate this work and t­ hese trends, and we aim in this book to unify our understanding of housing segregation. We attempt to formulate specific, testable hypotheses about the evolution of segregation and the effect of par­tic­u­lar policies. We seek to explain with some precision why some metropolitan areas have experienced more desegregation than ­others. We show how profoundly lower segregation influences a wide range of black outcomes.10 And we articulate a concrete and comprehensive approach to lowering black / white segregation levels more generally in urban Amer­i­ca. We do not yet know enough to accomplish all of ­these tasks, so our reach sometimes exceeds our grasp. But the attempt itself can help to focus ­future inquiry, and we think we show that enough is understood now to justify fundamentally new directions in urban policy. 8. The 1970s ­were a crucial inflection point in shaping modern segregation. We argue in Part II of the book that the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 succeeded in lowering housing discrimination enough to create new mechanisms of integration. But although black / white housing segregation declined all across urban Amer­i­ca to some degree starting in the 1970s, we increasingly see two very distinct patterns. The metro areas with moderate segregation continue to see further declines in segregation; we never observe the “moderate” areas regressing back into “high” segregation levels. But in the areas with high and very high segregation, pro­gress ­toward desegregation seems to be sputtering out, as T ­ able 0.3 suggests.

10 Introduction ­TABLE 0. 3   Trends in black / white segregation in major metro areas, 1970–2010

Average black / white dissimilarity levels for: Year

60 major MSAs*

12 MSAs with largest black populations

1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

.92 .80 .75 .73 .70

.93 .85 .81 .78 .75

Data sources: Indices calculated by the authors with restricted census block-­level data in constant 1980 SMSA bound­a ries. The sixty urban areas are ­t hose used in Massey, D. S., and Denton, N. A. (1987), “Trends in the residential segregation of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians: 1970–1980,” American So­cio­log­i­cal Review, 802–825. *Metropolitan Statistical Area

Since black populations in the urban areas with very high segregation vastly outnumber t­ hose in the moderate-­segregation areas, this diverging pattern is bad news. We estimate that roughly 40 ­percent of Amer­i­ca’s urban blacks live in metro areas with very high segregation, 50 ­percent are in areas with high segregation, and only 10  ­percent are in areas with moderate segregation.11 (Among the nation’s largest urban areas, none could be fairly called “low segregation” areas thus far.) The slowdown in desegregation where it is most needed is a crucial reason for a new generation of fair housing policies. 9. The centrality of African-­American agency. A key motive for the historical organ­ization of this book is to reveal the evolution of housing segregation as a remarkably coherent pro­cess, in the following sense. In nearly ­every de­ cade over the past c­ entury, a new set of forces, incentives, and pressures has worked upon Amer­i­ca’s black population, shaping the costs and opportunities of migration and settlement patterns. When we break t­ hings down in this way, the steps that led to the complex mosaic of the twenty-­first ­century are not only explicable, but to a certain degree obvious. Yet at the same time, the historical approach makes more evident the enormous importance of black agency in the evolution of segregation. In many accounts, segregation is simply something that happens to African-­Americans—­a sort of extension of historical slavery. To be sure, blacks had ­little control over their segregated conditions, but they ­were neither fools nor passive victims: they deeply understood the developments occurring around them, and

Introduction  11

sought, often with significant success, to challenge and shape ­those developments in consequential ways. A central part of our story concerns the role of black “pioneers”12—­ individuals and families who w ­ ere willing to incur the risks and costs of entering predominantly white neighborhoods. We focus not so much on the stories of par­tic­u ­lar pioneers, but on pioneering as a dynamic concept: ­under what conditions does this type of pioneering occur, and how does it affect the housing decisions of every­one ­else? Understanding and following the general path of pioneers, as we ­shall see, leads to figuring out many of the puzzles of segregation. 10. Our focus on black / white segregation. Almost everywhere in urban Amer­i­ca, black / white segregation is higher than that experienced by most Hispanic or Asian groups. The costs of segregation are highest for blacks, and the dynamics of black / white segregation are, we ­will argue, fundamentally dif­ fer­ent from ­those affecting Hispanics and Asians (Chapter 12).15 D ­ oing justice to ­these other phenomena would try the patience of our readers. On the other hand, the dramatic increase in racial diversity in Amer­i­ca is impor­tant in understanding the recent evolution of black segregation, and we examine ­those connections in some detail (Chapters 12 and 17). 11. Why we think the fair housing glass is half-­full. Both the coherent quality of housing segregation—­a nd, indeed, of urban evolution generally—­a nd the capacity of black leadership to powerfully influence the path of evolution are impor­t ant in assessing the prospects for f­ uture pro­g ress. We are more pessimistic than some who, observing the steady decline in average segregation levels and the increasing multiethnicity of urban Amer­i­ca, see black segregation as a prob­lem which is gradually fading away.13 We ­will try to demonstrate why, despite impor­tant pro­gress over the past half-­century, black segregation has in most urban areas settled into a new equilibrium that w ­ ill require deliberate policies to dislodge. Moreover, we think it’s clear that simply doubling or tripling funding for our existing set of fair housing strategies w ­ ill have ­little effect upon segregation levels. On the other hand, we are very optimistic about the potential for new, carefully designed policies to have power­ful and beneficial effects upon black segregation levels. We have four main reasons to be optimistic. First, we can demonstrate that past innovations in fair housing policy had profound effects upon the operation and dynamics of housing segregation. That ­these effects ­were often unforeseen and poorly understood ties into our second point: we

12 Introduction

now know vastly more than we did in the past about the properties of housing segregation. The key to effective policy in this area is to understand the coherent flow of segregation’s evolution and bend it modestly in ways that facilitate desegregation. The third key point is that, b ­ ecause so many properties of housing segregation ­today are well understood and so many current trends are helpful to the purpose of integration, relatively modest and inexpensive interventions can make a sizable difference. It is pos­si­ble t­ oday to do meaningful “fair housing planning” in a way we never could before. Our fourth reason for optimism is the value of incrementalism. The difference between a metropolitan area t­ oday that has very high black / white segregation, and an area that is only moderately segregated, is only about twenty points on the index of dissimilarity. The economists David Cutler and Edward Glaeser have estimated that a decline of about eight points on this index may eliminate as much as a third of the black / white difference on key outcomes in education, employment, and earnings.14 This means that even a partially successful policy of housing desegregation can have enormously consequential results for millions of African-­Americans. Since desegregation appears to have direct effects in reducing in­equality, sophisticated desegregation strategies (that is, policies which take into account other demographic trends and the ingredients of stable integration) can be highly consequential even if they do not eliminate segregation. And the investment returns on such policies, if the lit­er­a­ture on the effects of segregation is even half-­right, are enormous. 12. Why both liberals and conservatives should share both optimism and concern about fair housing. Outside of academia (and to no ­little extent within it), views about housing segregation tend to fall into familiar left / right divides. Liberals often echo some version of the “discrimination” hypothesis, and emphasize the need to educate whites out of their racism if we are ever to achieve an integrated (or just) society. Conservatives tend to emphasize the role of preferences and self-­segregation, and strongly reject the idea that the government should subvert ­these preferences through some form of social engineering. As we have suggested, both ­these views are too simplistic. Both discrimination and personal preferences (among both blacks and whites) certainly play some role in con­temporary housing segregation, but the evidence strongly suggests that both ­factors play a smaller role than is commonly supposed.

Introduction  13

The ­actual dynamics of housing segregation are more complex—­a nd more in­ter­est­ing—­than ­either of ­these theories suggests. But we would like to say more to readers who start this book strongly leaning ­toward ­either the liberal or the conservative view. To the liberals: we think “racism” is much too ­simple a word to describe the steadily evolving attitudes and be­hav­ior of whites over the past c­ entury. Ever since the 1970s, ­there have been more than enough whites interested in living in integrated communities to achieve widespread desegregation. A key prob­lem, as we ­shall see, is that in most metro areas in the 1970s, t­ here was too much demand for housing in integrated neighborhoods, not that demand was insufficient. Housing discrimination has not vanished, and we take its continuing presence seriously enough to argue that we need a new generation of tools to more effectively detect and combat it. But the proportion of whites who ever engage in housing discrimination is minuscule compared, for example, to the era before the Fair Housing Act. Indeed, the very quality of outcomes in the urban areas with only moderate black / white segregation—­outcomes that often better the lives of both whites and blacks—is testimony to the ability and desire of persons of all races to make integration work. That said, it is also true that embracing the solutions and strategies we propose in Part V does not require one to abandon a belief in pervasive racism; they simply require that one not hold pragmatic experimentation hostage to t­ hose beliefs. To the conservatives: we very much oppose the idea of “forced” integration in housing, which in almost all cases would be both unsuccessful and unconstitutional. The initiatives we propose rely on incentives and information, and seek to complement market forces rather than substitute for them. But the real­ity is that in many metropolitan areas, ­t here are many fewer neighborhoods with high levels of integration than in other metro areas, and we w ­ ill pres­ent strong evidence that this difference is not a function of choices and preferences, but of market failure in the areas that remain highly segregated. Making choice real, we argue, sometimes requires interventions to strengthen the functioning of markets. And long-­term housing integration w ­ ill be successful only if it reflects the personal and collective preferences of Americans who live in and around our cities. ­Those realities very much inform our diagnosis of segregation and the remedies we propose to reduce it.

14 Introduction

We w ­ ill achieve fair housing, and indeed we w ­ ill achieve a fair society, only if we use gentle but intelligent public policy to dislodge an unhealthy and extreme level of segregation that serves no one’s long-­term interests. Understanding why this is so, and how to get where we need to go, is a complicated story, but an in­ter­est­ing one. We hope readers w ­ ill come away with an understanding of racial dynamics in Amer­i­ca that seems surprising only in retrospect.

PA R T I

The Core of the American Dilemma

W

hen the civil rights revolution came to pass in the 1960s, African-­ American pro­ g ress surged upward in many areas. Public accommodations—­like ­hotels, department stores, and restaurants—­rapidly desegregated. Black voting surged, and so did the number of black elected officials. Whole spectra of skilled and professional jobs opened up, and the number of African-­A merican ­house­holds with what could be considered upper-­middle-­class incomes qua­dru­pled in the course of a de­cade. But housing segregation in much of Amer­i­ca remained pervasive and intense and, as we suggested in our Introduction, where segregation has persisted, it has held back black pro­gress in a host of other areas. The durability of black / white segregation can make it seem as though racial residential patterns are locked in place, impervious to change. But this is not true; a major theme of this book is that the nature and contours of American housing segregation have been s­ haped and reshaped by manifold ­factors—­black and white migration patterns, civil rights laws, market forces, and continually evolving racial attitudes. The key to creating effective fair housing policies for the f­ uture is to understand the forces shaping segregation’s evolution in the past. The five chapters of Part I chart the evolution of African-­A merican housing segregation from the end of the Civil War to the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. Chapter 1 traces how the arrival of black mobility—­via the end of slavery—­started a large migration from the rural South to Southern cities. While in the 1870s most urban blacks worked in white ­house­holds and lived nearby, by 1900 social and economic changes had produced large black districts and increasing concern among whites about how

16  The Core of the American Dilemma

to “contain” ­those districts. In the opening years of the twentieth ­century, ­legal changes initially unrelated to segregation generated interest in, and then demands for, racial zoning in Southern cities. But parallel trends within the black community produced a willingness to combat racial zoning, and the contest of ­these forces met and ­were resolved against government-­mandated segregation by the Supreme Court in the 1917 decision of Buchanan v. Warley. Chapter 2 shifts to the North. African-­A mericans in the late nineteenth ­century usually lived in “black” districts, but ­these areas had substantial racial diversity, and blacks had lower levels of segregation than many white immigrants. World War I and the beginning of the ­Great Migration of blacks to the North led to broad white perceptions of blacks as a threat: rivals for jobs and housing to working-­class whites, and a perceived source of disorder and conflict in the eyes of most white elites. Over a dozen years from the end of World War I to 1930, pervasive white sentiments favoring segregation created ghettos with ­little more than tacit assistance from local governments. Crucially, however, the black “ghetto”—­which existed in its most classic form, with largely fixed borders, from about 1930 to the beginning of the 1940s—­was an intrinsically unstable construct, as Chapter 3 explains. Since black migration from rural to urban areas was an ongoing pro­cess, ghetto populations would ­either become unsustainably overcrowded or spill into adjacent white areas. The “restrictive racial covenant” was the one tool that could, at least temporarily, keep ghetto borders intact, but it was not a v­ iable long-­term strategy, and it had the effect of coalescing African-­A merican (and, increasingly, educated white) opinion around its elimination and ­toward the concept of fair housing. T ­ hese efforts culminated in the Supreme Court’s second ­great fair housing decision, Shelley v. Kraemer, in 1948, which barred state and federal courts from using injunctions to reverse sales of restricted housing to black buyers. Shelley was a historic l­egal decision, ushering in an era of civil rights activism on the Supreme Court. But its effects on the ground ­were just as momentous, though often misunderstood. Shelley did not—­could not—­ban private housing discrimination, but it crippled a particularly potent form of collective discrimination. African-­A mericans could now move beyond the established ghetto borders, but the dominant strategy for black “pioneers” was to make short moves into “border” areas close to existing ghettos.

The Core of the American Dilemma  17

Pioneering was led by middle-­class blacks seeking better housing. This pro­cess, repeated dozens of times in individual cities, transformed urban geography, eventually fueled white suburbanization, and—­crucially and ominously—­produced substantial economic stratification within the black community, leading to the emergence of so-­called “underclass” communities in the old ghetto. By the time of Shelley, the federal government had become a major player in urban housing markets, both through the creation and growth of public housing programs and through its role in creating and stabilizing the modern residential mortgage. As many scholars have documented, government housing programs in this era w ­ ere often easily bent to follow prevailing patterns of segregation. But stories told about the federal government’s complicity in segregation are sometimes so ahistorical as to be misleading. Drawing on new data, Chapter 4 provides a more nuanced account of the evolving effects of government housing programs during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Chapter 5 tells two intertwining stories. Housing segregation in the 1950s and 1960s continued to evolve in subtle but impor­tant ways, following patterns that can be broadly generalized across the nation. Si­mul­ta­neously, a fair housing movement arose, and sentiment for action against private market discrimination steadily grew. The demographic and economic patterns under­lying segregation during this era ­were closely related to public attitudes ­toward fair housing law, and the shape of ordinances and statutes passed by cities and states with increasing frequency was influenced by the contours of segregation as well. We explain the design flaws that weakened most local fair housing laws and analyze their limited impact on both discrimination and segregation levels. All of this sets the stage for the federal strug­gle over fair housing and the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, a law whose remarkable effects and crucial limitations ­will frame our story in Part II.

1

Southern Black Urbanism and the Origins of Fair Housing, 1865–1917

In all ­things purely social we can be as separate as the fin­gers, yet one as the hand in all ­things essential to mutual pro­gress. —­Booker T. Washington, Atlanta Exposition Address

Is it pos­si­ble, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective pro­gress in economic lines if they are deprived of po­liti­cal rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meager chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to ­these questions, it is an emphatic No. —­W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk

F

or black Americans at the time of the Civil War, the condition of not being slaves and the condition of mobility ­were closely intertwined. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation effectively invited slaves to abandon their masters and, by migrating ­behind Union lines, to secure their freedom. By the time Lee surrendered to Grant, former slaves by the tens of thousands ­were on the move. Often they moved to cities. In the de­cades that followed, ­there was a South of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and a South of Reconstruction, and a South of white Redeemers and a South of Jim Crow. T ­ hese po­liti­cal evolutions mattered gravely at many levels. But beneath them all was a change of transcendent importance: blacks ceased to be slaves. The Civil War amendments and the legislation that accompanied them did not make blacks “equal” in most meaningful ways; in many senses it did not even make them “­free.” But the ability of former slaves to found churches, or­ga­nize schools and colleges, sometimes own property, and sometimes accumulate capital ­were fundamental departures from the past. With all of ­these abilities came a capacity to plan, to learn about opportunities, to move—­a nd to leave. 19

20  The Core of the American Dilemma

Thus, through all the vicissitudes of the Southern black civic and po­liti­cal experience in the postbellum de­cades, a host of fundamental trend lines that turned upward in 1865 never turned back down (see Figure  1.1). Black literacy and schooling rates ­rose, de­cade ­after de­cade; black life expectancy ­rose, and infant survival rates ­rose, de­cade ­after de­cade. A black professional class steadily arose. And the black presence in cities grew relentlessly as well. ­Free blacks in antebellum Amer­i­ca had been a largely urban population—­not least ­because freedom itself was easier to preserve in the city. But the overwhelming majority of enslaved blacks lived in rural areas, on farms and plantations, where slavery was easier to maintain. Slaves in cities had opportunities to mingle with ­free blacks, and much greater opportunities to escape.1 This duality remained in the postbellum era. The countryside was a land of peonage, of lynchings or the threat of lynchings, of education that was irregularly available and sometimes not available at all. Life was better than ­under slavery in any number of impor­tant ways—­freedom from the fear of being forced apart from one’s f­ amily, for example—­but the prospect of escaping extremely rigid social hierarchies and significantly improving one’s material circumstances was usually remote. Cities ­were dif­fer­ent, even in the South: ­there was plenty of squalor, but ­there was almost always an institutional structure—­churches, schools, businesses—­that offered black opportunity. Growth and evolution ­were palpable. ­There was a hierarchy of urban places in the black vision of opportunity: small Southern towns, minor Southern cities; major Southern cities, and major Northern cities. Bigger cities, and especially Northern ones, ­were most likely to have impor­tant black institutions, a sizable black m ­ iddle class, and a greater sense of freedom. But t­ here was a parallel hierarchy of possibility. To someone on a debt-­ridden farm, the easiest step of escape, both in terms of local knowledge and contacts and in the cost of the journey, was to a nearby town or small city. If one found work, one could save and move to a larger city—­preferably one outside the Deep South, and maybe eventually migrate to the North.2 As best we can tell from the existing lit­er­a­ture and extant data, that was how black migration evolved in the South. A dominant fact of modern black history is the G ­ reat Migration, encompassing some six million African-­ Americans who moved from the South to the North between 1915 and the late 1960s. But before the G ­ reat Migration—­indeed, before large-­scale, long-­ distance migration for large numbers of blacks was pos­si­ble—­there was a

Southern Black Urbanism and the Origins of Fair Housing, 1865–1917  21 FIGURE 1.1.

Outcomes for African-­A mericans, 1870–1940. Literacy rate

School attendance rate relative to whites

Black professionals as a % of labor force

90.5

88.5

3.0% 20.1

1870

18.2 1900

1940

1870

0.4% 1900

1940

1870

1900

1940

Data sources: Literacy: Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition, 2000 (HSUS2000), 2-468; Schooling: HSUS2000, 2-431 (for five-­to-­t wenty-­year-­olds); Professionals: HSUS2000, 2-172-202. In each case, data is reported for “nonwhites.”

lesser migration to the urban South. During the period from 1870 to 1910, the share of Amer­i­ca’s blacks living in the North remained flat, while the share living in the urban South nearly tripled (see Figures 1.2–3). Many of ­these urban areas ­were mere towns, but Southern urbanization was a key dynamic force in black society during the half-­century ­after the Civil War. Urban blacks during t­ hese de­cades fell into two camps: t­ hose who w ­ ere “attached” to a white ­family, and ­those who ­were not. ­Those in the former group generally worked in the ­house­holds of affluent whites as maids, servants, stable-­hands, and d ­ rivers. It might, more broadly, include former slaves or c­ hildren of slaves who worked in the offices and businesses of former masters. A large part of the growth of Southern cities in the postbellum era was propelled by white migration, and some of t­hose whites brought retinues of blacks with them. The other camp was composed of “in­ de­pen­dent” urban blacks: ­those who worked in the parallel black economy, or who had day jobs in white factories and businesses. This second camp encompassed greater extremes of wealth and poverty; they could achieve a middle-­class lifestyle or die of malnutrition or cholera. They ­were the engine of change within the black community. Particularly impor­tant was the growing class of professional blacks: the interaction of rising black literacy, the rapid growth of black urban communities, and a modest but expanding corps of black colleges and technical schools meant that the number of

22  The Core of the American Dilemma FIGURE 1.2.

Urbanization of blacks and whites, 1870–1990. 87% 72%

64% Whites

26%

62%

Blacks

12% 1870 ’80

’90 1900 ’10

’20

’30 ’40 ’50 ’60 Great Migration

’70

’80 1990

Data sources: Bureau of the Census, 1975, Historical Statistics of the United States, Series A172; additional sources discussed in Chapter 1 notes.

FIGURE 1.3.

Distribution of the black population, 1870–1990. 100%

Rural South

Urban South

50

North and West 0

1870 ’80

’90 1900 ’10

’20

’30 ’40 ’50 ’60 Great Migration

’70

’80 1990

Data source: Bureau of the Census, 1975, Historical Statistics of the United States, Series A172; additional sources discussed in Chapter 1 notes.

