“Racial segregation in housing … was a nationwide project of the federal government … designed and implemented by its most liberal leaders … racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live ….The policy was so systematic and forceful that its effects endure to the present time.” These quotes are from the preface to The Color of Law, a new book by Richard Rothstein. The general ignorance of the history of de jure (by law) segregation is so profound that Chief Justice John Roberts could get away with saying that since residential segregation “is a product not of state action but of private choices, it does not have constitutional implications.” Rothstein also shows how racist housing laws contributed to segregated education, income differentials, the large differences in wealth between Blacks and whites, and stymied working class unity.
The diehard racist Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1912. He oversaw total segregation in every area of work, from bathrooms to cafeterias. The first federal housing was built for defense workers during World War I, exclusively for white families. Black workers were forced into segregated slums often far from their jobs.
Local municipalities began to develop zoning laws that required homes with lots that would make them unaffordable to most Black workers. President Hoover’s advisor, Frederick Olmsted, stated, “ in any housing developments which are to succeed…racial divisions…have to be taken into account”.
Zoning laws, could not completely exclude middle or higher income Blacks. This was tackled by exclusionary lending practices. Since the Russian Revolution, Washington was terrified of the attraction that communism might hold and sought to encourage single home ownerships as a way to give white families a stake in capitalism. In 1933, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) began easing terms for mortgages. To exclude Blacks, HOLC drew color-coded maps of every urban area to define areas of “risk”, which were colored red and included all Black areas. This is the origin of the term redlining. President Roosevelt’s New Deal housing programs were all segregated by race or excluded Blacks altogether.
The New Deal’s Public Works Administration (PWA) strove to increase housing for middle and working class, but its housing was required to follow “neighborhood composition,” thereby maintaining patterns of separation. In 1937, the U.S. Housing Authority, which continued the same policies, replaced the PWA; in 1940 The Lanham Act created defense-worker housing only for whites.
The Federal Housing Authority (FHA), created in 1934, required absolute racial segregation. The FHA also discouraged loans in urban neighborhoods and encouraged them in newly built suburbs. Blacks could only get private home loans, with higher interest rates.
Post WW II the FHA permitted local authorities to continue building segregated public housing. Veterans Administration (VA) loan appraisers were financing most housing by 1948, all in segregated developments. Only 2 percent of purchasers were Black GIs. In 1954 the Eisenhower administration declared that the invalidation of “separate but equal” in education did not apply to housing. As late as 1984, 10 million federally funded housing tenants in 47 metropolitan areas were almost all segregated by race and every predominantly white project had superior facilities, amenities, and services. In 1973, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that the “housing industry, aided and abetted by government, must bear the primary responsibility for the legacy of segregated housing.”
The author also discusses how Black neighborhoods were nearer to industrial and polluted areas, and had inferior schools and transportation. Rothstein decries the long-term segregation and inequality that has been created, seeing it both as a moral evil and a loss for the society as a whole. He proposes some solutions, but acknowledges they are unlikely to be enacted.
What the author fails to consider is that the American capitalist system depends on racism for survival. The wage differentials alone between Black workers and White workers add up to about half of total corporate profits. Not only do lower wages and services save huge amounts of money, but segregation insures that Blacks and whites will live and be educated apart, keeping racism alive. Racism divides working people from each other. When Black workers earn lower wages and have higher unemployment, wages and working conditions for all suffer. When imperialist wars are to be fought racism is needed to brand the enemy as fearsome and inferior. When increased rebellion looms as conditions worsen, fascist repression relies on racism and nationalism.
We in the Progressive Labor Party see fighting racism, nationalism and identity politics as essential to building a movement that can wipe the scourge of capitalism from the earth and build an international communist movement. Living together would help us fight together for an egalitarian communist world.