Southern Black Urbanism and the Origins of Fair Housing, 1865–1917  23

black professionals doubled between 1890 and 1910, and doubled again between 1910 and 1930. 3 The two categories of urban blacks had very dif­fer­ent relations with the whites. For the attached blacks, ­there was no question of the strict hierarchy, dif­fer­ent from relations of master and slave but directly descended from ­those relations—­varying levels of interaction but a high degree of interconnectedness. Typically, attached blacks lived close to the whites for whom they worked—­sometimes in the same ­house, more often in a coach ­house or cottage b ­ ehind the main property, often fronting on an alley. In­de­ pen­dent blacks ­were more likely to live in black “districts,” or at least on a black street or a designated building along a street. In the immediate postbellum period, thousands of blacks uprooted by the war or fleeing to Union lines had created encampments on the edges of cities; ­these encampments ­were often the targets of early white raids—attempts (often successful) at driving mi­grant blacks back to the countryside. Longer-­term black districts ­were, nonetheless, often located on the edges of towns and cities—­a characteristic that was markedly dif­fer­ent from Northern patterns and would prove impor­tant in the twentieth ­century. For Southern whites in cities, it was the in­de­pen­dent blacks who posed the main challenge of social control. In themes that would persist for generations, whites tended to take two views of the “black prob­lem.” For many whites, in­de­pen­dent blacks simply represented a threat: an ­enemy force that needed to be discouraged from coming to the cities, stripped of any resource or right that fostered in­de­pen­dence, and excluded as much as pos­si­ble from mainstream institutions. Other whites—­smaller in number than the first group but often more affluent—­took a larger view, seeing the challenge as one of “civilizing” former slaves and the new free-­born generations, and creating a social order where blacks would not be a drag on society, but would develop productive capacity in tandem with a gradually industrializing South. In his careful case studies of five Southern postbellum cities, Howard Rabinowitz contends that urban policies in the South gradually shifted from ­those that emphasized exclusion of blacks, to t­ hose that emphasized separation.4 The Jim Crow laws that emerged in the 1880s and 1890s reconciled goals held by both white camps. The laws mandated separation of the races, but they implicitly sanctioned the parallel development of black institutions. Separate black schools might be grossly underfunded, but the official stance of policy (and in strong contrast to antebellum policy) was that black literacy

24  The Core of the American Dilemma

was a good ­thing, and self-­reported black literacy rates continued a steady rise ­under Jim Crow. Civil courts might be heavi­ly biased against black litigants, but blacks could undertake commercial transactions and assert property rights in ways not dramatically dissimilar from the ways of whites. Southern black capitalism was never likely to emerge on a large scale, but small manifestations w ­ ere steadily spreading and w ­ ere centered on the cities. When Booker  T. Washington embraced the new compromise in his 1895 speech at the Atlanta Exposition, he was not merely expressing a naive wish for the f­ uture; he was describing what he saw as an emerging real­ity—­a developing black economy and culture that had progressed in some dramatic ways since 1865. The question for our purposes is what this evolution meant for black residential patterns. ­Until very recently, historians and sociologists ­were quite unsure how to answer this, for reasons we explore in Chapter 2. But the picture has sharpened substantially in just the last few years, thanks to the development of digital versions of original census manuscripts and the creative efforts of several economists and sociologists. 5 In the 1880 census rec­ ords, one can clearly see the two patterns we have described: “attached” blacks living in close proximity to whites, often in outbuildings along alleyways, and the clustering of “in­de­pen­dent” blacks in distinct districts, though ­these early districts ­were often areas four or five blocks long on a ­couple of adjacent streets. Any medium-­size or large city—­which in the late-­nineteenth-­century South meant cities with more than twenty-­five thousand ­people—­was likely to have several distinct black districts, maybe even a dozen. Using most modern mea­sures of segregation, the level of black / white separation was still relatively low. But it was rising, and quickly. The engine of population growth in the turn-­of-­the-­century South was industrial and commercial development. Though the South emerged from the Civil War with a level of industrial production dramatically lower than the North’s, manufacturing grew rapidly in the late-­nineteenth c­entury, and even though it still lagged well b ­ ehind the Northern pace, industrialization was a transformative force. The population of the urban South tripled from 1865 to 1915, and Atlanta, Birmingham, and Memphis emerged as major industrial centers. Black population in Southern cities grew even more rapidly than white population, and the available data (and logic) suggests black population growth was disproportionately in the “in­de­pen­dent” urban sphere. This meant that the black districts grew rapidly, sometimes

Southern Black Urbanism and the Origins of Fair Housing, 1865–1917  25

merged together, and increasingly produced an eco­nom­ically and socially distinguishable black m ­ iddle class. The last fifteen years of the nineteenth ­century witnessed the potent emergence of Jim Crow: emphatic and comprehensive in the Deep South, less consistent but still widespread in the “upper South” and border states. Schools, court­houses, theaters, trolleys, railway carriages, and a host of other institutions established formal mechanisms of separation. Disenfranchisement spread, blacks largely dis­appeared from even minor civic posts, and their presence on juries was unlikely, except perhaps in civil disputes between two black litigants. The Supreme Court made clear in 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, that it would not disturb this system; the F ­ ourteenth Amendment’s injunction of equal protection was addressed by the fiction of “separate but equal.” Yet through the years when Jim Crow was spreading most rapidly, no one seems to have suggested the idea of Jim Crow housing—­ that is, mandating housing segregation by law—by creating designated residential zones for blacks and whites. Why not? Three f­actors seem impor­tant. First, white urban leaders in the South generally identified the black “prob­lem” as one of extending social control. Time and again, Southern cities in the late-­nineteenth ­century annexed black districts—­sometimes virtual encampments—­outside of city limits to bring ­these areas ­under city control and authority. If whites feared the spread of disease from unsanitary living conditions among blacks, or worried about crime and vagrancy among blacks, the solution they turned to in the 1880s and 1890s was the extension of municipal authority, including the police power, into black neighborhoods. This was, oddly enough and only in certain ways, an “integrationist” sentiment, and it interleaved with an impor­tant second force—­the redundancy of residential separation. Since, by the 1890s, Southern society had firmly established caste rules that instilled deference among blacks to whites, and proscribed social intercourse, housing segregation was an unnecessary add-on. So long as blacks had a strictly defined social place, the need to circumscribe geographic place was less obvious. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the mechanisms for creating a ­legal structure of residential segregation had not been in­ven­ted. Zoning did not exist in the United States in 1900. Urban thinkers—it would be too early to ­really talk about urban “planners”—­were starting to discuss the concept as a way of separating industrial, commercial, and residential areas from one another, and preventing noxious uses from intruding on quiet neighborhoods,6

26  The Core of the American Dilemma

but zoning would not actually be implemented anywhere u ­ ntil Los Angeles— at the time, a minor city—­adopted a tentative zoning plan in 1909.7 General land use zoning became widely known when New York City ­adopted a zoning ordinance in 1916, and it became a major national issue in the 1920s. ­These ­were all good reasons why racial zoning did not appear in the 1890s, or even in the first years of the 1900s. Yet m ­ atters w ­ ere about to change. Baltimore introduced an ordinance that created racial districts in 1910, and within a few years racial zoning had become one of the most rapidly spreading phenomena in the Southern and border states. This thus leads to another question: What changed? The steady migration of blacks to Southern cities accelerated in the early 1900s; by 1910 t­ here ­were nearly two million African-­Americans in Southern urban areas, more than ­triple the number during the Civil War. Many Southern and border cities had black populations exceeding thirty thousand; Baltimore by 1910 had nearly eighty-­five thousand black residents. Since the growth was driven by more commerce and industry, most new blacks ­were in the “in­de­pen­dent” category, living in black districts rather than in the “attached” category, living in white ­houses or nearby alleyways. And with a higher proportion of Southern, urban blacks in black districts, overall housing segregation levels r­ ose. Larger black districts also meant a larger black m ­ iddle class. The number of black professional workers in the United States nearly doubled from thirty-­four thousand in 1890 to sixty-­six thousand in 1910. A large share of ­these professionals, and prob­ably an equally large or larger number of successful black businessmen, ­were concentrated in a ­couple of dozen Southern and border cities. As Jim Crow became pervasive and black residential segregation increased, upper-­middle-­class blacks ever more keenly resented arrangements placing them in a caste that, understandably, they viewed as completely inconsistent with their education, income, and achievements. Increasing segregation created strong incentives for at least some members of the black elite to differentiate themselves and use what economic signs of status they could muster. A con­spic­u­ous way of ­doing this was to be a black “pioneer” in a white neighborhood. Then t­ here was the rise of “private” zoning.8 ­Under traditional American property law, landlords had always had the ability to restrict what tenants could do with leased land, and through somewhat cumbersome methods ­owners could also restrict the uses of land that they sold or devised to an-

Southern Black Urbanism and the Origins of Fair Housing, 1865–1917  27

other party. During the late-­nineteenth ­century, landowners began to experiment with a type of property control known as a restrictive covenant. A large landowner might, for example, want to allow long-­time tenants to become o ­ wners of the property they leased; using a restrictive covenant, the landowner could place provisions in the deeds of these new owners that would limit the type or density of buildings permitted on their land, not only while they owned it, but (at least in theory) in perpetuity. This was a novelty in courts, and challenges to the enforceability of such arrangements produced a patchwork of decisions across state jurisdictions. But in t­ hose states that permitted o ­ wners to insert uniform restrictive covenants within many small parcels they sold off, a new phenomenon soon arose: the housing subdivision. Developers, sometimes within cities and sometimes on their borders (in the spreading phenomenon of “suburbs”), realized they could more effectively market a development of, say, one hundred homes, if they could guarantee the buyers that all of the homes in the area would conform to a common, coherent plan. In subdivisions, developers could insert covenants in the deed of each subdivided lot, creating enough restrictions to ensure a coherent “plan” and the protection of a neighborhood’s desirability, but not so many restrictions as would put buyers off. Mary­land was one of the states that looked tolerantly on restrictive covenants, and one of the first systematic uses of the covenants in creating a “planned” neighborhood was Roland Park, a subdivision on the outskirts (and soon to be within the city limits) of Baltimore.9 With design assistance from Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (the son of the more famous Olmsted, designer of Central Park) and E. H. Bouton, the developers laid out an entire community governed by a set of restrictive covenants, which even made provision for an early incarnation of a “shopping center” (built in 1907). Other developers ­were far from confident that lots and homes with detailed, long-­term restrictions on ­free use would be attractive to buyers, but Roland Park was a g­ reat success. By 1910, the idea of or­ga­nized, orchestrated land use was “in the air” in Baltimore. And though Roland Park did not include “racial” covenants—­that is, racial and ethnic restrictions on who could buy or occupy property—­this additional way of creating “exclusivity” soon occurred to other developers. Baltimore in 1910 was Amer­i­ca’s sixth-­largest city and had its fourth-­ largest black population. It was one of the country’s principal ports, a major manufacturing and commercial center, and culturally impor­tant. Literary and social critic H.  L. Mencken was thirty and hitting his stride, and his

28  The Core of the American Dilemma

sarcasm about the American hinterland was in tune with an elite progressivism that waxed influentially in the city’s salons. The po­liti­cal tone of the city was in many ways more Northern than Southern. Social reformers produced reports documenting terrible conditions in Baltimore slums, and public campaigns arose to create a more sanitary infrastructure and bring communicable diseases like typhoid and tuberculosis u ­ nder control. Baltimore a­ dopted building codes and even launched nascent urban renewal efforts aimed at encouraging property o ­ wners to replace the worst slum housing with more modern apartments. Baltimore was unusual among early-­t wentieth-­century American cities in having both a proportionally large black population (15  ­percent, compared to New York City’s 4 ­percent or Boston’s 2 ­percent) and a rapidly rising immigrant population. For blacks, Baltimore had notable advantages: a sufficiently large black population to foster an in­de­pen­dent black “scene,” and a somewhat more relaxed approach to racial caste than existed through most of the South. H ­ ere as elsewhere in Southern and border states, a fair number of Baltimore blacks lived in the alleyways of white neighborhoods, but ­there ­were two quite large black districts: “Pigtown” in southwest Baltimore, the poorest section of the city, and the Seventeenth Ward section of northwest Baltimore, populated by both working-­class and middle-­class blacks, along with a sprinkling of white ethnics. By 1910, both districts w ­ ere sufficiently dominated by blacks so as to create clear, major dividing lines between black and white sections of the city.10 As black districts became more identifiable, they w ­ ere si­mul­ta­neously more threatening to whites in adjacent neighborhoods, and more likely to be the destination of blacks leaving alley housing or other integrated districts. The rigidly segregated schools w ­ ere increasingly aligned with the black and white districts, providing another incentive for blacks to live in the black districts. But since the black population was growing, expansion of the black districts was inevitable, producing strong white reactions. Along the western boundary of the Seventeenth Ward neighborhood, working-­class whites attacked blacks arriving on the white side of “the border”; the announced conversion of a school in the area from “white” to “black” attendance precipitated protests and vandalism against the school. Increasingly, many Baltimore leaders saw black poverty and crime as prob­lems that needed to be contained, and interracial tension and vio­lence as prob­lems to control by minimizing situations where whites and blacks would come into conflict.11

Southern Black Urbanism and the Origins of Fair Housing, 1865–1917  29

In June 1910, George W. F. McMechen, a prosperous black attorney with a law degree from Yale, purchased a ­house several blocks to the east of the Seventeenth Ward neighborhood. Unlike the western and northern sides of this black district, the eastern border had been “stable” for several years. McMechen does not appear to have seen himself as a crusader for black rights, but rather as an upper-­middle-­class l­ awyer who could afford to buy a home one or two steps up from the best housing available in the black district. To upperclass Baltimore whites, McMechen’s move showed that they, too, could be vulnerable to having their neighborhoods “turn” through racial integration. And unlike many working-­class or ethnic whites, McMechen’s affluent neighbors w ­ ere not much inclined to use mob intimidation to drive McMechen away. A dif­fer­ent strategy was needed. A large public meeting in July 1910 produced a petition asking the mayor and city council to “take some mea­sures to restrain the colored ­people from locating in a white community, and proscribe a limit beyond which it ­shall be unlawful for them to go. . . .” Within a few months, the city council was considering an ordinance that would prohibit “Negroes from moving into blocks that ­were more than half white, and would prohibit whites from moving into blocks that ­were more than half Negro.” Blacks in Baltimore or­ga­nized some re­sis­tance, but the mea­sure passed the city council in December on a strict party-­line vote (all Republicans voting against the mea­sure), and the city’s progressive Demo­cratic mayor promptly signed it into law. Notably, this first effort was quickly struck down by a Mary­land court, though the judge’s unpublished opinion seems to have focused on technical flaws in the law. T ­ here was, in any case, significant white opposition to provisions of the law. It was ambiguous how the large number of racially mixed blocks would be treated ­under the law; ­there had been no official determination of exactly which blocks w ­ ere to be “white” and “Negro.” Moreover, whites who owned housing on blocks that ­were “majority Negro” felt that they ­were now trapped into selling to only a portion of the market, and lobbied for a new version of the ordinance that would grand­father existing ­owners. Real estate brokers ­were similarly concerned about the effect of the law on mixed neighborhoods. The city a­ dopted a modified ordinance in 1911 with a broad grand­father clause and an exemption for all housing on “mixed” blocks. This version, too, was invalidated in court and replaced by a third incarnation.12 Motives aside, did Baltimore’s ordinance work? To some extent, it did. McMechen was not required to move, since all current o ­ wners w ­ ere grand­fathered.

30  The Core of the American Dilemma

But the Seventeenth Ward line held for the time being, and McMechen’s neighbors remained overwhelmingly white. In the city as a ­whole, the black / white index of dissimilarity ­rose from .68 in 1910 to .82 in 1920. This was a substantial increase, but as we w ­ ill see in Chapter 2, not a much sharper increase than occurred in a host of Northern cities that never attempted racial zoning. ­Because of the slowness of property turnover, grandfathering, and the ultimate difficulties of enforcement, racial zoning prob­ably only slightly accelerated the pace of segregation. Nonetheless, nearly a dozen other Southern and border cities followed Baltimore by adopting racial zoning ordinances over the next few years. The pace is notable b ­ ecause other types of Jim Crow legislation generally spread more slowly, and b ­ ecause zoning itself, as we noted earlier, had not yet caught on and would not for several more years. ­Table 1.1 shows all the cities in the United States in 1910 that had both a numerically large, and proportionally substantial, black population. Of ­these thirteen cities—­a ll of them in Southern or border states—­eleven ­adopted racial zoning ordinances between 1910 and 1917. The two exceptions w ­ ere Washington, D.C., where virtually all municipal decisions ­were still in the hands of Congress, and New Orleans, which had long had—­compared to the rest of the South—­relatively calm and stable race relations, and had perhaps the most established black elite in the nation.13 Other cities not on this list also passed racial zoning ordinances, such as Ashland, V ­ irginia, and Greensboro, North Carolina; but most of the activity can be explained as a desire by whites to contain rapidly growing black districts in what ­were or ­were becoming large cities.14 The example of Baltimore gave the idea not only po­liti­cal currency but also popu­lar momentum. As the Baltimore case suggests, many Southern and border-­state judges had qualms about racial zoning. The new ordinances w ­ ere often v­ iolated, and, if local authorities attempted to enforce them, the measures ­were often thrown out in court. The North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that such an aggressive form of zoning exceeded the powers granted by the state legislature to cities.15 The Georgia Supreme Court, in Carey v. Atlanta, threw out Atlanta’s racial zoning ordinance and held that its restriction of property rights v­ iolated the ­Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.16 The Georgia court drew a sharp distinction between Jim Crow laws that regulated how the races would use public or commercial ser­vices and ­those that substantially curtailed the ability of both blacks and whites to dispose of their property as they saw fit.

Southern Black Urbanism and the Origins of Fair Housing, 1865–1917  31 ­TABLE 1.1   U.S. cities with at least twenty-­five thousand blacks in 1910 that w ­ ere at

least 15 ­percent black City Atlanta* Baltimore* Birmingham* Charleston* Jacksonville* Louisville* Memphis* Nashville* New Orleans Norfolk* Richmond* Savannah* Washington, D.C.

Black population, 1910

Blacks as % of total population

51,902 84,749 52,305 31,056 29,293 40,522 52,411 36,523 89,262 25,929 46,733 33,246 94,446

33% 15% 39% 53% 50% 18% 40% 33% 26% 37% 36% 51% 28%

Data source: Bureau of the Census, Negro Population, 1790–1915 (Washington, 1918), Chapter 7, T ­ able 12. Cities denoted with an asterisk (*) ­a dopted racial zoning ordinances between 1910 and 1917.

Despite such setbacks, racial zoning was gaining momentum through the early 1910s. The number of Southern and border cities passing racial zoning ordinances steadily grew, with legislators more skillful in designing the ordinances to avoid the most common judicial objections. Advocates of racial zoning in ­Virginia, for example, sidestepped the limitations on local police power by persuading the state legislature to mandate racial zoning in cities throughout the state. The only way to stop this new form of Jim Crow from becoming dominant in the South was through a Supreme Court decision broadly invalidating racial zoning. This seemed rather improbable on its face, given the court’s now lengthy rec­ord of e­ ither upholding Jim Crow laws explic­itly or sidestepping challenges to them.17 But a fledgling black organ­ization called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored ­People—­the NAACP, for short—­deci­ded to make the attempt.18 At the time, the national landscape of groups interested in black civil rights was nearly barren. The brief flourishing of black po­liti­cal influence during Reconstruction had produced no broad, sustained civil rights alliances. Booker T. Washington had reached ascendancy as a black leader by 1900,

32  The Core of the American Dilemma

but his energies ­were focused on industrial education, and he had endorsed social segregation of the races in his 1895 Atlanta speech and in many of his writings. By the early 1910s, Washington was expressing alarm at the spread and rigidity of Jim Crow, but his legendary powers ­were in decline by then, and he died in November 1915 at the age of fifty-­nine. Partly in reaction to Washington’s dominance of national debate on black issues, a group of prominent African-Americans had met in Niagara, Ontario, in 1905, and discussed strategies to ­counter the rise of Jim Crow. The “Niagara Movement” did not manage to achieve any lasting institutional form, but a number of its leaders joined with several whites active in civil rights and “black improvement” efforts to form in February  1909 what soon became the NAACP. Its two most famous found­ers (certainly from the perspective of history and prob­ably even at the time) ­were Moorfield Storey, the NAACP’s first president, and W. E. B. DuBois, its director of publicity and research. Storey was a famous white ­lawyer and po­liti­cal activist; he had served as president of the American Bar Association in 1896 and as editor of the American Law Review (where Oliver Wendell Holmes had published some of his best-­known work). He was a prominent critic of nascent American imperialism in the aftermath of the Spanish-­A merican War, and he helped to instigate and lead an inquiry into atrocities committed by American troops in the Philippines. DuBois was, by 1909, already one of the leading black intellectuals in the nation; his 1905 book, The Souls of Black Folk, had developed a comprehensive critique of Washington’s accommodationist strategy; but more than that, it had presaged new ways of thinking about self-­realization that anticipated and influenced twentieth-­century developments in both black and white culture. The combination of Storey, DuBois, and several other significant figures almost instantly made the NAACP a notable national organ­ization and a unique one in black affairs. Its 1911 charter defined as its mission: “To promote equality of rights and to eradicate caste or race prejudice among the citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of color citizens; to secure for them impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for the ­children, employment according to their ability and complete equality before law.”19 This was a remarkably s­ imple, clear, but—in the context of 1911 Amer­i­ca— revolutionary mission. The NAACP went beyond rejection of an “accommodationist” philosophy. It rejected Plessy v. Ferguson and all the interpretations

Southern Black Urbanism and the Origins of Fair Housing, 1865–1917  33

of the post–­Civil War acts and amendments that countenanced some sort of racial caste system. It was not aiming for short-­term material gains; it was entirely focused on a long-­term strategy of achieving ­legal equality. One of the NAACP’s strengths was its ability to proj­ect dif­fer­ent images to dif­fer­ent audiences and constituencies. The involvement of Storey and other establishment figures gave it a certain amount of “insider” cachet; it developed close ties with many white as well as black elites. Yet it assiduously cultivated local chapters around the country, thus becoming a broad-­based membership organ­ization. And its focus on long-­term change and commitment to basic princi­ples of equality gave it a radical, transformational mission. Clearly, the idea of an interracial “civil rights” organ­i zation struck a resonant chord with middle-­class blacks: by 1917, the NAACP had thousands of members and dozens of local chapters. The involvement of very able attorneys willing to devote many pro bono hours to challenges against discrimination, along with a sense of evolving opinions among American elites, meant that it could set ­legal goals that ­were not only bold but plausibly achievable. By late 1913, the NAACP board had determined that it should or­ga­nize a major lawsuit against racial zoning. It wanted to act quickly, before racial zoning became firmly entrenched or sanctified by a Supreme Court decision. Its leaders thought a challenge in a border state was less likely to be procedurally derailed than one in the Deep South. Louisville seemed like a particularly promising candidate. Louisville was home to many prominent blacks, including William Warley, who had or­ga­nized and led a local branch of the NAACP.20 When the issue of racial zoning arose, Louisville’s white elite initially showed mixed feelings about its merits, and the mayor, the city attorney, and the city council had all invited black leaders to discuss the issue and pres­ent their criticisms. When the council nonetheless unanimously enacted the ordinance in December 1913, the NAACP moved into gear quickly. It began to or­ga­nize mass meetings among blacks in Louisville to solidify opposition to the mea­sure, increase membership in the branch, and raise funds.21 It developed a careful l­egal strategy, “creating” a suit by recruiting a white plaintiff to legally challenge an attempt by Warley to acquire property in a white zone. It framed the issue as first and foremost a question of curtailing property rights, and only secondarily as a “racial” regulation. It made sure that its complaint included federal counts. Although Buchanan v. Warley was brought in state court, the NAACP did not

34  The Core of the American Dilemma

particularly want to win in the Kentucky courts; it wanted a state court decision that could be effectively appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. As expected, Warley and the NAACP lost at the trial court, and appealed. The Kentucky Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court) unanimously affirmed the lower court decision. The court noted that Kentucky had long engaged in racial segregation in other venues, such as public transportation and public schools. But it noted that an even stronger pre­ce­dent for the Louisville ordinance lay in its 1907 decision in Berea College v. Commonwealth.22 ­There, the court had upheld a state law that prohibited a private college from maintaining integrated education. If the state could bar private persons from using their property to create an integrated setting, surely it was d ­ oing nothing more through racial zoning? Moreover, the court observed, if racial amalgamation was the evil to be avoided, then racial residential separation “­under the congested conditions of modern municipal life” was as essential as any other form of mandated segregation.23 On appeal, the United States Supreme Court unanimously and emphatically rejected this reasoning and found the ordinance unconstitutional. 24 In its view, Louisville had specifically interfered with a core purpose of the ­Fourteenth Amendment: to prevent states from abridging the right to life, liberty, or property based on race. Interference of this sort was intended to be prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which provided that “all citizens of the United States ­shall have the same right in ­every State and Territory, as is enjoyed by white citizens thereof to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property.” In the Court’s view, most Jim Crow legislation regulated more nebulous “social rights” of men, or the way the state arranged the benefits it provided. Plessy v. Ferguson, the court noted, simply concerned the organ­ization of railway ser­vices. Berea College concerned the way Kentucky had exercised its licensing power over private colleges in the state. But racial zoning directly circumscribed property rights based on race; it would eliminate the possibility of using one’s property in a w ­ hole variety of ways. The court quoted and endorsed the Georgia Supreme Court’s distinction in Carey: In each instance [of upheld segregation legislation] the complaining person was afforded the opportunity to r­ ide, or to attend institutions of learning, or afforded the t­ hing of what­ever nature to which in the par­tic­ u­lar case he was entitled. The most that was done was to require him as a

Southern Black Urbanism and the Origins of Fair Housing, 1865–1917  35

member of a class to conform with reasonable rules in regard to the separation of the races. In none of them was he denied the right to use, control, or dispose of his property, as in this case. Property of a person, ­whether as a member of a class or as an individual, cannot be taken without due pro­ cess of law.25

This was a vision of caste that fit well with Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta address. Blacks must be allowed to engage in the economic system itself, and to improve themselves with the tools of ­labor and capital; in exchange, they should be willing, at least while they caught up with whites, to accept an inferior and separate social position. The Supreme Court could thus vindicate a crucial civil right without disturbing its accommodation of a substantial but limited sphere for Jim Crow. Buchanan v. Warley does not share the fame of the mid-­t wentieth-­century civil rights decisions; it is often not even mentioned in general histories of the period. Scholars who do notice tend to take two dif­fer­ent views: some see it as a seminal civil rights case that showed a new willingness on the Supreme Court’s part to start pushing back against Southern state subordination of blacks. O ­ thers argue that the civil rights aspects of the case ­were largely incidental; the Supreme Court was principally acting to protect property rights—in par­tic­u­lar, the property rights of whites who could see their freedom of action in the real estate market significantly circumscribed by racial zoning. In this view, Buchanan was another example of the court’s focus on “substantive due pro­cess” in the early twentieth c­ entury, a doctrine which had led to a series of court decisions invalidating social regulation as impermissibly constraining the f­ ree market.26 We think both influences played a role. The 1917 Supreme Court included justices with a range of perspectives on both substantive due pro­cess and race relations; since Buchanan was unan­i­mous, dif­fer­ent influences undoubtedly underlay the votes of individual justices. Many types of social regulation did survive court scrutiny in the era of substantive due process—­ indeed, within seven years the court would uphold a conventional zoning law that in many ways restricted property rights far more than racial zoning did. The court consistently considered ­whether regulations had a convincing social rationale; in racial zoning, the rationale was weak (segregation was already high and the mechanisms of racial zoning ­were clunky) and it collided with past acts of Congress that specifically sought to protect

36  The Core of the American Dilemma

the ability of blacks to exercise property rights. Buchanan did not pres­ent itself as setting any new standard for civil rights; if anything, it soft-­pedaled this message. But the implication to many observers, especially African-­ Americans, was clear: the Court had set a limit on Jim Crow. Did Buchanan fundamentally change the course of black urban residential patterns? In one sense, certainly not; black segregation continued to accelerate through other means. But in another sense, it prob­ably made a profound difference that w ­ ill be evident only further along in our story. Without Buchanan, racial zoning certainly would have become pervasive in the South, and quite likely would have spread to the North as well. As the civil rights movement took shape, such zoning would have been struck down; but counterstrategies like racial covenants would then have followed, and the series of evolutionary steps that unfolded in ensuing de­cades would, quite possibly, have proceeded more slowly. Buchanan also foreshadowed a pattern that persists to the pres­ent day: Amer­i­ca’s most significant policy responses to the phenomenon of segregation have never taken aim at segregation itself, but rather at something off to the side. In Buchanan, the focus was on property rights and the limits of state power; in ­later de­cades the strug­gle would be over the ability of private individuals to discriminate collectively or individually. Each major step was largely brought about by concerns over extreme segregation, and in each case champions of reform thought segregation itself had been dealt a mortal blow. In each case, however, segregation proved remarkably resistant in the face of collateral damage. The NAACP won both visibility and credibility in black communities from Buchanan. National membership skyrocketed from nine thousand in 1917 to ninety thousand (distributed over three hundred local chapters) by 1919.27 The organ­ization’s strategy of carefully selecting winnable litigation targets and aiming to bring cases before the Supreme Court was seemingly vindicated. Yet even as black newspapers celebrated Buchanan, a new shift ­toward housing segregation was taking shape. And this time, the crucial developments would unfold in the North.

2

The Ghetto, 1918–1940

“To have saved our nation from an enervating class system, such as exists everywhere ­else, by instead giving it a caste system based on race, which always stimulates the illusions and pretensions of mankind—is that not a contribution of which even we can be proud?” —­Black journalist George Schuyler, “Our Greatest Gift to Amer­i­ca”

The development of [racial] covenants always involves crystallization of latent prejudices and the creation of new ones. —­Robert Weaver, The Negro Ghetto

U

ntil recently, many urban scholars believed that at the beginning of the twentieth ­century and before, conditions of genuine housing integration existed for blacks in Northern American cities. As two leading sociologists put it in 1993: “­There was a time, before 1900, when blacks and whites lived side by side in American cities. In the north, a small native black population was scattered widely throughout white neighborhoods. Even Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia—­cities now well known for their large black ghettos—­were not segregated then.”1 Recent scholarship has modified this idyllic view. But to r­eally understand how black segregation was dif­fer­ent then, it is very helpful to consider for a moment how segregation is mea­sured. Understanding two widely u ­ sed mea­sures ­will pay dividends throughout this book. The index of dissimilarity (abbreviated “D” in the lit­er­a­t ure) mea­sures how differently two groups are distributed across a city, county, or metropolitan area. If, for example, a city is 20 ­percent black and 80 ­percent white, and a census count can assign e­ very resident to one of a hundred geographic subdivisions within the city, one can calculate D by determining the proportion of blacks (or whites) who would need to move to create a 20 / 80 black / white ratio in e­ very subdivision. If D is 100 ­percent (that is, 1.00), this 37

38  The Core of the American Dilemma

means that e­ very black person currently lives in a dif­fer­ent subdivision from ­every white person; ­t here is no geographic overlap and housing segregation is complete. If D is 0, then the distribution of blacks and whites is completely uniform across tracts; segregation is non­ex­is­tent. In practice, neither of t­ hese extremes exists or has been observed in American cities; Figure 2.1 illustrates several pos­si­ble states based on real-­world examples. The “exposure” index (abbreviated “E”) reports a related but distinct mea­sure: the average proportion of persons of Group A that persons of Group B live among in the same area or neighborhood. If in a city of one hundred neighborhoods, all the African-­A mericans live in ten of the neighborhoods, the average black person has all-­black neighbors, so black exposure to blacks is 100 ­percent (1.00) and black exposure to whites is 0 ­percent (.00). If 90 ­percent of blacks in the city live in neighborhoods that are all-­ black, and 10 ­percent of blacks live in neighborhoods that are 90 ­percent white, the black exposure to blacks is .91, and black exposure to whites is .09. We have provided exposure rates for the vari­ous neighborhoods illustrated in Figure 2.1. Both the dissimilarity and exposure indices provide useful information only if the number of geographic units compared is fairly large (preferably at least one hundred), and if the borders of the units reflect a­ ctual neighborhood bound­a ries. But census reports from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not provide data for small geographic areas; scholars had to rely on data published for wards within cities. Often, however, ­there ­were only ten or twenty wards in a city, and the bound­a ries of wards ­were normally drawn not to capture the borders of ethnic communities, but for po­liti­cal reasons (such as minimizing the black vote). The scholars who relied on such data often came to the conclusion that black / white dissimilarity indices in twentieth-­century Northern cities ­were quite moderate.2 But new tools are now available; in recent years, several teams of scholars—as well as the Mormon Church3 —­have converted many old census manuscripts into computerized databases, thus making it pos­si­ble to observe a­ ctual neighborhoods in late-­n ineteenth and early-­t wentieth-­century cities and compute accurate mea­sures of segregation.4 Angelina Grigoryeva and Martin Ruef published in 2015 black / white dissimilarity mea­sures, using detailed neighborhood geographies, for a host of American cities in 1880. The five largest Northern cities all had black / white dissimilarity mea­sures between .66 and .74. 5 Most scholars would agree

The Ghetto, 1918–1940  39 FIGURE 2.1.

Illustrating mea­sures of segregation. Each grid represents a hypothetical city with 100 neighborhoods of 100 residents each. The numbers inside each square indicate the number of blacks residents. 100% black

0%

Segregated cities

Integrated cities

City A 20% black Dissimilarity index: .90 Black-to-white exposure index: .13

City B 20% black Dissimilarity index: .50 Black-to-white exposure index: .54

20 1 50 13 2 0 0 0 0 0

70 97 98 65 0 0 0 1 0 0

84 94 97 97 97 98 100 100 100 100 100 100 40 100 100 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

19 35 45 55 0 0 0 0 0 0

6 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5

0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

City C 5% black Dissimilarity index: .90 Black-to-white exposure index: .26 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

1 3 5 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

2 2 2 3 3 4 7 14 32 54 79 88 1 93 100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

22 16 28 21 17 12 10 9 4 2

32 51 64 30 13 12 10 15 4 13

36 54 68 81 25 11 11 8 14 2

38 57 73 85 94 11 10 19 9 1

40 61 77 89 100 16 9 6 3 1

22 23 26 29 12 11 9 6 3 1

20 7 16 13 12 3 4 6 11 1

17 1 8 13 12 9 10 13 3 18

14 15 15 2 2 10 10 5 12 0

14 9 5 2 12 10 9 5 13 3

City D 5% black Dissimilarity index: .50 Black-to-white exposure index: .80 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

6 4 7 6 4 2 1 1 1 0

8 8 9 9 9 10 10 11 12 13 14 17 8 19 22 31 3 7 43 62 2 2 2 4 1 2 1 1 4 1 5 1 1 3 1 1 3 0 0 0

6 6 7 7 3 2 1 1 1 0

6 1 4 3 2 1 1 1 1 0

5 0 1 3 2 1 1 3 1 5

4 4 4 0 1 1 1 1 2 0

3 1 1 0 2 1 1 1 3 1

40  The Core of the American Dilemma

that t­ hese represent fairly high—­a nd strikingly uniform—­levels of segregation. What­ever lay ­behind this pattern, it strongly suggests that this was no Elysian era of color blindness in Northern housing markets.6 But while it would clearly be wrong to view Northern urban blacks in 1880 as a highly integrated population, it is also impor­tant to distinguish this era from what came l­ ater. Blacks in the 1880s w ­ ere not at all ghettoized. Blacks rarely made up more than 2 ­percent of the population of Northern cities.7 Each city had several “black districts,” but ­these ­were not all-­black areas; they w ­ ere instead areas where blacks w ­ ere numerous enough to give the area a distinctively African-­A merican character, and they contained many blocks, sections of blocks, or apartment buildings that ­were all-­black. ­T hese districts in the aggregate might be anywhere from 10  ­percent to 50  ­percent black. Outside of them, a fifth of African-­Americans in ­these Northern cities lived in other neighborhoods, sometimes as h ­ ouse­hold servants (though much less commonly than in the South), sometimes in heavi­ly immigrant districts, and sometimes as prosperous black professionals or business ­owners living in other­wise white neighborhoods.8 In other words, although black / white dissimilarity was high at this time (­because a plurality of blacks w ­ ere concentrated in a few black districts), black exposure to whites was high as well; the typical black in almost any Northern city had mostly white neighbors. Formal black civil rights varied across the North; most Northern states repealed their “Black Codes” (a Northern version of Jim Crow) ­a fter the Civil War, but many had not granted complete formal equality to blacks, and discrimination was common in both the private and public spheres. Yet blacks migrating from the South—­still, in 1880, a relatively uncommon event—­ encountered an atmosphere that was fundamentally dif­fer­ent from the South. The North was ethnically diverse, and a typical Northern white might have a wide variety of ethnic prejudices. “Differentness” was generally associated with low status, and blacks w ­ ere widely ste­reo­t yped and thus associated with low skill, poverty, crime, and other undesirable traits, all of which meant that apartment ­houses or blocks with high black occupancy would be more or less shunned by whites. Still, blacks who could demonstrate by education, dress, or speech that the ste­reo­t ype did not apply to them could participate in many white institutions and be treated on terms approximating equality. In the South, in contrast, all social realities ­were dominated by racial concerns, and the rigid caste system fell in many ways with

The Ghetto, 1918–1940  41

special force on middle-­class blacks, since it was they who posed the greatest threat to the dominant racial ideology. If one asked a white Northerner in the late-­nineteenth ­century about ethnic concerns, or dangers to WASP hegemony, blacks would almost certainly not have figured in the answer. The salient ethnic change, and one that drew the most concern among native residents of the largest Northern cities, was the rising tide of immigration from southern and eastern Eu­ rope: Italy, Greece, and vari­ous parts of the Austro-­Hungarian and Rus­sian Empires (encompassing Poles, Czechs, and Ukrainian and Rus­sian Jews). The g­ reat Irish migration of the late 1840s and 1850s had subsided, and Irish-­A mericans ­were already assimilating in many cities by the 1880s; German immigration to the United States in the 1850s and 1860s had been broadly dispersed. The new waves of immigration ­were substantially larger, and the arrivals seemed in many ways more culturally foreign and potentially overwhelming to native whites.9 More than 90 ­percent of the new immigrants settled in the North, chiefly in the broad band of large cities from Boston in the East to Milwaukee in the Midwest. Their arrival coincided with an acceleration of industrialization and helped to fuel explosive growth in the cities; the ten largest American cities collectively tripled in population between 1880 and 1920. Generally speaking, the new immigrants to major cities encountered levels of segregation comparable to or exceeding that experienced by African-­ Americans. In the largest destination cities for immigrants,10 the index of dissimilarity between first-­generation Italians and native-­born Americans was .77; the index for Rus­sian immigrants versus native Americans was .78.11 Both values ­were higher than ­those experienced by blacks; and since Italians and Rus­sians ­were far more numerous than blacks, the immigrants also experienced much lower levels of exposure to the native white population. Both external and internal forces drove ­these high levels of concentration. As noted, native whites tended to look upon the new waves of immigrants as unsanitary, uncouth, and un-­American; discrimination was widespread and unapologetic. The immigrants, for their part, almost invariably sought out upon their arrival the districts where fellow compatriots w ­ ere concentrated. In a “­little Italy” an Italian immigrant could find shops selling familiar goods, a preponderance of Italian speakers who could provide advice about jobs and housing, and one or more Italian-­language newspapers—­not to mention what­ever friends and ­family had come before. This pattern of new

42  The Core of the American Dilemma

arrivals seeking out ethnic concentrations of fellow immigrants has become known in the lit­er­a­ture as “port of entry” segregation. This, then, was the era when the “ethnic neighborhood” character of many industrial American cities took shape, when one could almost pick a crosstown street at random and, in journeying along it, pass a seemingly infinite variety of distinctively dif­fer­ent sets of ethnically defined marketplaces, places of worship, and languages, each overlapping but each quite distinct.12 Yet even as native-­white concerns about immigration increased, the geographic paths of the Italians, the Poles, and the Jews ­were already marking out a dif­fer­ent path from that of African Americans. The vast majority of new Eu­ro­pean arrivals in the Northern cities entered upon pro­cesses of assimilation that w ­ ere both power­f ul and pervasive. ­Children attended well-­funded public schools whose classes ­were conducted entirely in En­glish. Factories brought together men and ­women of many nationalities. “Settlement h ­ ouses” in immigrant neighborhoods taught the En­glish language as well as American norms about cooking, h ­ ouse­keeping, and social mores. Depending on a host of influences, the c­ hildren of immigrants w ­ ere usually much more “Americanized” than their parents, who themselves became more Americanized as years passed. Greater “native” capital meant better jobs and a greater likelihood that ­children would attend and perhaps even gradu­ate from the “high schools” that ­were themselves rapidly spreading. All of t­ hese mechanisms existed for blacks in the North as well, but with a crucial difference. As ethnic whites assimilated, their ethnicity became less vis­i­ble; they ­were more likely to look, sound, and act like native Americans. They ­were reasonably likely to marry outside their ethnic group and produce ­children who would be absorbed into the phenotypical mainstream. ­These vari­ous mechanisms meant that a growing proportion of the immigrants and their c­ hildren would move into predominantly native white neighborhoods, and geographic integration would reinforce all the other mechanisms of assimilation. The pace of assimilation might depend on many local ­factors, but the pro­cess itself was inexorable. Not so for blacks. In a society that was, at the turn of the ­century, becoming more conscious and more concerned about ethnic distinctions, African-­A mericans represented the ultimate ethnic difference. Aside from the tiny minority who could “pass” as white, blacks ­were readily distinguishable from native whites, and greater education or “whiter” speech could soften but not eliminate their distinctiveness. As ethnic segregation became commonplace, and native whites grew more concerned about maintaining the

The Ghetto, 1918–1940  43

FIGURE 2.2.

Trends in segregation, 1880–1930. Dissimilarity indices of Italians/native whites, Russians/native whites, and Blacks/whites, in five major cities Italian

Russian

Black

1.0 2nd gen.

1st gen. 2nd gen.

1st gen.

0.5

0 1880

1900

1930

1880

1900

1930

1880

1900

1930

Data source: Enumeration district data from 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930 censuses, as developed by Allison Shertzer, Randall P. Walsh, and John R. Logan, “Segregation and Neighborhood Change in Northern Cities: New Historical GIS Data from 1900–1930,” 49 Historical Methods 187 (2016).

“purity” of their neighborhoods, discrimination against ­t hose who ­were dif­fer­ent—of course including blacks—­increased, and ­there was no offsetting mechanism to lower black segregation. Instead, black segregation gradually but steadily r­ ose. The consequence of t­ hese patterns for housing segregation is illustrated in Figure  2.2. White ethnic segregation was generally high but fairly flat from 1880 u ­ ntil 1910, and then, as assimilation took hold and the flow of new arrivals slowed, segregation levels began a steady decline. For blacks, the story was almost the precise opposite. Black segregation levels generally ­rose moderately from 1880 to 1910, reaching levels comparable to t­ hose experienced by recent Eu­ro­pean immigrants by the early 1910s. And then, black segregation levels r­eally took off, reaching “ghetto” levels in most large Northern cities by 1930. What changed ­a fter 1910?

The War­time Pivot Black migration from the South to the urban North was steady and modest during the last de­cades of the nineteenth ­century and the first fifteen

44  The Core of the American Dilemma

years of the twentieth; roughly 1 ­percent of the black population moved to the North each de­cade.13 ­Those with the resources and confidence to make this move tended to have more education, more advanced skills, and presumably more money than the average black Southerner, but this did not immunize them from the “port of entry” phenomenon; like other immigrants, they ­were more likely to ­settle in a “black district” rather than a predominantly white neighborhood. Over time, ­these districts became more heavi­ly black, and logically, more rapid rates of migration to Northern cities would, other ­things being equal, tend to push segregation rates up.14 The beginning of what became known as the ­Great War in the summer of 1914 was a crucial pivot. Massive conscription in Eu­rope, a variety of other war­time restrictions, and the increased danger and difficulty of transatlantic travel, dramatically reduced Eu­ro­pean immigration, from some 1.2 million new arrivals in 1914 to three hundred thousand in 1916 and just over one hundred thousand in 1918.15 Si­mul­ta­neously, war demand—­initially from Eu­rope, but then even more notably from the U.S. government ­a fter Amer­i­ca entered the war in 1917—­led to a surge in industrial production.16 Manufacturers—­most of them located in or near Northern cities—­faced unpre­ce­dented ­labor shortages, and wages r­ ose sharply. Black migration to the North leapt upward. Though no one, to our knowledge, has studied local birth and death registers with sufficient care to determine the year-­by-­year timing and dimensions of the surge, total black migration during the 1915–1920 period occurred on about ten times its prewar scale. Some of the migration came about through direct recruitment by factory representatives fanning out across the South. Sometimes working for a par­tic­u­lar factory, sometimes acting as a freelance ­labor “­factor” (agent), the recruiters offered Southern farm laborers a seemingly complete package: a railway ticket, a job with wages far beyond black rates in the South, and often a place to live. Recruits might even receive a bonus that would help pay the way for ­family members.17 The broad-­based migration created direct linkages between hundreds of Southern towns and rural counties, and black communities in Northern cities. And the mi­grants wrote home: Chicago, Illinois. [apparently Nov. 1917?] My dear S ­ ister: I was agreeably surprised to hear from you and to hear from home. I am well and thankful to say I am d ­ oing well. The weather and every­thing e­ lse was a surprise to me when I came. I got h ­ ere in time to attend one of the greatest revivals in

The Ghetto, 1918–1940  45

the history of my life—­over 500 p ­ eople joined the church . . . ​the ­people are rushing h ­ ere by the thousands and I know if you come and rent a big ­house you can get all the roomers you want. You write me exactly when you are coming. I am not keeping h ­ ouse yet I am living with my b ­ rother and his wife . . . ​I can get a nice place for you to stop ­until you can look around see what you want. I am quite busy. I work in Swifts packing Co. in the sausage department. My d ­ aughter and I work for the same com­ pany—­We get $1.50 a day and we pack so many sausages we d ­ on’t have much time to play but it is a ­matter of a dollar with me and I feel that God made the path and I am walking therein. Tell your husband work is plentiful ­here and he wont have to loaf if he want to work.18 Chicago, Illinois, Nov. 13, 1917, to M—of Hattiesburg, Miss. Yours received sometime ago and found all well and d ­ oing well. Hope you and ­family are well. I got my t­ hings alright the other day and they w ­ ere in good condition. I am all fixed now and living well. I certainly appreciate what you done for us and I w ­ ill remember you in the near f­ uture. M—­, old boy, I was promoted on the first of the month I was made first assistant to the head carpenter when he is out of the place I take every­ thing in charge and was raised to $95 a month. You know I know my stuff. Whats the news generally around H’burg? I should have been h ­ ere 20 years ago. I just begin to feel like a man. It’s a g­ reat deal of plea­sure in knowing that you have got some privilege. My c­ hildren are g­ oing to the same school with the whites and I ­don’t have to umble to no one. I have registered—­will vote the next election and t­ here ­isn’t any ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’—­its all yes and no and Sam and Bill. . . . ​19

The economic opportunities and greater freedom for blacks in Northern cities proved a far more impor­tant stimulant for continued migration than the direct recruitment of l­abor f­actors. But recruitment assumed a large and ominous form among many Northern whites. New black workers almost always arrived at wage rates significantly below ­those the incumbent white workers had achieved. To the whites, this seemed like particularly insidious timing: b ­ ecause of the very existence of l­ abor shortages and war­time demand, ­labor ­unions ­were making unpre­ce­dented pro­gress in organ­izing workers and pressing for improved pay and working conditions—­but the arrival of blacks often directly undercut t­ hese efforts. Moreover, recruitment

46  The Core of the American Dilemma

of black workers was often particularly focused on factories experiencing strikes, where blacks w ­ ere brought in as scabs. White workers thus saw blacks as an especially nasty form of competition; t­ hese war­time factories provided an almost ideal breeding ground for virulent racism. Thus, even as the Supreme Court was showing a new degree of racial liberalism in Buchanan v. Warley, other ­matters ­were aligning in Northern cities to produce a sharp deterioration of race relations. Black populations in major cities doubled or nearly doubled between 1915 and 1920, making blacks much more vis­i­ble in working-­class communities and undoubtedly prompting many apartment buildings and perhaps blocks to “change” from white to black. The war in­de­pen­dently seemed to prompt a sharp rise in white nativist sentiment and hostility to the “other,” be it German, Jew, or black. And the vis­i­ble economic competition from blacks—­keenly felt to be unfair by working-­class whites—­helped to push unfriendly suspicion into outright toxicity. ­There ­were several outbreaks of racial vio­lence between whites and blacks in 1917 and 1918. And then came the so-­called “Red Summer” of 1919, which witnessed over three dozen race riots—­often better described as white mob attacks on blacks—in cities across the country.20 Much of the vio­lence occurred in the South, but ­there was significant rioting in Scranton, Pennsylvania; Baltimore, Mary­land; Bloomington, Illinois; Omaha, Nebraska; New York City; and Philadelphia.21 In Washington, D.C., rumors of the arrest of a black man for raping a white w ­ oman prompted several days of vio­lence against black residents and businesses, from July 19th to the 23rd; five blacks, two white police officers, and eight white civilians ­were killed, and one hundred fifty persons w ­ ere injured.22 The weekend a­ fter the Washington riots, a group of white teen­agers at a beach on Chicago’s Near South Side hurled stones at a black teenager in the w ­ ater who apparently swam past an invisible line separating black from white turf; the swimmer was hit, and drowned. 23 Crowds quickly formed; the police arrived but refused to make any arrests, and fighting soon broke out between groups of black and white men. Over the next few days, much of Chicago’s South Side resembled a war zone, with roving bands of both whites and blacks attacking individuals, homes, and businesses. (The Chicago riots ­were unusual in the degree to which blacks retaliated, creating a spreading pattern of tit-­for-­tat.) The vio­lence did not end completely for thirteen days; at the end of it, twenty-­three blacks and fifteen whites had died, with over five hundred injuries.

The Ghetto, 1918–1940  47

The breadth and intensity of the 1919 race riots was widely seen as a watershed event for black / white­relations in the North. It was now clear to every­one that the “race prob­lem” was not limited to the South. At the street level, it seems likely that white and black residents became more aware than ever of the racial composition of neighborhoods, and that “integration” seemed like a riskier proposition. Blacks might feel more vulnerable in white neighborhoods; whites might feel more vulnerable living close to black areas. Low-­level, racialized vio­lence might well have become more common. It is much easier to observe the effect of the 1919 riots on the elites. In Chicago, in par­tic­u­lar, where the civil leadership was noticeably traumatized by the rioting, the debate about what to do resolved itself into two camps. What might be called the “elite” view was nicely expressed by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, a group catalyzed by the sitting governor, Frank Lowden,24 and funded by the city’s most prestigious private organ­ization, the Union League Club. The Commission’s membership included many of the city’s leading white citizens, and several of its leading black citizens; 25 it undertook a large, wide-­ranging study of race in Chicago on a scale that anticipated in many ways the mammoth An American Dilemma, published a generation ­later.26 The recommendations near the end of its 651-­page report are worth quoting in some detail: We are convinced by our inquiry: (a) that mea­sures involving or approaching deportation or segregation are illegal, impracticable and would not solve, but would accentuate, the race prob­lem and postpone its just and orderly solution by the pro­cess of adjustment; (b) that the moral responsibility for race rioting does not rest upon hoodlums alone, but also upon all citizens, white or black, who sanction force or vio­lence in interracial relations or who do not condemn and combat the spirit of racial hatred thus expressed; (c) that race friction and antagonism are largely due to the fact that each race too readily misunderstand and misinterprets the order’s conduct and aspirations. . . . We urge all citizens, white and Negro, vigorously to oppose all propaganda of malicious or selfish origin which would tend to excite race prejudice. We commend race contacts in cultural and cooperative efforts as tending strongly to mutual understanding and the promotion of good race relations. We condemn the provocation or fostering of race antagonism by

48  The Core of the American Dilemma

associations or organ­izations ostensibly founded or conducted for purposes of patriotism or local improvements. . . . We recommend as of special importance that a permanent local body representing both races be charged with investigating situations likely to produce clashes, with collecting and disseminating information tending to preserve the peace and allay unfounded fears, with bringing sound public sentiment to bear upon the settlement of racial disputes, and with promoting the spirit of interracial tolerance and cooperation. . . .27

While not proposing specific legislation, the Commission strongly argued against the idea of housing segregation, calling it counterproductive and “futile” given a rapidly growing black population. It contended that most fears about integrated housing ­were based on myths rather than facts. In essence, the Commission took the view that black immigration was more challenging than, but fundamentally similar to, Eu­ro­pean ethnic immigration, and that assimilation was a better answer than separation. Racism and black suppression w ­ ere tempting vices, like drink or tobacco; occasionally they might get the upper hand in local affairs, and very easily in the streets, but the better ele­ments of society needed to resist them. The black population undoubtedly had prob­lems—­some from discrimination, and some perhaps self-­inflicted (for instance, higher crime and higher illegitimacy)—­but ­there was an undeniable pattern of pro­gress. In par­tic­u­lar, the number and general impressiveness of highly educated blacks was continually increasing. Time, and a regular infusion of private assistance and goodwill, would gradually resolve the race prob­lem. The competing point of view had been expressed shortly ­after the riot by The Economist, a leading Chicago publication for the business community. “­There would have been no riot,” The Economist suggested, “if Chicagoans knew how to deal with negroes the way Southerners did.”28 While few Chicago leaders thought that Jim Crow was an appropriate path for public ser­vices, stores, theaters, and so on, many saw black residential dispersion as a unique threat. Blackness was a marker of social caste, and, with a rapidly growing black population, a black presence in a neighborhood necessarily created the danger of a greater black presence, which would necessarily make the neighborhood less desirable to whites. Many middle-­class whites wanted to avoid residential proximity to blacks to preserve property values, and they wanted to avoid working-­class proximity between blacks and whites to avoid social conflict.

The Ghetto, 1918–1940  49

Had the contest between ­these two views been fought out in a strictly public sphere—­had, for example, Buchanan not happened and had Chicago been considering a racial zoning ordinance in the aftermath of the riots—it is unclear who would have won. But if segregation w ­ ere to be accomplished by primarily private means, it was far easier to circumvent the “benevolents” and a public showdown. Indeed, the era of municipal racial zoning had provided ­simple exemplars for private groups to follow. As early as 1917, the Chicago Real Estate Board ­adopted a code that prohibited members from introducing a black home buyer on any block that was at least 75 ­percent white.29 Violation of the code would lead to expulsion. Many banks, which already had restrictive lending policies for black customers, easily moved ­toward informal norms that strongly discouraged established institutions from lending to blacks seeking to move into predominantly white neighborhoods. 30 Neighborhood “improvement associations” got out the word to individual ­owners—­especially apartment building ­owners—­that systematic efforts w ­ ere under way to achieve racial homogeneity in the neighborhood, usually as part of a campaign to stabilize housing conditions and values. ­These mechanisms ­were straightforward ways of concentrating the black population. They might not work as quickly as racial zoning, but they would have largely the same result, given sufficient time. In Chicago and most other cities that have been closely studied, the pro­cess was accelerated through terrorism and mob vio­lence. According to Allan Spear, Chicago witnessed fifty-­ seven bombings over the two years leading up to the 1919 race riot; the bombings consistently targeted black homes in largely white neighborhoods, or real estate agents who had introduced blacks into white areas.31 The Chicago Commission Report thus appeared at a point (1922) when the mechanisms leading to ghettoization of blacks ­were already in place. The Commission Report largely devoted itself to rebutting assumptions under­ lying exclusionary efforts. But since it did not propose any meaningful mea­ sures aimed at regulating discriminatory be­hav­ior, private associations ­were unlikely to leave the path of least re­sis­tance. Moreover, both sympathetic white elites, and the black leadership itself, had difficulty coalescing around any specific strategy for countering segregation. They could unify in opposition to any proposal for racial zoning (and such proposals ­were certainly ­under discussion before Buchanan came down) or any scheme to force segregation and eliminate ­free movement for blacks. But many saw increased segregation through private action as more or less inevitable, and sought to strike a bargain ­u nder which business and real estate

50  The Core of the American Dilemma ­TABLE 2 .1   Ethnic intermarriage in New Haven, 1900–1950

Percentage of marriage licenses in which the bride shared the groom’s ethnicity Year

Black

Italian

Jewish

Irish

German

1900 1930 1950

 95% 100% 100%

97% 85% 70%

96% 95% 90%

81% 51% 36%

57% 33% 33%

231

1,138

413

685

391

Total N

Data sources: Percentages based on T ­ ables 1, 2, and 3 from Ceri Peach, “Which ­Triple Melting Pot? A Re-­e xamination of Ethnic Intermarriage in New Haven, 1900–1950,” 3 Ethnic and Racial Studies 1 (1980).

interests would invest in improved housing in black districts, in exchange for acquiescence in the vari­ous ­legal private mechanisms underway (excluding vio­lence and intimidation, of course) to discourage housing integration.32 The public discussions and private pro-­segregative mea­sures that are richly documented in Chicago had close parallels that can be traced in almost any major Northern or Western city one chooses. But this leaves us with a ­couple of fundamental questions. Was 1919–1920 ­really a “pivot,” or did black segregation simply continue along a trend that had started de­ cades earlier? And how was black segregation, in any case, dif­fer­ent from the prewar pattern of white ethnic segregation? One way of observing the change that occurred is by looking at patterns of social assimilation. A fascinating case study of ethnic intermarriage in New Haven, Connecticut, illustrates patterns that occurred throughout the North (­Table  2.1). 33 In 1900, inter-­ethnic marriage rates for African-­A mericans ­were low, but they ­were similarly low for Italian and Jewish immigrants, whose families had mostly arrived in Amer­i­ca within the past twenty years. Ethnic intermarriage rates for these and other white ethnic groups rose steadily during the first half of the c­ entury, but dis­appeared entirely for blacks. Housing segregation followed similar paths. As we saw in Figure  2.2, the index of dissimilarity across a sample of major Northern cities ­rose steadily for blacks from 1880 to 1930, spiking upward around the time of World War I. The trends for Italian-­A mericans, or the predominantly Jewish Russian-­Americans, started at levels higher than ­those for blacks, but trended downward as assimilation progressed.

The Ghetto, 1918–1940  51

The divergence of the black experience from white ethnic assimilation is even clearer when we look at the cross-­sectional racial makeup of neighborhoods in major cities, as illustrated in ­Tables 2.2 and 2.3, below, for 1910, 1920, and 1930. T ­ able 2.2 reports the evolving distribution of Italian-­A mericans in the principal New York boroughs of the time (Manhattan and Brooklyn); ­Table 2.3 reports the same type of data for African-­A mericans in Chicago. Italian-­A mericans made up roughly 15  ­percent of the combined Manhattan / Brooklyn population during ­these de­cades, but Italian-­A mericans typically lived in neighborhoods that w ­ ere roughly half Italian. Over t­hese twenty years from 1910 to 1930, the proportion of Italians living in neighborhoods that w ­ ere over 90 ­percent Italian fell from 20 ­percent to u ­ nder 7 ­percent. Italian-­Americans ­were steadily assimilated, but so long as immigration rates ­were high, many Italians would live in “port of entry” neighborhoods that ­were heavi­ly Italian. ­After the start of World War I, immigration slowed, and so  did the prevalence of all-­Italian neighborhoods. Even in 1930, Italian-­ Americans w ­ ere relatively segregated in the sense of being disproportionately concentrated in certain neighborhoods, but t­ hose neighborhoods ­were only occasionally—­and with decreasing frequency—­monolithically Italian. For Chicago blacks, the trend was dramatically dif­fer­ent (­Table  2.3). Over the 1910 to 1930 period, Chicago’s black population ­rose from about 2 ­percent to about 7 ­percent of the city total. In 1910, the median Chicago African-­American lived in a neighborhood that was around 40 ­percent black, and only 6 ­percent of Chicago blacks lived in districts that w ­ ere over 90 ­percent black. By 1920, the median Chicago African-­A merican lived in a neighborhood that was 60 ­percent black, and nearly one in four Chicago blacks lived in districts that w ­ ere over 90  ­percent black. By 1930, the median African-­ American lived in a neighborhood that was 93 ­percent black, and nearly two-­ thirds of Chicago blacks lived in virtually all-­black neighborhoods. It was in this sense that real ghettoization emerged during the 1920s: well-­defined districts that w ­ ere nearly all black, and within which the vast majority of blacks lived. Chinese immigrants in the West had already experienced something similar, but this was a fundamentally new t­ hing in the North. ­Table 2.3 also helps us understand other impor­tant aspects of “ghettoization” in Chicago. The neighborhoods with relatively small black populations did not simply dis­appear as segregation efforts became more or­ga­nized and systematic. Rather, t­ hese areas faded by attrition; ­there ­were nearly thirteen thousand blacks in Chicago in 1910 living in neighborhoods that w ­ ere less

52  The Core of the American Dilemma ­TABLE 2 . 2  ­Italian residents in Manhattan / Brooklyn enumeration districts

Toward integration District composition ­ nder 5% Italian u 5–10% 10–60% 60–80% 80–90% 90%+ Italian

1910

1920

1930

43,622 33,867 183,163 56,673 58,930 103,354

43,052 45,361 181,230 96,212 56,683 130,368

38,861 54,318 357,732 141,768 98,214 45,279

Data source: Authors’ calculations based on census enumeration district data generously provided by Allison Shertzer, Randall P. Walsh, and John R. Logan. For more information on this dataset please see Shertzer, Walsh, and Logan, “Segregation and Neighborhood Change in Northern Cities: New Historical GIS Data from 1900–1930,” 49 Historical Methods 187 (2016).

­TABLE 2 . 3   Black residents in Chicago enumeration districts

Toward extreme segregation District composition ­ nder 5% black u 5–10% 10–60% 60–80% 80–90% 90%+ black

1910

1920

1930

8,373 4,507 21,779 5,082 2,887 2,832

6,281 3,851 32,577 24,651 16,240 23,568

6,120 1,976 19,746 20,419 33,988 152,968

Data source: Authors’ calculations based on census enumeration district data generously provided by Allison Shertzer, Randall P. Walsh, and John R. Logan. For more information on this dataset please see Shertzer, Walsh, and Logan, “Segregation and Neighborhood Change in Northern Cities: New Historical GIS Data from 1900–1930,” 49 Historical Methods 187 (2016).

than 10 ­percent black, and eight thousand blacks living in such neighborhoods twenty years ­later. But ­these areas ­were increasingly overshadowed by the im­mense growth of the main black concentrations. Chicago’s black population more than doubled in the late 1910s, and more than doubled again during the 1920s. Nearly all of ­these new arrivals ended up in the principal black districts, as whites in ­these areas departed or ­were, in effect, passively displaced by the operation of market forces that made it increasingly difficult for blacks to move in anywhere ­else. Channeling the choices of new arrivals did most of the work of creating a ghetto. And the more established the fact of black segregation became, the more t­ hose blacks still in predominantly

The Ghetto, 1918–1940  53

white areas would feel the strangeness and vulnerability of living in ­those areas, and the incentives to relocate into the ghetto. 34 At least during ­these early stages of “filling in” black districts, rapid black population growth greased the skids of ghettoization. Allison Shertzer and Randall Walsh argue, in a recent paper, 35 that the most crucial ingredient in rising Northern segregation was an increase in the propensity of whites to move out of neighborhoods that had a substantial black presence. They show that, at a given black presence, whites became more likely to leave a neighborhood in the 1910s relative to the 1900s, and still more likely to leave in the 1920s relative to the 1910s. Of course, it is very difficult with the available data to disentangle the effect of rising rates of black entry into black “districts” (through discrimination elsewhere and through rising in-­migration from the South) from rising rates of white “flight.” But the Walsh / Shertzer analy­sis demonstrates just how much ghettoization could come about simply through shifting white attitudes about the safety or desirability of “integrated” neighborhoods, and an increasing public awareness that neighborhood turf was being defined in racial terms. Although ­there ­were local variations, the story was largely the same across cities in the North and West. In ­every major Northern city for which we have case histories, drives got under way sometime in the late 1910s or 1920s to stop the “invasion” of “respectable white neighborhoods” by the rapidly increasing population of blacks. The very consciousness of whites in the North seemed to change during the few years from 1917 to 1920 from an “ethnic” view of urban diversity to one more centered on race (a consciousness that was, as we have noted, already deeply rooted in the South). Real estate boards and banks nearly everywhere developed explicit codes limiting the access to brokerage ser­vices or mortgage loans for blacks seeking to live in white areas; improvement associations arose in hundreds of neighborhoods to build solidarity around racial homogeneity. The saga of Herman Sweet, a successful black physician well-­established in Detroit, whose 1922 purchase of a home on a white block led to mass gatherings of whites around his h ­ ouse, and who was charged with murder when the gatherings turned violent and someone in his ­house fired into the crowd, was one of many contemporaneous events in Detroit where whites agitated to prevent blacks from entering white areas. 36 Similar mechanisms arose in the South, where white elites by the 1920s had generally become strongly committed to residential racial segregation,

54  The Core of the American Dilemma

and where ­there was precious ­little scope for an alternative black view. Southern vio­lence, if it occurred, was much more likely to turn fatal, and police protection of blacks was far less likely to be sympathetic or tolerant.37 Southern cities tended to use municipal power to directly foster segregation or at least to supplement private market efforts. Indeed, even in the wake of Buchanan, many Southern cities passed new racial zoning ordinances. ­These ­were usually crafted in ways that plausibly distinguished them in one way or another from the invalidated Louisville ordinance. Moreover, ­lawyers for ­these cities often contended that the Court’s view of racial zoning (as an unconstitutional restriction of property rights) had arguably changed with its decision to uphold general use zoning in 1924.38 Despite its relative weakness in the Deep South, the NAACP continued to challenge a number of t­ hese ordinances and was consistently successful in persuading courts that Buchanan had continued vitality. Still, at least a few of the racial zoning ordinances remained on the books for years, and Birmingham’s racial zoning law remained on the books ­until it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1951. 39 Even where such ordinances existed, however, the thrust of enforcement was not generally aimed at displacing blacks from established settlements, or ending the street / alleyway patterns u ­ nder which many (though a declining number of) black domestics and their families lived in physically close proximity to whites; such patterns ­were ­either specifically exempted from city policies or ignored in enforcement efforts. Rather, the focus of Southern municipal action was on the prevention of black neighborhood expansion into white middle-­ class neighborhoods—­ the development of urban neighborhood lines that both blacks and whites knew would not be crossed. The hardening of ­these lines, and the growing proportion of Southern urban blacks who w ­ ere industrial workers rather than f­ amily servants, meant that Southern urban segregation followed in t­ hese de­cades a path very similar to that in the North. Still, ­there ­were impor­tant structural differences in Southern black segregation as it consolidated in the 1920s. Southern black ghettoization tended to be less concentrated near the center of cities. In the North, the extraordinarily rapid growth of cities had tended to produce “concentric circle” patterns of growth, with older housing (and newly arriving ethnic groups) generally concentrated in the ­middle of the city. Almost ­every Northern ghetto, once it was formed, was not far from downtown and was surrounded by white neighborhoods on its “middle-­class” border. In the

The Ghetto, 1918–1940  55

South, black settlement had been more dispersed from the outset (recall the black “encampments” on urban fringes ­a fter the Civil War). And as Southern cities (more slowly) expanded, the rural areas that turned suburban had indigenous black populations. Thus, urban blacks in the South, though highly segregated by the 1930s, w ­ ere less concentrated in centralized enclaves; many of the black ghettos that took shape in the South w ­ ere in, or close to, the suburbs. This turned out to be an impor­tant difference, ­because urban black populations ­were continuing to grow. Not only was the industrial economy steadily e­ xpanding in all regions during the 1920s; the agricultural economy of the rural South entered a period of absolute decline.40 Cotton crops w ­ ere increasingly damaged by parasites, and farm prices in general w ­ ere depressed through most of the de­cade. Despite relatively high birth rates, the black population in rural Southern counties fell in absolute terms from 1920 to 1930, b ­ ecause out-­migration was very high. Roughly half of all blacks coming of age in the rural South in ­these years migrated away. Some blacks moved to cities in the Deep South; a larger number moved to cities in the upper South. But two out of three black mi­g rants journeyed to the North, where the overall black population ­rose by more than 60 ­percent, to over 2.6 million in 1930. In the urban South, black districts located close to the edge of an urban area could easily expand to accommodate a larger population, through new construction on its outlying borders. In the North, this was generally not true. Well-­defined black ghettos could accommodate significant black population growth in the 1920s, when the ghetto was still in the pro­cess of emptying out its incumbent white population. But by the end of the 1920s, ­these ghettos w ­ ere overwhelmingly black. Additional population growth could occur only by increasing population density within the ghetto, or by expanding the borders of the ghetto to incorporate currently white neighborhoods into its reach. This latter option raised, to whites, the fearful specter of neighborhood racial transition. If one considers the vari­ous forces in play, it becomes obvious that the same rules that create a barrier for blacks seeking to enter white neighborhoods could create very rapid racial transition if the barrier ­were breached. ­Because the logic of neighborhood transition plays such a fundamental role in the rest of our story, it is worth laying it out in some detail. Once very high levels of racial segregation exist, a “dual housing market” necessarily exists;

56  The Core of the American Dilemma

blacks and whites compete for housing intraracially, within the geographic expanse occupied by their own race. In most Northern cities in par­tic­u­lar, the steady arrival of more blacks from the South created, once the ghettos ­were all-­black, a dual housing market in which blacks tended to pay higher prices for lower quality housing in neighborhoods with inferior amenities. We noted that in the prewar, urban South, the most affluent blacks tended to be t­ hose most rankled by segregation; the same was true—­and prob­ably even more so—­for affluent blacks in Northern ghettos. The dual housing market meant they could not achieve the status they felt their wealth had earned them. They resented being bound to a “lower-­class” caste when they w ­ ere, eco­nom­ically and in a growing number of other ways, upper-­middle-­class. The temptation was thus strong for some affluent blacks to enter white areas, and the easiest way to do this was to breach a border between two relatively similar, upper-­middle-­class neighborhoods. Moving just across a border provided “cover,” since the “black pioneer” was virtually in the shadow of the existing black area. Moving to an upper-­middle-­class neighborhood minimized the risk of vio­lence, something quite likely to happen if one moved into a working-­class neighborhood or one with a strong ethnic white identity. To buy a white home in an adjacent, middle-­class white neighborhood would prob­ably require the buyer to pay the full purchase price in cash, but this was not as large a prob­lem as one might think: middle-­class blacks who owned homes in the ghetto ­were prob­ably already close to owning their homes outright.41 The prospective black buyer might find informal means to let nearby white o ­ wners know of his interest, or might use a black broker (or a white broker who was not a member of the established guilds). The white seller, so long as he could keep the transaction secret ­until it was completed, and so long as he planned to leave the neighborhood, might be willing to “betray” his neighbors for a higher sales price—or might even relish the facilitation of black entry if he disliked the caste system. Once one black ­house­hold was installed—­a ssuming they ­were not promptly bought out by a local improvement association, or frightened away by some type of intimidation—­the cost of entry to a second black buyer was lower, both ­because the second buyer was breaking a weakened taboo as to that block, and ­because the other white ­owners would now be ner­vous that their block had been breached. Writing in the 1940s, Gunnar Myrdal captured well what happened next:

The Ghetto, 1918–1940  57

Such a situation creates a vicious circle, in which race prejudice, economic interest, and residential segregation mutually reinforce one another. When a few Negro families do come into a white neighborhood, some more white families move away. Other Negroes hasten to take their places, ­because the existing Negro neighborhoods are overcrowded due to segregation. This constant movement of Negroes into white neighborhoods makes the bulk of the white residents feel that their neighborhood is doomed to be predominantly Negro, and they move out—­w ith their attitudes against the Negro reinforced. Yet if ­there ­were no segregation, this ­wholesale invasion would not have occurred. But ­because it does occur, segregational attitudes are increased, and the vigilant pressure to stall the Negroes at the borderline is kept up.42

What might happen to housing prices in the “changing” neighborhood during this pro­cess was hard to predict. In princi­ple, a neighborhood newly opened to black entry should see prices go up, since the market was enlarged and since black middle-­class buyers in the dual market would be willing to pay a premium. On the other hand, if a large number of whites fled quickly—­a nd if they believed that black entry would necessarily bring about neighborhood decline—­prices might fall, at least as long as panic conditions prevailed.43 Moreover, once a neighborhood had become all black, and thus, resegregated, it was part of the ghetto. Crime would likely increase;44 further property transactions might be inhibited by a decline in credit availability; the overcrowded conditions of the ghetto would lead to the subdivision of some homes into apartments . . . ​a nd thus, another self-­fulfilling prophecy of neighborhood decline would often be realized. As Myrdal notes, one power­f ul net effect of this cycle was to increase the desire of whites to maintain a stable border with the black ghetto. The closer ghettoization came nearer to completion, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the more key white actors in the private sector realized ­there was a major design flaw in the segregation proj­ect: ­there was no effective way, especially in the North, to account for black population growth. As black populations grew, through migration and natu­ral increase, the black housing premium—­ already noticeable by 1930, according to several anecdotal accounts—­would steadily rise, and the danger of a breach at any point along the ghetto border, particularly along the middle-­class sections of that border, was obvious.

58  The Core of the American Dilemma

We illustrate the general dynamic of ghetto expansion in Figure 2.3. As urban scholar Ernest Burgess pointed out in the 1920s, cities had taken on a “concentric ring” pattern of development, with a commercial downtown surrounded by industry, which itself was surrounded by older, working-­ class neighborhoods, and a succession of gradually more affluent “rings” as one moved away from downtown. Middle-­class rings in the central city spilled over into the suburbs, where the newest housing often lured particularly affluent families. In the North, ghettos almost always arose in the working-­class “ring” of development, with black neighborhoods alongside other low and moderate income districts. Many of ­these districts had a strong immigrant character, and often a single ethnic group dominated. Blacks moving into such tightly knit, cohesive neighborhoods often met violent re­sis­tance. More attractive housing lay along the middle-­class borders, and middle-­class blacks ­were thus often the leading pioneers of expansion. ­There was one private, ­legal mechanism that might maintain the racial integrity of ­these middle-­class white neighborhoods even when the black housing premium became substantial: the racially restrictive covenant. When property o ­ wners entered into a valid covenant, they bound both themselves and any ­future owner of their property to the covenant’s terms. If a covenant provided that ­every property owner in a neighborhood agreed not to sell or rent to a non-­white person, then in princi­ple no one could break that agreement and sell out for a higher price. White property o ­ wners could essentially lock themselves into a cartel by removing housing stock from any potential for black occupancy, and by creating a binding promise that no one white owner would act expediently in the ­future. But though racial covenants had the unique advantage of binding whites together, they w ­ ere also the clumsiest of discrimination devices—­especially in established urban neighborhoods. As noted in Chapter 1, real estate covenants of any sort had been exotic l­ egal devices of dubious enforceability as recently as the early 1900s.45 During the first quarter of the twentieth ­century, they gained traction as appealing methods of private land-­use regulation, but even so they w ­ ere only easy to use—­for both ­legal and practical reasons—­when developers created new subdivisions. A developer splitting farmland into suburban lots could insert a variety of land-­use requirements into each deed of sale. All buyers would buy knowing that the land was locked into certain restrictions; prospective buyers who disliked the restrictions could buy elsewhere. By 1920, it was very common for developers to

The Ghetto, 1918–1940  59 FIGURE 2.3.

Models of urban expansion. Adding race to the Burgess model: In northern and western cities, the (initially small) black ghettos that coalesced in the 1910s and 1920s were typically deep in the heart of the city. As density in the ghetto increased, expansion usually occurred toward white, middle-class neighborhoods, both because middle-class blacks were more likely to be pioneers, and because of the greater likelihood of intense, often violent resistance to black entry in white working-class neighborhoods. CBD

working-class ethnics

warehouses, manufacturing original black ghetto

working-class ethnics

middle-class border areas

outlying suburbs

outlying areas of central city

In 1925, Ernest Burgess posited that development in American cities followed a “concentric zone” model, with the core occupied by commercial and industrial uses. Lot sizes and affluence gradually increased as one moved further from the core.This model captured income and class patterns well through most of the 20th century, though recent trends in gentrification (Ch. 18) have upended the model.

outlying suburbs

Concentric Zone Model (E. Burgess, 1925)

Chicago

1 Central business dist. 2 Industrial transition zone 3 Working-class residences 4 Residential zone 5 Commuter zone

Data source: Ernest Burgess, “The Growth of the City,” in The City, ed. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. Mc­Ken­zie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925).

60  The Core of the American Dilemma FIGURE 2.4.

Racial covenants in Chicago, 1940.

Chicago area of detail

es

Lake Michigan

Areas with racial covenants in 1940

% Black in 1940 80-100 60-79 40-59 20-39 0-19

Miles 0

2

Data sources: Herman H. Long and Charles S. Johnson, ­People vs. Property: Race Restrictive Covenants in Housing (Nashville: Fisk University Press, 1947); 1940 Decennial Census, Census Tracts, Chicago (1941).

include racial restrictions, along with other terms that, for example, limited housing to specific types, established uniform setback requirements, or enlisted lot o ­ wners in a common drainage system. Importing racial covenants into established urban neighborhoods—­the ones that, in Northern cities, ­were actually close to black districts—­was far more difficult. To be complete, the covenants would have to gain the con-

The Ghetto, 1918–1940  61

sent of ­every owner in the covenanted area.46 Creating new deeds and making covenants binding on ­future ­owners involved considerable expense.47 If coverage was spotty or incomplete, black pioneers could breach the racial boundary and the covenant would become a liability rather than an asset, preventing the remaining white o ­ wners from selling and leaving.48 Urban racial covenants, therefore, often specified that they only went into effect once a very high proportion of neighborhood parcels w ­ ere covered, and often expired ­a fter some designated period of time. In short, racial covenants ­were an expensive and risky strategy, the more so the closer the covenanted area was to the black ghetto. Despite ­these disadvantages, racial covenants ­were a central component of private segregation strategies through much of the United States by the early 1930s. We do not know just how pervasive ­these ­were, b ­ ecause the difficult job of searching through innumerable individual title rec­ords has only been done for a few cities. But con­temporary accounts consistently imply that racial covenants spread rapidly as a ghetto-­containment strategy around this time, and the available case studies confirm this impression.49 In Chicago—­perhaps the best-­documented city—­racial covenants began to sprout on the borders of the South Side ghetto by 1927, and by 1940 formed an essentially unbroken line around the middle-­class perimeter of the ghetto (Figure 2.4). Racial covenants significantly upped the ante of segregation strategies. They amounted to private zoning; in suggesting fixed limits to black ghettos, covenants would provide a focal point around which black opposition to segregation, as it matured, could coalesce. And, although a covenant might work in any given neighborhood, the ­whole of a network of covenants would prove weaker than the sum of its component parts, for it ignored a basic demographic fact. As Myrdal observed, “The urban Negro population is bound to increase. The pres­ent Negro ghettos ­will not suffice.”50 We explore the working out of this logic in Chapter 3.

3

Shelley v. Kraemer and the Rise of Blockbusting, 1940–1959

Stand up and rejoice! A g­ reat day is ­here! We are fighting Jim Crow, and the vict’ry is near! I read in the news, the Supreme Court has said, “Listen ­here, Mister Jim Crow, it’s time you ­were dead.” —­From Anonymous, “Hallejelujah I’m a Travelin’ ” (1946)

The search for a “watershed” in recent Negro history ends at the years that comprised World War II, 1939–1945 . . . ​. because of the neglect of the war period, ­these years of transition in American race relations comprise the “forgotten years” of the Negro revolution. —­R ichard M. Dalfiume, “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution”

T

hose white civic leaders who w ­ ere most concerned about containing the interracial conflict that exploded at the end of the 1910s might have felt a good deal of complacency about ­matters in the late 1930s. The number of racially integrated neighborhoods in urban Amer­i­ca had fallen dramatically. Usually with l­ ittle direct government intervention, a combination of or­ga­nized, sometimes violent, and sometimes subtle white efforts had concentrated black demand in well-­defined black districts, from which white renters and homeowners had almost entirely departed by the early 1930s. Through the years of the ­Great Depression, well-­defined ghettos contained nearly the entire urban black population across hundreds of cities. The extraordinary economic hardships of the Depression, almost everywhere felt disproportionately by blacks, sharply reduced black mobility and the rate of migration from the rural South to cities. T ­ here was, however, one silver lining in segregation. The concentration of African-­ Americans had also concentrated African-­ American talent, organ­ization, and culture, and each major urban area had a locus of vibrant black commerce, journalism, and culture. 62

Shelley v. Kraemer and the Rise of Blockbusting, 1940–1959  63

Beneath the apparent stasis of the 1930s, perceptive observers realized that the ghetto “solution” to the prob­lem of urban race relations was intrinsically unstable. ­There was no growth mechanism, no escape valve. Ghettos ­were almost always (especially in the North) located near the heart of metropolitan areas; they ­were thus surrounded by white neighborhoods or other established uses. White interests wanted to “protect” t­ hose adjacent white neighborhoods from large-­scale black entry, entry that might be precipitated even by a few sales by whites to affluent blacks. The restrictive covenant seemed to be a solution to this “collective action” prob­lem, making it much harder for individual whites to “defect” and sell to blacks. Creating covenants in already built-up neighborhoods required a lot of institutional or citizen energy, but through the 1930s the number of such covenants increased, and they seemed to work exceedingly well. But as the black urban population grew—as it did even during the slow growth, low-­m igration years of the Depression—­the density of housing in the ghetto increased, and so did the “black premium” paid for that housing. This meant that both the demographic and economic pressure on ghetto bound­a ries steadily increased. The constriction created by restrictive covenants made the dual housing market steadily more stark. Then came World War II. Fighting in Eu­rope broke out in 1939, and the dramatic Nazi victories in the spring of 1940 created a genuine world crisis. British demand for American goods sharply escalated, and Congress, with Roo­se­velt’s prodding, vastly increased defense spending and instituted a peacetime draft. The American economy fi­nally climbed out of recession. As late as 1939, the unemployment rate had still been a staggering 17.2 ­percent. By 1941 it was down to 9.9 ­percent, and a­ fter Amer­i­ca actually entered the war in December 1941, unemployment virtually dis­appeared and ­labor shortages began to surface.1 The result of this restored prosperity was a resumption of the G ­ reat Migration on a g­ rand scale, indeed on a scale that dwarfed what had come before. While black migration to cities totaled perhaps half a million during the second half of the 1910s, approximately three times that number of African-­Americans migrated to urban areas during the first half of the 1940s. While about one in twelve rural blacks moved to an urban area during the 1910s, about one in four did so during the 1940s; as Figures 1.2 and 1.3 show, it was during this de­cade that black urbanization passed 50  ­percent and nearly caught up with white rates. In most major cities, black populations

64  The Core of the American Dilemma

during the 1940s grew between 40 ­percent and 100 ­percent, and again, the growth was most pronounced in the North. Where ­were ­these blacks to live? The tight barrier of racially restrictive covenants largely confined ghettos to existing territory, especially in the North. This meant that housing prices in the ghetto ­rose rapidly, both in absolute terms and relative to prices in nearby white neighborhoods. It also meant that despite the prosperity of the war, housing conditions in the ghetto generally deteriorated, as overcrowding, the splitting of ­houses and apartments into progressively smaller quarters, and the ease with which landlords could command higher rents, produced declines in housing quality. Of course, the supply of housing was not completely inelastic—­other­wise, housing price increases would have wiped out the economic advantages of urban residence. Restrictive covenants rarely if ever formed a complete barrier around the ghetto. Since covenants w ­ ere expensive and difficult to establish in built-up areas (see Chapter 2), and b ­ ecause racial covenants w ­ ere rarely developed in areas predominantly covered by multifamily housing, many particularly dense or low-­income white neighborhoods did not have covenants developed in a sufficiently systematic fashion to constitute an effective barrier to black entry. Moreover, if the economic premium black purchasers could offer white sellers was large enough, then a par­tic­u ­lar block covered by restrictive covenants might “turn” simply through a common willingness of white o ­ wners to take the money and run. Through such episodes, most ghettos—­particularly in the North—­occasionally expanded. Still, ­there was no denying that the war migration to the cities created a tremendous shortage of black housing, and generated a fundamental challenge to the structure of ghettos that had so recently taken their “classic” form. If black leaders had often been divided and irresolute as the structure took shape in the late 1910s and 1920s, they w ­ ere not so now. Increasingly, they or­ga­nized and objected to the second-­class ser­vices delivered to the ghetto. And in the housing arena, frustration increasingly focused on the restrictive covenant. This focus was accentuated by the rapid growth of the black m ­ iddle class during the war. Our estimate, based on census microdata for 1940 and 1950, is that the number of blacks earning as much as the median white worker in 1940 more than tripled during the 1940s. White incomes went up a lot as well, of course, but even in relative terms, blacks closed the income gap with whites at a higher rate during the 1940s than in any de­cade (for

Shelley v. Kraemer and the Rise of Blockbusting, 1940–1959  65

which data exists) before or since. T ­ hese middle-­class black ­house­holds wanted, and could afford, better housing precisely at a time when the housing stock around them was becoming more crowded and more deteriorated. They ­were perfectly aware that white ­house­holds, often with lower incomes, lived in more attractive housing, in quieter neighborhoods, at lower cost, often only a few blocks away. What prevented them from buying that housing, it became increasingly clear, was the restrictive covenant. Meanwhile, urban black communities w ­ ere undergoing other transformations of even greater consequence. The Harlem Re­nais­sance and the New Orleans jazz movement brought black culture to genuine prominence in the 1920s and 1930s—­something that not only had cross-­racial appeal but which heavi­ly influenced American culture itself. Musical figures like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington ­were famous worldwide, while poets and authors like Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay w ­ ere well known and admired in literary circles. Richard Wright’s breakout novel, Native Son, appeared in 1940; it not only brought attention to a range of “black issues” from segregation to criminal justice, but awakened many whites to the existence of black literary culture. Joe Louis dominated boxing, and although blacks ­were still a largely invisible presence in Hollywood, Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar in early 1940 and films like Imitation of Life (1934) explored racial themes in ways that would have been hard to imagine twenty years earlier. Chicago’s South Side elected Congress’s first black post-­ Reconstruction representative in 1928, and black segregation catalyzed the election of a rising number of Northern blacks into state legislatures and city councils. Black educational attainment in 1940 still lagged de­cades ­behind comparable white rates, but through the network of well-­established black colleges, and some significant incursions into predominantly white institutions, a large and sophisticated body of college gradu­ates had emerged. In 1940, ­there w ­ ere roughly one hundred thousand black college gradu­ates nationwide, and they constituted both an active corps of literary, academic, and po­liti­cal leaders, but also the membership base for a broadening array of black social and cultural institutions. William Hastie and Charles Houston ­were widely admired l­ awyers; Hastie was appointed to a federal judgeship by Franklin Roo­se­velt in 1937 and to the governorship of the Virgin Islands in 1946. E. Franklin Frazier emerged as a major American sociologist ­a fter publishing The Negro ­Family in the United States in 1939.

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We cannot begin tracking the evolution of general white attitudes on racial issues ­until ­a fter World War II, when opinion surveys emerged as a regular practice. In many ways, the “black condition” seems to have been fairly easy for whites to ignore during the interwar years; Jim Crow appeared to be stable in the South and ghettos made blacks largely invisible in the North. ­There is l­ ittle doubt, however, that the issue of racial caste was one that many elite whites thought about regularly, and one on which thinking evolved substantively. The “Scientific Racism” that was so widely a­ ccepted during the progressive era had begun to come ­under significant attack in the late 1920s, and by the late 1930s was given relatively l­ittle credence among younger experts in the field. African-­ A mericans had felt themselves on the po­ l iti­ c al defensive throughout the 1920s, but in the 1930s, ­there ­were nascent signs of po­liti­cal leaders showing an awareness of, and sometimes a responsiveness to, black issues. Herbert Hoover had no par­tic­u­lar interest in civil rights,2 but his administration commissioned special censuses gathering systematic data on African-­A merican housing and economic conditions, and Hoover’s special panel, convened to bring the best of con­temporary social science into national policy making, paid significant attention to the black condition.3 Black leaders also mobilized po­liti­cal opposition to one of Hoover’s judicial nominees in 1930; when their complaints achieved resonance in the Senate, Hoover withdrew the nomination. By the 1930s, sentiment for federal action against lynchings in the South became a minor but perennial issue. Even though the ­actual number of lynchings had been falling steadily since the 1890s,4 public and media attention grew through the 1930s. Demo­cratic liberals like Robert Wagner joined forces with Republicans in support of mea­sures, highlighting the role of Southern senators in bottling up or filibustering legislation. 5 Franklin Roo­se­velt temporized on a host of racial issues during the 1930s; he was generally unwilling to risk Southern support for the New Deal by pushing racial reform issues. But many New Dealers w ­ ere more sympathetic to civil rights than their progressive counter­parts from the 1900s and 1910s, and a gradually broadening array of New Deal programs provided benefits across racial lines. In 1935 Roo­se­velt signed an executive order barring discrimination in the administration of WPA proj­ects, and a gradually broadening array of New Deal programs provided benefits across racial lines. In 1941, as the economy moved to a war footing and in direct response to threats by black ­labor leaders to stage protests in Washington, Roo­se­velt created the

Shelley v. Kraemer and the Rise of Blockbusting, 1940–1959  67

Fair Employment Practices Commission to investigate complaints of discrimination by federal contractors.6 The events leading to Gunnar Myrdal’s epic work, An American Dilemma, well illustrate the changed worldview of American elites. The New York–­based Car­ne­gie Foundation—at the time one of the two or three largest foundations in the world—­deci­ded in 1937 to undertake a study of the “Negro question” in Amer­i­ca. The idea had been proposed by Newton Baker, a prominent ­lawyer serving on the board who had been Secretary of the Army during World War I. Baker had grown up in West ­Virginia and had risen to prominence in Ohio. He had racial views which, especially compared to the President he served ­under (Woodrow Wilson), ­were moderately progressive; he saw racial issues in Amer­i­ca as a slowly ticking bomb and realized that blacks had been particularly hard hit by the Depression. The president of Car­ne­gie, Frederick Keppel, was if anything an even more consummate insider than Baker; through Car­ne­g ie he involved himself in a dazzling array of good works and regularly sought out civic, national, and international leaders to assess emerging issues and the worthiness of prospective donees. Keppel did not know much about black issues per se, but he was well aware that many aspects of black life in Amer­i­ca ­were evolving rapidly while the policies defining the black position had barely changed in a generation. An ambitious study was appealing; but Keppel realized that it would be challenging for any one author to achieve credibility with the three distinct audiences—­black leaders, Northern liberals, and elite Southern progressives—­whose cooperation would prob­ably be necessary to bring about real change. Keppel hit upon the idea of bringing in a highly respected Eu­ro­pean intellectual with no past rec­ord or positions on racial issues. Myrdal fit the bill perfectly: he was trained as both an economist and a l­ awyer; he had written influential treatises in economics but also had published (with his wife, Alva) very popu­lar works on social issues, and he was an influential planner in the Swedish government.7 The Car­ne­gie board committed itself to a massive study that would ultimately receive over $300,000 in funding—an unheard-of amount at the time for any kind of social science work. Significantly, in Myrdal’s initial correspondence with Keppel, he kept open his options about how he would characterize black issues; he noted, for example, that he was not willing to dismiss ge­ne­tic accounts of racial differences ­until he had investigated further. Once he arrived in Amer­i­ca and began to consult with experts and read the lit­er­a­ture, he found that

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s­ imple notions of scientific racism had been almost entirely dispensed with within intellectual circles. At the same time, in making extensive field trips through the South, he was indelibly struck by the brutality of the conditions ­there and the rigidity of Jim Crow. Part of Myrdal’s genius was his ability to develop a rapport with a very wide range of ­people. Being a Swedish extrovert, oxymoronic as that may sound, helped a lot. He could proj­ect a ­simple goodwill and an openness to experiences and ideas that could win over a black revival meeting in Mississippi or a white country club audience in Georgia. His cutting-­edge expertise in multiple fields of social science, the mastery he quickly developed over the existing lit­er­a­ture on race relations, and the backing of Car­ne­gie not only gave him entrée to national experts and policy makers, but often lasting friendships across both regional and racial lines. Myrdal found a wide consensus among Northern white elites and intellectuals that meaningful reform of the position of blacks in Amer­i­ca was necessary, and an unwillingness even among many Southern white elites to defend the system. He also found a large black elite, many of whom became ready collaborators in his proj­ect, and among whom he observed a strong and growing vein of radicalism. An American Dilemma, the massive work Myrdal and his team produced in 1941–1942 and which was published in January  1944, certainly crystallized the emerging elite consensus for reform, and prob­ably played a significant role in channeling this impetus t­oward po­liti­cal and l­egal mea­sures rather than economic and class-­based strategies. Although most of the book was devoted to documenting black conditions in Amer­i­ca, its central theme was that the race prob­lem in Amer­i­ca was, at its heart, a white prob­lem: whites faced a growing contradiction between the professed ideals of American democracy and the realities of a caste system. This tension would only grow, Myrdal pointed out, as Amer­i­ca emerged from the war as the world’s leading power and as it urged itself upon a damaged and de-­colonizing world as the proper model for reconstruction. An American Dilemma was an immediate success; it sold in large numbers and generated several shorter versions which sold even better. It was quickly recognized as one of a handful of nonfiction books that broadly changed American consciousness (comparable, say, to Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives [1890] or Ida Tarbell’s History of Standard Oil [1904]). And it provided a remarkably accurate prediction of how civil rights would evolve during the next quarter-­century.

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But though Myrdal’s work was pivotal in providing a richly documented and deeply conceived rationale for broader civil rights, An American Dilemma was also a reflection of its times. In 1939, the ­Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) blocked black contralto Marian Anderson from performing at its Constitutional Hall to an integrated audience. The denial became a cause célèbre, with hundreds of DAR members, including First Lady Eleanor Roo­se­ velt, resigning their memberships. Roo­se­velt then used her influence to persuade Harold Ickes, the Interior Secretary, to facilitate an Anderson concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The concert attracted an enormous crowd, and millions listened on radio. Wendell Wilkie, the charismatic Republican presidential nominee in 1940, made civil rights a significant issue in his campaign, calling for racial integration of the armed forces and desegregation in the nation’s capital. A ­ fter his election loss in November, he continued to work on progressive racial issues. Progressive po­liti­cal ideals and civil rights for African-­A mericans w ­ ere increasingly intertwined.8 Both Eleanor Roo­se­velt and Wendell Wilkie often made common cause with the NAACP, which seemed in the thick of every­thing to do with expanding civil rights. Throughout the interwar years it had continued to grow and deepen its network of local chapters.9 Thurgood Marshall, who had started working with the NAACP in 1934, won his first major case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1940, and that same year he founded and became executive director of the NAACP ­Legal Defense and Education Fund.10 What would become the dominant NAACP l­egal strategy—to develop a set of interlocking challenges to the ­legal components of Jim Crow that would cumulatively undermine its viability—­was emerging in coherent form. Not r­ eally an integral part of that strategy, but an issue that nonetheless was front and center in nearly all civil rights discussions, was the importance of mounting a ­legal challenge to restrictive covenants. State and federal courts had been tolerant of racially restrictive covenants as they spread widely in urban neighborhoods during the 1920s and 1930s, and few challenges succeeded. Representative of (and of course influencing) this pattern was the 1926 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Corrigan v. Buckley, where the court resolved a challenge to a restrictive covenant on a minor technical ground, and then went on in dicta to broadly defend the ­legal soundness of restrictive covenants.11 But as progressive attitudes changed, and the implications of widespread racial covenants for African-­A merican conditions in cities became more

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evident, judges naturally began to look at the covenants with more critical eyes. Many racial covenants, especially t­ hose added on to deeds in fully developed urban neighborhoods, w ­ ere clumsy affairs.12 Covenants w ­ ere supposed to “touch and concern” the property itself (for example, by limiting the property to single-­family homes or requiring building setbacks), but racial restrictions arguably failed this test: they concerned characteristics of occupants, not of the property itself. If a covenant covered a large area—­say a thousand homes—­a nd two or three white o ­ wners had sold homes to affluent, light-­skinned black buyers without provoking a ­legal challenge, then any subsequent black f­amily entering the neighborhood could defend a challenge on the grounds of “laches”—­that is, on grounds that it was unfair to individual o ­ wners to enforce the restriction inconsistently.13 Similarly, if, say, 85 ­percent of the ­owners in a group of blocks had joined a covenant, but half of the “unincluded” o ­ wners subsequently sold their h ­ ouses to black buyers, the covenant could be challenged on the grounds that the conditions envisioned by ­owners when they joined the covenant had changed, and that the basic purpose of the covenant—to preserve an all-­ white neighborhood—­had now been frustrated.14 For that ­matter, how would one prove in court that a Negro or Jewish occupant was, in fact, Negro or Jewish?15 As elites in and out of the bar came to see restrictive covenants not as part of the solution to urban racial conflict, but rather as an unsavory part of Jim Crow that had seeped into the North, judges w ­ ere more prepared to pay attention to their l­ egal weaknesses and to side with other­wise sympathetic defendants. This began to happen regularly ­after 1940. However, racial covenants still flourished in the 1940s, holding up quite broadly even as the economic pressures on blacks to attempt to defy them grew more intense. One could have readily i­ magined a broad “war of attrition” on restrictive covenants, with civil rights organ­izations recruiting African-­A mericans to move into covenanted areas in many cities and undertaking many small, local suits to challenge the technical imperfections of covenants. But the NAACP, recognizing the shifting attitudes of national elites on ­matters of race and the more liberal composition of the Supreme Court, was inclined ­toward a more systematic approach. It convened a small conference on restrictive covenants in Chicago in mid-1945, just as the end of the war was opening new vistas of activism. The seventeen attendees ­were an extraordinarily high-­powered group, including top l­ awyers like Hastie, Houston, and Marshall, but also activist scholars like Robert Weaver, who twenty years

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l­ater would become the first African-­A merican to sit on a presidential cabinet. ­There was general agreement that undermining restrictive covenants should be a civil rights priority, and that a favorable Supreme Court decision would be the most plausible way to achieve this goal. But the challenges to getting ­there ­were formidable. In contrast to the ­legal doctrines we mentioned earlier, which could take advantage of specific covenant defects in par­tic­u­lar cases, ­there ­were a few arguments that might be used for a systemic l­egal attack on racial covenants. One was that they ­were an unjustifiable “restraint on alienation.” In the common law that Amer­i­ca inherited from ­England, landowners could tie up their property for generations a­ fter their deaths. But ever since primogeniture had been abolished during the Revolutionary era, American courts had become increasingly hostile ­toward ­legal devices that substantially restricted the ability of current o ­ wners to sell their property to whomever they chose. Of course, many non-­racial covenants restricted the nature of f­ uture uses (that is, a restriction limiting property to single-­family homes), but restrictions on who could buy ­were, in vari­ous other contexts, viewed as inconsistent with the healthy functioning of markets and therefore illegal. The prob­lem with this argument, if one was seeking change from the U.S. Supreme Court, is that the common-­law rules about alienability, like most other m ­ atters of property law, ­were clearly in the province of state courts or legislatures, not the federal courts. A second argument concerned the equitable nature of an injunction. When a white seller v­ iolated a restrictive covenant by selling to a black buyer, the other affected o ­ wners had two alternative l­egal remedies. They could sue the white seller for breaking the covenant—in other words, bring a direct suit for breach of contract seeking an award of monetary damages; or they could seek an injunction to prevent the black buyer from taking possession, or to evict the black occupants who had already moved in. The injunctive remedy, in which someone is ordered to take some physical action rather than simply pay damages, was normally available to enforce covenants, but it was an “equitable” remedy, intrinsically subject to more court discretion based on the totality of circumstances as the court understood them.16 This, then, was an opening for challengers to invite the court to “balance the equities” between the white community association seeking to enforce a covenant, and the black buyer seeking to move in. It was, in other words, a ­legal opening for the introduction of social science evidence on both the

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harms of overcrowding within the black community, and the vari­ous beliefs that presumably animated the covenant holders.17 Fi­nally, challengers could argue that enforcement of restrictive covenants v­ iolated the ­Fourteenth Amendment. As we have seen, the Supreme Court had found that racial zoning by a city was “state action” that denied both whites and blacks “equal protection” of the laws.18 By the mid-1940s, the court had clearly shown a willingness to limit and even erode Jim Crow laws through the F ­ ourteenth Amendment.19 Court decisions founded on equal protection doctrine threw out barriers to blacks on juries, forbade the interstate application of segregation to trains and buses, and required states that segregated higher education to nonetheless provide meaningful programs to eligible African-­Americans.20 As Berkeley Professor D. O. McGovney argued in a 1945 article, 21 the same “state action” princi­ple could be applied to the enforcement of restrictive covenants. Even though covenants ­were private agreements created without the involvement of any level of government, the pro­cess of bringing suit and securing an injunction from a judge to enforce the covenant did create state action and thus came ­under the ambit of the ­Fourteenth Amendment. Or so McGovney argued.22 The difficulty with this argument—­a nd it was a large difficulty—­was that it proved too much. As Erwin Chemerinsky has noted, if judicial enforcement of a restrictive covenant was state action, then “ultimately every­thing can be made state action. If any decision by a state court represents state action, then ultimately all private actions must comply with the Constitution. Anyone who believes that his or her rights have been ­violated can sue in state court. If the court dismisses the case ­because the state law does not forbid the violation, ­there is state action sustaining the infringement of the right.”23 Such a broad potential expansion of federal and judicial power would be momentous and deeply controversial. Still, the viability of this argument received a large boost when the Supreme Court deci­ded, in 1944, that the Texas Demo­cratic Party could not constitutionally exclude blacks from voting in its primary. 24 The defendants argued that the party was a private organ­i zation, beyond the reach of the ­Fourteenth Amendment; but the court rejected this view, holding that the primary system was so intertwined with the public, demo­cratic pro­cess that barring black participation would be functionally equivalent to state-­ sanctioned disenfranchisement. Racially restrictive covenants, unlike many forms of private discrimination, ­were almost entirely dependent upon state

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enforcement to be v­ iable, and had a collective, comprehensive character that strongly resembled public zoning. The analogies ­were ­there to be drawn. Over the next two years, Marshall and the NAACP team monitored the landscape of restrictive covenant disputes. Houston volunteered to serve largely pro bono in Hurd v. Hodge, a promising challenge in the District of Columbia that offered facts conducive to many of the arguments we have noted, and also provided an unusually direct pipeline to pos­si­ble Supreme Court review.25 Houston established a broad evidentiary rec­ord, and when the district court judge ruled to enforce the racial covenant, Houston appealed the case to the D.C. Cir­cuit Court of Appeals. He lost t­ here as well, 26 but by a vote of two to one, and the one was Judge Henry Edgerton, a highly respected member of the court who wrote a lengthy and wide-­ranging dissent.27 In Detroit, the NAACP became involved as counsel in a fairly “clean” covenants case, Sipes v. McGhee, in 1945. The defendants lost at the trial court, appealed, and lost again in a unan­i­mous verdict by the Michigan Supreme Court. Sipes became something of a dry run for the appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, with the NAACP organ­izing its amici and associated social science briefing. A ­ fter the Michigan high court decision, the question was simply ­whether Sipes was indeed the best case on which to push for Supreme Court review.28 The NAACP’s hand was forced by Shelley v. Kraemer, a case brought in St. Louis by a local community association with significant support from the city’s broader real estate community. The plaintiffs in Kraemer had a quite weak case. The restrictive covenant allegedly v­ iolated by an African-­ American ­couple, Mr. and Mrs. J. D. Shelley, covered only about two-­thirds of the homes in the neighborhood, and the Shelleys’ block had been racially integrated for de­cades. The Shelleys w ­ ere apparently unaware of the covenant’s existence when they bought their h ­ ouse, and it was unclear ­whether the covenant had even been properly included in the property’s chain of title. The Shelleys thus had a strong case u ­ nder standard servitudes law; they w ­ ere represented by a local real estate attorney, and indeed, at trial the state court found in their f­ avor and held the covenant unenforceable.29 But the community group appealed, and the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously reversed the lower court, in an opinion that showed more po­liti­cal solidarity with the goal of segregation than attention to the ­actual facts of the case. 30 Undaunted, the Shelleys’ l­ awyer filed a petition for review by the U.S. Supreme Court in early 1947. NAACP leaders had been completely uninvolved

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in the case, and feared that the opportunity for Supreme Court review of restrictive covenant law might be expended on this one, idiosyncratic case which, ­because of the weak Missouri opinion, could easily be deci­ded only on narrow, technical grounds. The NAACP deci­ded to promptly appeal the Michigan decision in Sipes, as well as Hurd v. Hodges and a companion case shepherded by Houston through the District of Columbia courts. The stratagem worked: the Supreme Court announced a few months ­later that it would review all four cases in the 1947–1948 term. It was now very likely that, however the court ruled, its decision would be broad rather than narrow. Of course, the NAACP’s strategy against racial covenants was not limited to the cases. As a very large membership organ­ization, it helped to focus the agitation of local chapters ­toward the issue of covenants—an easy task, since the severity of the dual housing market became more evident with each passing year—­with public meetings, news articles, and po­liti­cal pressure on local officials all sounding the theme that segregation by covenant was unjust and unworkable. 31 A series of books and essays appeared that critiqued the role of covenants in ghettoizing blacks, including Weaver’s The Negro Ghetto (noted earlier), ­People v. Property, a tract by Herman Long and Charles Johnson (the same Johnson who played a key role in the Chicago Commission on Race a quarter-­century before), and a series of essays by Charles Abrams (­later elaborated upon in Abrams’s book, Forbidden Neighbors). Further momentum for change was under way in the White House. President Truman had both a genuine interest in civil rights and an increasing sense of the po­liti­cal importance of Northern black voters. In December 1946 he had appointed what became known as the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, whose task was to “determine how governmental action might safeguard the civil rights of the p ­ eople.” As the Committee’s work proceeded in 1947, it became clear that several members favored substantive changes in federal policy, and the report the Committee issued in October 1947, To Secure T ­ hese Rights, went far beyond any prior federal document in proposing specific reforms: desegregation of the armed forces, federal action to protect voting rights, creation of civil rights oversight groups in the administrative and legislative branches, anti-­lynching legislation—­a nd action against restrictive covenants. 32 The Justice Department, well aware of the Committee’s views, announced a day ­later that the solicitor general would file an amicus brief on the side of the black petitioners in the covenant cases, and would seek to participate in the oral arguments.

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Briefs submitted by the NAACP and by an unusually large number of amici made the l­egal arguments we have discussed, 33 and offered an extensive array of social science materials. 34 Most of this focused on documenting the dual housing market, mea­sur­ing the degree and estimating the effects of overcrowding in black districts, and, notably, citing a survey conducted by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, in which three-­quarters of the (presumably white) real estate agents agreed that black buyers ­were generally “good economic risks” whose occupancy “did not depreciate property.”35 Three of nine justices recused themselves from the cases on the grounds that their own homes contained restrictive covenants; the remaining six did not tip their hands during the two days of oral arguments devoted to the four cases. The Supreme Court issued its unan­i­mous opinions in the four cases, led by Shelley v. Kraemer, on May 3, 1948. Chief Justice Vinson, writing for the court, reversed all of the lower court decisions on the broadest pos­si­ble grounds, holding that neither federal nor state courts could issue an injunction, based on a racially restrictive covenant, against a black buyer to prevent ­either the purchase or the occupancy of real estate. In the Missouri and Michigan cases, the court fully a­ dopted the argument that a court injunction constituted discriminatory state action violating the F ­ ourteenth Amendment. While a private agreement among parties to discriminate did not violate the Equal Protection Clause, no such party could rely on an instrument of the state to enforce the agreement when its under­lying purpose was to discriminate based on race. 36 African-­A merican leaders w ­ ere exuberant. “We Can ‘Live Anywhere’ High Court Rules” was the banner headline of Pittsburgh’s black paper, and that was a representative sentiment. 37 Shelley seemed like a turning point in moving away from racial caste in Amer­i­ca, a sense that was soon reinforced. In mid-­July, at its national convention in Philadelphia, the Demo­cratic Party ­adopted a strong civil rights plank calling for a string of reforms that built on To Secure ­These Rights (and made Hubert Humphrey a civil rights celebrity in the pro­cess). Two weeks ­later, President Truman issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces. Both events stoked an in­de­pen­dent presidential run by Strom Thurmond, which threatened to hopelessly divide the Demo­crats’ advantage in the South and cement the widely expected victory of Republican Thomas Dewey. But Thurmond’s run may have served mainly, in the end, only to solidify Truman’s racially progressive image. Thurmond

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received only about 4  ­percent of the national vote and carried only three states. Truman won a narrow victory over Dewey, and black votes in large Northern states provided the decisive margin in key electoral states. The crucial question remained, however: what impact would Shelley have on the ground? Leading up to the decision, advocates had tended to argue that since restrictive covenants w ­ ere a lynchpin of segregation, desegregation would follow if the covenants could not be enforced. Even the generally prophetic Myrdal predicted that the ghetto would be doomed as an institution if restrictive covenants could be counteracted. Other commentators, particularly in the wake of the ­actual decision, ­were more restrained. As the Washington Post editorialized, “The removal of a ­legal barrier to housing for Negroes did not end economic and social limitations. ‘No one need ­either hope or fear that the Supreme Court’s action ­will change the situation quickly. The Ghetto wall is merely breached, not demolished.’ ”38 In the de­cades since, fair housing and segregation scholars have tended to dismiss the importance of Shelley,39 and indeed, if one simply looks at levels of segregation over time, one can understand where this conclusion comes from. In all the cities where we know racial covenants w ­ ere widespread, the index of dissimilarity—­that is, the degree to which whites and blacks lived in dif­fer­ent neighborhoods—­barely changed between 1940 and 1960. This is, however, an overhasty judgment. The landscape of urban segregation almost everywhere in Amer­i­ca changed dramatically ­a fter 1948. The key to understanding Shelley’s impact is to keep in mind exactly what covenants did: they prevented individual property ­owners in white neighborhoods from cashing in on the dual housing market premium by selling to blacks. All other forms of discrimination remained ­legal—­a nd intact—­ after Shelley. Would-be black movers still had to find a willing buyer and had to take into account the reaction of white neighbors to their arrival. A prospective black home buyer could now venture into any neighborhood in the city and make an offer on a home for sale. But how many would? A ­great number of sellers and real estate agents—­prob­ably a large majority—­would turn them away, often making the nature of their discrimination clear, leaving the black home seeker with an unpleasant and humiliating experience. Finding a willing seller might prove completely fruitless if the buyer could not find a bank willing to finance a mortgage to a black buyer in an established white neighborhood. And in any outlying neighborhood or suburb, it would be difficult for the black home seeker to predict what neighbor-

Shelley v. Kraemer and the Rise of Blockbusting, 1940–1959  77

hood reaction, on a spectrum from indifference to violent hostility, might follow his or her arrival. However, if a black home seeker focused on neighborhoods close to the existing borders of the ghetto, he or she had a much better prospect of making a successful and relatively smooth transaction. In par­tic­u ­lar, if one focused on middle-­class neighborhoods within one or two blocks of the existing ghetto—­preferably but not necessarily where at least one black f­amily had already settled—­the dynamics w ­ ere quite dif­fer­ent. White ­owners on such blocks w ­ ere often ner­vous, wondering w ­ hether their block would soon undergo racial transition. They would sometimes be aware that, ­because of the dual housing market, the value of their home to a black buyer was higher than its value to a white buyer. ­Under such circumstances, inquiries from blacks would be not only expected but often welcomed. Moreover, black home seekers could pretty easily find brokers to help them with a “border” transaction. Brokers whose main business lay with the black community would see the border as a natu­ral part of their business, and “establishment” brokers in the white community could reasonably argue to their professional associations that the color line had been broken on a par­tic­u­lar block, and that serving all comers was consequently fair game for any broker. Up u ­ ntil 1948, ­these ­were the very sort of black moves that ­were prevented by restrictive covenants; the built-up neighborhoods most likely to go through the cumbersome pro­cess of creating covenants ­were middle-­ class, single-­family-­home neighborhoods close to existing ghettos. If we wish to see what effect Shelley had, ­these are the neighborhoods to study. In a 2014 article,40 we examined the pattern of demographic change in the two American cities where the borders of racially restrictive covenants are best documented: Chicago and St. Louis. U ­ ntil quite recently, the U.S. Census counted ­house­holds only once ­every ten years, but we can compare the racial makeup of urban neighborhoods in t­ hese two cities over the 1940 to 1960 period, and in the 1950 count, the census asked h ­ ouse­holds about 41 moves they made in 1949. We found that in the 1940–1949 period, almost no African-­A merican ­house­holds moved into neighborhoods fully covered by covenants, but in 1949–1950 they did so on a fairly large scale (see Figure 3.1). In Chicago, during the fifteen months before the 1950 census, over twenty-­ three thousand African-­A mericans moved into neighborhoods adjacent to the ghetto and covered by racially restrictive covenants. Over the next de­ cade, they ­were followed by another 340,000 black movers.42

78  The Core of the American Dilemma FIGURE 3.1.

Black “pioneers” on Chicago’s South Side, 1950. Each dot represents 25 black residents who moved to their present census tract from elsewhere in Cook County within previous year.

Chicago area of detail

Lake Michigan Areas 60% black or greater in 1940

Miles 0

1

Areas with racial covenants in 1940

“Pioneering” black movers, 1949-50

Note: Dot placement is random within census tracts. Data source: 1950 Decennial Census, Census Tracts, Chicago.

Appendix T ­ able  3.1 shows the dramatic change that occurred. Up u ­ ntil 1949, Chicago tracts that ­were covered by restrictive covenants had no tendency to gain black residents. In 1949–1950 black entry into the covenanted areas (compared to other migration) suddenly became statistically significant, and the strength of the relationship between the presence of a covenant and black entry ­rose in the 1950s and again in the 1960s. Throughout this period, the distance of a tract from existing black areas was the other very power­ful predictor of black entry. Figure 3.2 shows how this pattern played out in Chicago over the next twenty years: areas of black concentration expanded rapidly from 1950 to 1970, and closely followed the path of the old covenants.43

1950

5

Note: 1940 city bound­a ries shown.

0

Miles

Areas with racial covenants in 1940

80-100 40-79 0-39

Census tracts by % black

Patterns of black expansion in Chicago, 1950–1970.

FIGURE 3.2.

1960

1970

80  The Core of the American Dilemma

Similar patterns held in St. Louis, and although data on the precise geography of restrictive covenants has not yet been compiled for most cities, other data strongly suggests that Chicago and St. Louis are representative of broad patterns.44 In seven of the largest Northern and border cities,45 the rate of black migration into white tracts was three times as high in the 1950s as in the 1940s. In ­those cities, virtually all predominantly black tracts became more crowded in the 1940s, but nearly four-­fifths of ­these same tracts lost black population in the 1950s (see Appendix ­Table 3.2). In other words, something fundamental changed around 1950 that ended the “piling up” of black densities in the traditional ghetto, and eased the cost to blacks of moving into white neighborhoods. The direct implications of this shift show up in data on housing prices as well: rents and home prices in black districts ­rose sharply in the 1940s, when black demand was pent up inside tightly circumscribed areas, but went flat in the 1950s as black pioneers w ­ ere 46 fi­nally able to expand into white areas. Any story about the causal effect of Shelley upon black housing opportunities is complicated by a parallel development: white suburbanization.47 The dramatic postwar growth of suburbs provided a major new outlet for white demand. Past scholars who noted the expansion of black core neighborhoods have tended to assume that blacks w ­ ere increasingly able to enter inner-­city white neighborhoods not b ­ ecause Shelley facilitated block-­by-­ block expansion into white areas by black pioneers, but ­because whites ­were abandoning ­those very neighborhoods for the suburbs. It seems quite likely that the availability of growing suburban opportunities at least eased the transition wrought by Shelley. But the timing of demographic events, especially in Northern urban areas, is more consistent with a story in which Shelley plays the leading role in opening up inner-­city white neighborhoods.48 For example, the neighborhoods that blacks entered ­a fter 1949 had been generally gaining, rather than losing, population; and, indeed, in most major central cities the number of white h ­ ouse­holds grew or at least remained steady through the 1940s and 1950s (see Appendix Table 3.3). The black pioneers ­were never moving into a vacuum left by fleeing whites; instead, they w ­ ere competing for, and often paying a premium for, housing in stable white communities that happened to be very close to black districts and that, without enforceable restrictive covenants, had no effective defense against the pioneers—­short of harassment or vio­lence, which most middle-­class whites found unacceptable.

Shelley v. Kraemer and the Rise of Blockbusting, 1940–1959  81

As the incremental pattern of black expansion became ingrained, some real estate brokers became a­ dept in exploiting it.49 “Blockbusters” would identify small areas that seemed ripe for black entry—­a reas adjacent to existing black areas that had attractive housing and a low likelihood of violent re­sis­tance. In the classic scenario, the blockbuster would sow panic among the white o ­ wners, not only warning of imminent black entry, but also suggesting that a housing price collapse would accompany the entry. Worried whites would sell en masse, often at a significant discount from what had been the market value of their homes. The brokers would stockpile inventory, and then start to sell to blacks at a premium—­a premium they could command b ­ ecause of the continuing shortage of housing within the ghetto. A typical home might be worth $15,000 before blockbusting began, the white owner might sell for $12,000, and the black arrival might buy for $18,000—­producing a huge profit for the broker. In a short time, the block would have under­gone a complete shift from white to black, and the mechanism could advance to the next block. Of course, such a pro­cess had the incidental effect of reinforcing white beliefs that the entry of blacks was a harbinger of collapsing prices and neighborhood decline. ­There are scores of documented cases where the blockbusting scenario played out just as we describe. But we doubt that blockbusting was the predominant mode of neighborhood change during the 1950s. Analyses of census data show that in many “transitional” neighborhoods, blacks and whites made very similar estimates of the value of their homes, and whites continued to buy homes in many neighborhoods for years ­a fter black entry had begun (see Chapters 5 and 8). In other words, the expansion of black districts was often a more gradual pro­cess than the blockbusting story suggests, with some honest real estate brokers involved and with both blacks and whites having reasonably good information about under­lying home values. We cannot say which pattern was more typical—to our knowledge, no one has done the painstaking work of examining title rec­ords in transitional neighborhoods on a large enough scale to draw clear conclusions. But ­there is no question that anecdotes about the worst form of blockbusting became very power­ful urban legends in the 1950s, and helped shape, as the de­cade wore on, more negative white views about the central city. ­There is also no question that rigidly bounded black ghettos transformed into rapidly expanding black districts during the years a­ fter Shelley. Expansion was fueled by continued heavy migration from the rural South to the

82  The Core of the American Dilemma

urban North. 50 While black populations in a typical Northern city increased by some 40 ­percent during the 1950s, the portion of the city covered by “predominantly black districts” in t­ hose cities nearly doubled. Overcrowding in black housing dropped sharply, and black housing throughout the North became noticeably more affordable. The number of black families owning their own homes increased by over one million between 1950 and 1960, and the proportion of urban black h ­ ouse­holds who were homeowners rose by more than half between 1950 and 1970. 51 Rather than the meta­phorical wall between black and white areas that characterized the 1940s, by 1960 one could identify in nearly all cities a steadily moving half-­mile band of transitional neighborhoods, continually pushing away from the core of the central city. While the new dynamic of rapidly expanding black districts provided unpre­ce­dented opportunities for middle-­class blacks to buy attractive single-­ family homes in leafy neighborhoods, this very change meant that economic segregation within the black community increased. Around the time of Shelley (i.e., in the 1950 census, the closest detailed mea­sure­ments we can obtain) the degree of segregation between black families with incomes below $3,000 and above $3,000 was quite low—­significantly lower than it was within the white community. 52 This ­isn’t surprising: when the entire black population is concentrated in a relatively small ghetto dominated by large buildings and small apartments, opportunities for the ­middle class to spatially distance itself are severely limited. By 1960, mea­sured economic segregation within the black community in the seven metro areas we examined had doubled— an extraordinary jump in a single de­cade, but one consistent with the sudden ability of middle-­class blacks to move into more attractive neighborhoods that followed in the wake of Shelley. Often the new class stratification among blacks was accompanied by a color stratification, with light-­ skinned blacks more likely to pioneer and more likely to predominate in the emerging African-­A merican middle-­class districts. 53 It would not be accurate to say that poor blacks ­were geo­graph­i­cally isolated from all other blacks by 1960, but the combination of continuing racial segregation and a newly expanding class segregation meant that poor and working-­class blacks w ­ ere increasingly isolated, not just from the white population but also from middle-­ class blacks. We s­ hall expand upon the ominous implications of this development in Chapters 4 and 5.

4

Public Housing, Federal Urban Policies, and the Underclass, 1934–1962

In retrospect, I believe that the compromises that w ­ ere made in the 1937 debate on the public housing mea­sure lastingly impaired it and ­will contribute to its demise. —­Charles Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors

Racial segregation . . . ​was a nationwide proj­ect of the federal government in the twentieth ­century, designed and implemented by its most liberal leaders. —­R ichard Rothstein, The Color of Law

P

erhaps the most rancorous discourse in the fair housing realm concerns the role of government-­a ssisted housing. As a concept, public housing was widely hailed as the incarnation of progressive public policy in the 1930s and 1940s. By the 1960s, it had become the most reviled of all government programs, hated by both left and right, albeit for very dif­fer­ent reasons. Subsidized federal mortgage insurance, which also got under way in the 1930s, similarly enjoyed a heyday of wide support and popularity. As the racial structure of FHA policies came to light, however, it became deeply enmeshed in controversy by the 1960s. In his popu­lar 2017 book, The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein claimed that government efforts to promote racial segregation ­were the driving force b ­ ehind the ghettoization of African-­A mericans. Rothstein never comprehensively analyzes the rise of segregation, but relies heavi­ly on highly selective anecdotes and broad assertions. Scholars like Alison Shertzer, John Logan, Randy Walsh, Weiwei Zhang, and Miao David Chunyu, who have published careful and impor­tant work on the rise of ghettos over the past few years, have consistently come to quite dif­fer­ent conclusions. As we have noted, it is more than a l­ittle absurd to claim that federal housing policies 83

84  The Core of the American Dilemma

caused housing segregation, since federal intervention in local housing markets was non­ex­is­tent before the 1930s, and by 1930, black segregation was firmly established throughout urban Amer­i­ca. It is more accurate to say that federal housing administrators ­were followers, rather than leaders, on racial housing practices, and this often flowed, especially in the public housing realm, from the decentralized nature of the programs. Yet the fact of government intervention gave added structure and legitimacy to some of the racial practices that helped form the ghetto, and at impor­tant junctures, government policy (sometimes unintentionally) made par­tic­u­lar prob­lems worse.12 The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the federal role in racialized housing during the three de­cades from the New Deal into the late 1960s. By the end of this period, strong efforts at reform ­were under way, and policies ­a fter 1970 looked very dif­fer­ent from ­those before (Chapter 15). Fundamentally, we find that t­ hese programs ­were sufficiently small and marginal in their effects that they did not shape the key points of evolution in our main story; Shelley, for example, had far more impact on the evolution of segregation than did e­ ither public housing or the FHA. But federal interventions are an impor­tant part of the story, especially when we come to examine the pos­si­ble ways policy ­today can move ­matters forward. The ­Great Depression brought a near-­collapse of the American financial system (including the home finance system) and widespread foreclosures and homelessness. ­These ­were all central concerns of the New Deal, but ­there was significant congressional opposition to direct federal involvement in housing production. In the early New Deal, federal initiatives related to housing focused on financial system reform and federal home insurance. In the mid-1930s, the Public Works Administration u ­ nder Harold Ickes built some public housing along with its infrastructure proj­ects, but the total number of units was small and a federal court in 1936 stymied Ickes’ top-­ down approach by limiting the ability of the federal government to use its eminent domain powers for housing development, which the court held was a state and local function. 3 By 1937, however, a co­a li­tion of l­abor, big-­city mayors, and a freestanding public housing movement w ­ ere strongly lobbying the federal government to support locally developed public housing, and one of the New Deal’s most effective senators, Robert Wagner, agreed to fight for a public housing bill.

Public Housing, Federal Urban Policies, and the Underclass, 1934–1962  85

Even in a 1937 Congress that had Demo­cratic supermajorities, public housing was not an easy sell. Advocates had to contend with the vehement opposition of real estate developers and builders, who portrayed public housing as the incarnation of socialism and a threat (rather than a stimulus) to the struggling construction sector. Franklin Roo­se­velt’s support was tepid; at most, he was willing to support modest initial funding. The result was the Housing Act of 1937,4 a characteristically decentralized approach to social policy that reflected the multiple poles of po­liti­cal power in the United States. U ­ nder the act, states could empower local officials to create local housing development authorities, whose jurisdiction usually coincided with the bound­a ries of major cities, and whose leadership was usually appointed by some combination of city and state officials. The housing authorities had the ability to buy land (through eminent domain proceedings, if necessary), clear it, and build and operate new housing that met some minimum set of federal standards. Federal aid came in three forms. First, the federal government could approve small grants to assist with site acquisition and construction. 5 Second and perhaps more importantly, the authority had the ability to issue “mortgage revenue bonds.” The interest on ­these bonds, like other bonds issued by state and local governments, was exempt from federal income tax; this made them very attractive to high-­income investors, and meant that the interest on the bonds would be substantially below market rate. Third, for most proj­ects, federal authorities committed to make payments during the early life of the proj­ect, ostensibly to lower rents but in effect covering the cost of paying off the bonds used to construct the housing. ­These arrangements meant that local housing authorities—­which sprouted up in major cities in the 1930s, and would eventually number some two thousand nationwide—­could build public housing at minimal local up-­front expense. This was particularly attractive during the Depression, when local governments w ­ ere often trying to stimulate economic activity but w ­ ere chronically short of revenue. It also made economic sense, since housing was a capital investment that would return benefits over many years. Rents would cover operating costs and repair reserves which, in new housing, would presumably be relatively low, thus making it pos­si­ble to include the very poor as well as working-­class tenants. Many of the leaders of the public housing movement ­were racially and socially progressive.6 They believed that public housing would serve as a

86  The Core of the American Dilemma

model for the private sector in design, utility, and incorporation of community facilities, and they generally favored racially integrated housing. But from the start, ­there ­were impor­tant countervailing influences that pushed public housing t­ oward segregation. First and most impor­tant was local control. Housing authorities w ­ ere legally distinct entities, not departments within cities or counties, but their man­ag­ers ­were generally appointed by local politicians. To actually get anything done, they generally needed the cooperation of city councils for zoning changes, operating funds, and other ­matters. And local aldermen or council leaders would often strongly oppose housing developments that broke with established racial bound­a ries and practices. Being effective in other dimensions usually required housing authorities to defer to po­liti­cal pressures on ­matters of race. One way to serve the poor while avoiding integration controversies was to disproportionately concentrate public housing in African-­A merican neighborhoods. Other considerations reinforced this strategy. The ghettoization of blacks in the 1920s and early 1930s, combined with the heavy effects of the ­Great Depression, meant that the worst housing conditions in any city tended to be concentrated in black areas. Many observers reported truly appalling conditions reminiscent of the slum conditions Jacob Riis had documented in late-­nineteenth-­century New York. African-­A merican leaders in the 1920s had often called for government clearance and construction of new housing in black areas, pointing out the housing dilemma created by segregation and sometimes even suggesting public housing development as a quid pro quo for segregation.7 It was not hard for progressive public housing advocates to persuade themselves that replacing slums with public housing in the most dilapidated portions of black ghettos was both a po­liti­cal path of least re­sis­tance and an enlightened social policy. Partly ­because of Roo­se­velt’s strictures, public housing (like Social Security) started out small. The modest level of federal funding, along with the ­legal and logistical steps necessary to get t­ hings rolling, meant that only 117,000 units ­were built before the outbreak of World War II.8 During the war, t­ here was a new, far more massive and far more centralized housing initiative: several defense-­related offices in the federal government’s war mobilization effort undertook to provide emergency housing for vast numbers of workers who relocated to industrial centers to assist in war production. From 1942 to 1945, t­ hese agencies threw up nearly one million units of temporary housing, and though this housing was often built in open

Public Housing, Federal Urban Policies, and the Underclass, 1934–1962  87

areas outside established ghettos, it too was generally segregated by design. Provisions in the congressional acts that authorized the housing provided that when the war was over, the government housing could not compete with the private market, so from 1945 to 1947 federal agencies dutifully destroyed most of the new housing. Given the poor, quasi-­military design of the housing (the Quonset hut was the default), this was not as epic a loss as it might at first appear, but it was nonetheless a striking example of the po­liti­cal bound­ aries that suffused government housing production. Around the country, many clusters of black workers who had lived in the government housing near factories in suburban areas managed to relocate en masse into nearby private units, creating small concentrations of blacks in “outlying” areas that would play an impor­t ant role in racial housing dynamics in the 1960s and 1970s. Housing was very high on the national agenda in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The slowdown of construction during the war, the migration of millions of ­house­holds to urban areas, and the widespread “forced savings” during the war (when incomes ­rose sharply but the availability of consumer goods was quite limited) all contributed to severe housing shortages ­after the war. Despite the evident demand, it was widely thought that federal subsidies for housing construction ­were impor­tant, ­because private industry was still skittish from the Depression and a postwar recession was widely anticipated.9 Public housing construction ­under the 1937 Act resumed, and Congress passed a major expansion of public housing in 1949. The 1949 Act retained the basic framework and subsidies of the 1937 Act, but it enabled local authorities to move forward on a larger scale; over the next twenty years, the public housing stock would rise to about eight hundred thousand units, though this still represented only about 1.2 ­percent of the nation’s housing units in 1968. The 1949 Act also advanced the idea of urban renewal, and the pairing of slum clearance with new construction—­a subject that co-­sponsor Senator Robert Taft spoke about with genuine fervor. One of the most power­ful ideas about cities in the late-­nineteenth ­century and first half of the twentieth ­century had been the notion that slum housing was analogous to a bacterial contagion. In some ways, this had been literally true: eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century cities usually had such poor sanitation mechanisms, and such dense living conditions, that diseases like cholera and plague spread quickly—­especially in poorer districts—­a nd mortality rates w ­ ere consistently higher in urban areas than

88  The Core of the American Dilemma

rural ones. With the growing understanding of infectious disease around the turn of the twentieth c­ entury, and the concurrent development of integrated plumbing, ­water supply, and sewer systems, the connection between disease and slum housing declined. But many of ­those concerned about the conditions of cities still believed in the late 1940s that dilapidated housing—­ “slums”—­had a contagion-­l ike effect; they impaired the development of the ­people who lived in them, and deterioration would tend to spread to adjacent neighborhoods. Indeed, the idea of the slum contagion was itself an impor­ tant ideological force ­behind efforts to segregate black neighborhoods, and to create l­egal or physical barriers between presumably dilapidated black areas and nearby white ones. Of course, ­there was something to the “slum contagion” idea. A more con­ temporary version of the idea, the “broken win­dows” theory,10 contends that s­imple signs of neighborhood deterioration, such as an abandoned building with broken win­dows, produce higher levels of crime and other types of social disorder. T ­ here ­isn’t much doubt that decent housing has a conversely positive effect upon, for example, ­children’s health, or that a dilapidated building has a negative effect upon housing values (including rents) in nearby buildings, thus making it easier for a domino pattern of deterioration to occur. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, this commonsense notion was carried to a much greater extreme; old housing was often assumed to be bad, and new housing to be better. From 1949 to the early 1960s, public housing and urban renewal programs fueled the de­mo­li­tion of several hundred thousand older housing units. Some very functional neighborhoods ­were demolished in the cause of “urban renewal,” and the sterility of much of the high-­rise housing often built to replace ­these neighborhoods owed something to the “contagion” worldview. As the second wave of public housing progressed, two serious structural prob­lems arose. The first of ­these was a rising concentration of poverty within public housing. The question of who public housing should serve—­ working-­class ­people needing a stable place to regroup before moving to private housing, or jobless ­house­holds that would likely remain for the long term—­had always been an issue, but Depression-­and World War II–­era public housing had served both groups. By the 1950s, however, working families ­were disappearing from public housing. This was partly ­because of the surge of higher-­quality construction in the private market, and the boom in industrial wages; blue-­collar workers could increasingly afford

Public Housing, Federal Urban Policies, and the Underclass, 1934–1962  89

better-­quality housing than public developments offered. But it was also due to federal requirements, introduced in the 1949 Act, that actually made it harder for local authorities to rent to families that could afford decent housing in the private market. T ­ hese initially subtle shifts had snowball effects. As the ratio of “poor” to “working-­class” ­house­holds increased, a sort of economic “tipping” pushed away still more working-­class ­house­holds, and the concentration of poverty in many proj­ects became extreme. Social controls declined, and the “slum” conditions reformers wanted to eliminate increasingly surfaced within the proj­ects themselves. Tendencies t­ oward social disorder and the formation of teenage gangs in public housing w ­ ere aggravated by design choices that favored concentrating large families—­a nd large numbers of teen­agers—in family-­based public housing. Rising be­hav­ior prob­lems within the proj­ects ­were linked to a second structural prob­lem: public housing units deteriorated more quickly than planners had anticipated, and operating and repair costs steadily grew. Lower rent collections and higher costs meant that the basic economic model of public housing was breaking down. By the mid-1960s, many public housing authorities around the country w ­ ere in serious fiscal straits, and this too made it likely that the programs would be overhauled. This leaves us with our central questions: How segregated was public housing, and what effect did it have upon broader housing segregation patterns? For all the discussion t­ hese questions have engendered, t­ here is surprisingly ­little hard data available to answer them. The first comprehensive national census of public housing, and the racial makeup of its tenants and the surrounding neighborhoods, did not occur ­until 1977, well ­a fter some efforts to desegregate public housing ­were under way. Constructing a picture of how public housing affected racial dynamics in the 1950s and 1960s thus requires a large mea­sure of conjecture. We do have hard data from this period for one major city—­Philadelphia— and ­Table 4.1 and Figure 4.1 give us some insight into its racial character. Philadelphia’s early public housing was spread widely across the city, but tenants generally came from neighborhoods close to the housing, and thus the level of segregation in public housing closely approximated segregation in the private market. A ­ fter 1950, a rising share of public housing was tied to urban renewal proj­ects in the city’s black neighborhoods on the west and south sides. At one and the same time, the black share of public housing tenants ­rose sharply while the housing authority increasingly made a point

90  The Core of the American Dilemma ­TABLE 4 .1   Racial occupancy and segregation in Philadelphia public housing for

families, 1952–1968 Black / non-­black index of dissimilarity

Year

% public housing tenants who w ­ ere African-­A merican

% public housing sites with all-­black occupancy*

Public housing

Citywide**

1952 1956 1960 1964 1966 1968

32% 50% 65% 60% 69% 75%

20% 39% 53% 58% 63% 61%

.88 .87 .89 .79 .70 .64

.89 .87 .87 .87 .82 .82

Data source: Authors’ calculations based on data on Philadelphia public housing published in Bauman, John F., Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920–1974 (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1987), 172–173. Notes: We calculate the public housing index of dissimilarity using project-­level data on occupancy by race. *Over 95% black occupancy **From nearest decennial census; calculated by block for 1950, 1960, and by tract for 1970

of avoiding discriminatory tenant assignments. Overall black / white dissimilarity declined in public housing to levels well below ­those prevailing in the private market, but this dissimilarity blurred two patterns: a majority of developments ­were nearly all black, while the rest ­were highly integrated. ­Segregation patterns apparently varied substantially across the United States. New York City, which had by far the largest public housing program in the nation (about 15 ­percent of the total national stock), did not pursue discriminatory tenant assignment policies, and deliberately maintained economic diversity within its proj­ects (it could do this partly b ­ ecause state and city subsidies gave it more operating freedom from federal policies). New York public housing was a rare case when a program was sufficiently large and sufficiently integrated to prob­ably have some pro-­integrative effect on the larger housing market, though so far as we know no one has carefully examined this possibility. Chicago represented the other extreme. Despite the racial progressivism of many of the Chicago Housing Authority’s early leaders, local po­liti­cal pressures and some early missteps had produced, by the mid-1950s, an intensely segregated program that only became worse during the 1960s. Chicago produced one of the most iconic national images of public housing: a

Public Housing, Federal Urban Policies, and the Underclass, 1934–1962  91 FIGURE 4.1.

Race and public housing siting in Philadelphia. Public housing built in Philadelphia was increasingly concentrated in black or “changing” neighborhoods after 1950. Housing built after 1950 Housing built before 1949

% black in 1950 80-100 60-79 40-59 20-39 0-19 Miles 0

5

Data source: John F. Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920–1974 (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1987), 172–173.

two-­a nd-­a-­half-­mile line of harsh, uniform, high-­rise public proj­ects with 100 ­percent black occupancy stretching along the east side of the twelve-­lane Dan Ryan Freeway on Chicago’s South Side, with a series of predominantly ­white ethnic neighborhoods lining the west side of the freeway. In Chicago, the “­family” public housing program was almost all occupied by African-­ Americans; “el­derly” public housing was predominantly white, and the neighborhood locations of each type of housing consistently underlined this difference. From what we can infer from the 1977 public housing census, and from qualitative accounts of other housing authorities, neither Chicago nor New

92  The Core of the American Dilemma

York w ­ as typical of the big-­city public housing experience. Philadelphia prob­ ably better captures general big-­city patterns outside of the South; public housing was often a ­little bit less segregated than the private market, but with f­ amily proj­ects over time experiencing both racial and poverty concentrations that w ­ ere self-­reinforcing. In smaller cities, and in the large number of housing authorities in major suburbs, the picture was more sanguine; public housing in t­ hose places tended to exist on a smaller scale and in more eco­nom­ically mixed neighborhoods. Smaller, more scattered sites lent themselves to more racially progressive policies in both site se­lection and tenant assignment. Black/­white segregation was often far below levels prevailing in the private market. How, then, did public housing affect the evolving racial dynamics of urban Amer­i­ca during its first thirty years? It may have had a pro-­integrative effect in some places, like New York City, or in the smaller cities and larger suburbs where public housing often brought black residents into white neighborhoods—­but this must remain mere conjecture ­until the research is done. What we can claim more confidently is that in Chicago, and prob­ably in many other major cities, public housing reinforced a trend inaugurated by Shelley: the appearance of sharply demarcated economic zones within black communities. ­A fter Shelley, middle-­class African-­A mericans ­were able to enter adjacent white neighborhoods in large numbers, and ­either buy single-­ family homes or rent nicer, less crowded apartments than they could get in the ghetto (Chapter 3). This pro­cess, repeated many times, produced racial transition on a massive scale, but also geo­graph­i­cally separated the black ­middle class from lower-­income families left b ­ ehind in the ghetto. The pro­ cess of slum clearance and public housing construction focused on the older ghetto neighborhoods, thus concentrating the poor further in ­those neighborhoods and reinforcing economic segregation within the black community. House­holds displaced by urban renewal who had the wherewithal to follow the black ­middle class into border neighborhoods would often do so, while t­ hose too poor to follow would often move into public housing. Though in neither case was this an intentional result of public policy, Shelley and public housing development worked in tandem to concentrate poverty within the black community and contribute to the formation of a segregated black underclass. Public housing rarely created ghettos, but it prob­a bly contributed mightily to one of segregation’s most intractable artifacts.

Public Housing, Federal Urban Policies, and the Underclass, 1934–1962  93

HOLC and the Early FHA One of the most frightening aspects of the ­Great Depression was its effect on real estate markets. With unemployment rates reaching 25 ­percent by 1933, millions of homeowners could not meet payments on their home mortgages. Dramatic declines in real estate prices—­even more serious than ­those in the 2007–2010 ­Great Recession—­meant that millions more homeowners could not even pay off their mortgages by selling their homes. Roughly two million ­house­holds ­were in danger of foreclosure in 1933. Most experts agreed that, on top of the Depression crisis, the home mortgage market suffered from some basic systemic prob­lems. Most of the money that banks and savings-­a nd-­loan associations (S&Ls) had available for lending came from checking or savings accounts that depositors could withdraw in short order. Making long-­term loans, like home mortgages, created liquidity prob­lems and other risks. As a result, conventional mortgage loans up through the 1920s ­were very conservative: home buyers could secure financing for perhaps half the purchase price of a home, but the entire principal would be due in a “balloon payment” ­a fter five to eight years. This tended to limit home buying to ­house­holds that could afford a very large down payment and had a reasonable prospect of saving enough to pay the mortgage debt in relatively short order. Setting aside ­family farms, urban homeownership rates ­were generally ­under 40 ­percent even before the Depression began. Of course, African-­ A merican urban homeownership was even less common. Blacks had median incomes that ­were typically half (or less) of the white median in the same cities, and the ghettos ­were usually concentrated in areas of older, dense housing, with relatively few single-­family homes. Even for t­ hose black ­house­holds that could afford a home and could find one, securing a mortgage loan from a conventional lender (i.e., a commercial bank or S&L) was likely to be more difficult. ­Those who could not get conventional financing had a few other options. They could save long enough to buy a h ­ ouse outright (self-­finance). They might secure a mortgage loan from the home seller—­for example, make a 50 ­percent down payment and then pay the balance, u ­ nder a mortgage agreement, over several years. Or, if particularly desperate, they might purchase u ­ nder an installment land contract. An “installment” buyer had the ­legal status of a renter with an option to buy. A ­ fter making a down payment and moving into a home, the buyer

94  The Core of the American Dilemma

made installment payments—­similar to rent payments, but somewhat higher. But if the buyer missed or fell ­behind on payments, the buyer did not have protection of foreclosure laws and could be simply evicted by the owner, with the complete loss of all payments made up to that point. As ghettos took shape, African-­A mericans faced additional hurdles in buying homes outside established ghetto bound­a ries. As we have seen, real estate associations strongly pressured their members not to show blacks homes in white areas; banks w ­ ere ­under similar pressures not to extend mortgages that could “destabilize” the emerging, segregated patterns. But while ­there is ­little doubt among scholars that this type of credit discrimination was widespread, the research to document its extent has remained largely undone. With the advent of the G ­ reat Depression, the weaknesses of the broad home mortgage market became all the more evident. Jobless ­house­holders could not pay off large balloon payments, and bank foreclosures soared in the early 1930s. Foreclosure sales swamped an already soft real estate market, so home prices fell sharply; homeowners could not readily sell their homes to avoid foreclosure, and banks holding foreclosed properties found their net worth dissolving. Bank customers perceiving their banks’ vulnerability pulled out deposits, and thus e­ very further sign of national economic decline precipitated greater instability among banks and S&Ls. Early on in the Depression, it was obvious to many observers that broad institutional reform of mortgage markets was impor­tant to both short-­term and long-­ term financial stability, and many thought the federal government was well placed to address it. The United States did not face the liquidity risks of a private institution, and the government routinely sold thirty-­year bonds on the open market. Over a longer time frame, home values ­were almost certain to rise, which lowered the risk of financing a larger fraction of a home purchase. If the government could find a way to facilitate the broad introduction of long-­term, self-­a mortizing mortgages, it would both ease the monthly payments of existing homeowners and greatly facilitate the ability of renters to enter the owner market. Homeownership rates would increase, foreclosure risks would go down, and the construction industry would have a power­ful new source of demand. The Hoover Administration took some tentative steps t­ oward promoting such mortgages, but the efforts w ­ ere too small to have a noticeable effect. The Roo­se­velt Administration proposed something much larger and more

Public Housing, Federal Urban Policies, and the Underclass, 1934–1962  95

aggressive, and Congress in 1933 created the Home O ­ wners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). A quasi-­independent agency, HOLC could issue bonds guaranteed by federal credit, and use the proceeds to buy troubled loans from private financial institutions. HOLC could then refinance the loans with longer-­term, self-­a mortizing mortgage loans with rates (tied to the bonds) that w ­ ere generally below private market rates. Banks and S&Ls supported this public intervention, at least as a short-­term expedient, ­because it allowed them to shed many of their most problematic loans, and tens of thousands of homeowners ­were saved from foreclosure. By most mea­sures, HOLC was an immediate and large-­scale success: in 1934, it approved nearly 2.3 million mortgages—­more than three times the volume generated by all private banks and S&Ls put together.11 Another early New Deal agency, the Civil Works Administration (CWA), launched at the beginning of 1934 the first comprehensive survey of homes and home finance ever undertaken by the federal government. The agency’s mission was both to provide employment for the unemployed and to generate information useful for other agencies—in this case, HOLC and other emerging New Deal agencies, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation— that would regulate banking and mortgage activities. The survey aimed to cover at least one city or metropolitan area in each state, and (presumably to economize) excluded the very largest urban areas (Cleveland was the largest city included). It selected ­every tenth block (in large cities) or seventh block (in smaller cities) and, within ­these blocks, conducted door-­to-­door interviews of ­house­holds on income levels, sources of income, and wide-­ranging ­matters concerning housing, including owner­ship and methods of purchase and finance. ­Table 4.2 summarizes the survey’s findings on home owner­ship and home finance for whites and blacks in three of the largest cities CWA studied: Atlanta, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. African-­Americans had far lower average incomes than whites, and w ­ ere, ­because of ghettoization, more concentrated in denser neighborhoods closer to urban cores. Nonetheless, even in 1934, homeownership rates among blacks ­were significant, ranging from 10 ­percent in Cleveland to 23  ­percent in Indianapolis. More strikingly, black homeowners often had conventional mortgages. In Cleveland, for example, two-­ thirds of black o ­ wners had outstanding mortgages—­the same rate as whites—­a nd only 8 ­percent of ­these mortgages ­were from individuals (compared with 7 ­percent for whites). Only 4 ­percent of black ­owners reported

96  The Core of the American Dilemma ­TABLE 4 . 2   Patterns of owner­ship and home finance in three major cities,

January 1934 Atlanta

Cleveland White

Indianapolis

Indicator

White Black

Total h ­ ouse­holds surveyed %O ­ wners % ­Owners with installment contract % ­Owners with mortgage % Mortgages with individuals % Mortgages with HOLC

8,842 39%