Keeping Races in Their Places

The Dividing Lines That Shaped the American City

Anthony Orlando

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000517392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Real Estate
• Index: Business

"A book perfect for this moment" –Katherine M. O'Regan, Former Assistant Secretary, US Department of Housing and Urban Development

More than fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, American cities remain divided along the very same lines that this landmark legislation explicitly outlawed. Keeping Races in Their Places tells the story of these lines—who drew them, why they drew them, where they drew them, and how they continue to circumscribe residents' opportunities to this very day.

Weaving together sophisticated statistical analyses of more than a century's worth of data with an engaging, accessible narrative that brings the numbers to life, Keeping Races in Their Places exposes the entrenched effects of redlining on American communities. This one-of-a-kind contribution to the real estate and urban economics literature applies the author's original geographic information systems analyses to historical maps to reveal redlining's causal role in shaping today's cities.

Spanning the era from the Great Migration to the Great Recession, Keeping Races in Their Places uncovers the roots of the Black-white wealth gap, the subprime lending crisis, and today's lack of affordable housing in maps created by banks nearly a century ago. Most of all, it offers hope that with the latest scholarly tools we can pinpoint how things went wrong—and what we must do to make them right.

1

The Great Migration

Welcome to the Promised Land

DOI: 10.1201/b22708-1

They would gather at home, in church, in juke joints and citrus groves and nervous car rides, and they would talk. “Must we remain?” they would say. “Where can we go?”²

That was the question—where and how. Without getting noticed, without getting stopped. It was dangerous. Often, they were missing one or more members. Beaten, perhaps, or killed for no good reason. That only underscored the need to get out—and the challenge of escaping.

They were locked in a caste system, a valuable hierarchy that thrived on cheap labor and sick superiority. It was a bloody business, keeping races in their places, and it created the worst of all human paradoxes: They were both too expendable to be safe and too profitable to be set free.

It could have gone differently after the Civil War. And for a while, it did.

From the moment of their defeat, the Southern states resisted any attempt to break the chains of slavery. Under the approving eye of President Andrew Johnson, they passed the “Black Codes,” a series of laws that proscribed nearly every freedom that emancipation should have conferred: Freedom to peaceably assemble. Freedom to keep and bear arms. Freedom to be tried by an impartial jury. Freedom to vote. At the beginning of each year, Black men were required to sign a contract with a White employer. If they didn’t, they would be forced to work for free—and often, their children would too. Involuntary labor, they called it. Not slavery.³

What, one wonders, had all the fighting been for?

Thus began the experiment known as Reconstruction. For ten extraordinary years, Congress imposed military rule on the conquered rebel states and required them to hold new elections where Black men were allowed to vote—and then to adopt new constitutions that guaranteed this right for all future elections as well.⁴

Deprived of democracy for so long, Black Americans wasted no time in embracing their civic duties. Throughout the South, they gathered in great numbers to discuss how best to exercise their newly won citizenship. They threw their support behind universal male suffrage, and they celebrated “en masse” when it was achieved with the Fifteenth Amendment.⁵ By the early 1880s, some 2,000 Black citizens had ascended to the highest ranks of political office, including the U.S. Senate.⁶

They would not reach such heights again for another 90 years.⁷

Every democratic advance in history, it seems, is met with a violent reprisal. Almost as soon as Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts, the Ku Klux Klan began its “reign of terror,” burning, looting, raping, and murdering anyone who challenged the old caste system.⁸ As the historian Allen Guelzo points out, “it is one of the monumental ironies of Reconstruction that the victors—freed slaves, Northern whites—were more often the targets of violence and murder than the vanquished.”⁹

Local officials either couldn’t or wouldn’t impose law and order, and so Congress took up the task with three Enforcement Acts that empowered federal marshals and federal courts to prosecute individuals who violated Blacks’ new constitutional rights.¹⁰

The states bristled at this intrusion into what they considered to be their jurisdictions. General Benjamin F. Butler countered, “If the federal government cannot pass laws to protect the rights, liberty, and lives of citizens of the United States in the states, why were guarantees of those fundamental rights put in the Constitution at all?”¹¹

From 1871 to 1873, the sweep of federal action was remarkable. Under President Ulysses S. Grant, the government prosecuted nearly 2,500 cases of conspiracy to deprive citizens of their constitutional rights. With every KKK arrest, more Klansmen went into hiding, seeking refuge as far away as Canada.¹² But it was not to last.

Any schoolchild paying attention to their U.S. history class will recognize the term “Reconstruction,” but shockingly few know of the so-called “Redemption” that followed.¹³ Once the Feds relinquished control to the locals, the democratic experiment was scrapped. Integrated facilities—schools, hospitals, trains, restaurants—were resegregated or simply closed to Blacks.¹⁴ The acts of citizenship—voting, serving on a jury, open debate—became impossible, suffocated by restrictive qualifications that only Blacks could not meet and slaughtered when necessary by murderous White wrath.¹⁵

This new caste system, more devious and elaborate than the first, grew and hardened over decades, each generation placing new bricks in its imprisoning walls until Black Southerners had nowhere to flourish. Nowhere to move. Nowhere to hide.

“What confounds me is how much longer the rollback of Reconstruction was than Reconstruction itself; how dogged was the determination of the ‘Redeemed South’ to obliterate any trace of the marvelous gains made by the freedpeople,” says the historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr.¹⁶

Feeding this determination, motivating it and justifying it and fueling it with an incoherent concoction of opportunistic paternalism and genocidal rage, was a most barbaric lie: The lie of White supremacy.

The civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson goes so far as to argue that “the great evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude and forced labor. The true evil of American slavery was the narrative we created to justify it. They made up this ideology of white supremacy.”¹⁷

They even borrowed from the new evolutionary science of the day to “prove” the biological inferiority of Black genes and Black blood and Black brains. It was laughable pseudoscience by today’s standards. Even by the standards of the time, it was clear that they were cherry-picking data and making unsubstantiated leaps of logic.¹⁸ Yet they were so influential that their twisted stereotypes continue in American culture to this day. When racist jokes compare Blacks to monkeys, they are parroting the degenerate propaganda of the nineteenth-century eugenicists who used this same imagery of divergent species to keep races in their places.¹⁹

This animalistic stereotype had two contradictory sides. On the one hand, Blacks were portrayed as simple, stupid, silly. Too dumb to vote, too primitive to care. On the other hand, they were fearsome creatures, shifty and cunning, and hellbent on rape.²⁰

“This stereotype of the omnipresent black rapist is a classic instance of repression and projection,” argues Gates.

We now know, thanks to developments in DNA analysis, that one in three African American males carries a Y-DNA signature inherited from a direct white male ancestor … and that the average African American autosomal admixture is about 25 percent European.²¹

The historian Eric Foner concurs: “Even as Klansmen claimed to be motivated by the need to protect white womanhood from black men, sexual assaults against black women became a widespread feature of their violent campaign.”²²

Down through the generations, this perversion persisted in the American psyche. As late as the 1970s, Southern posters warned that integration “will turn your neighborhood schools into a savage jungle … with a wave of crime, extortion, rape, cannabalism,” accompanied by photos of interracial couples locking lips.²³

“The North won the Civil War,” Stevenson concludes, “but the South won the narrative war.”²⁴

And, I would add, the Supreme Court let them. Constitutional rights do not enforce themselves, and there was no shortage of legal challenges to the South’s rampage of violations. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments had codified the abolition of slavery, the equal protection due to citizens, and the right to vote, yet the Supreme Court was reluctant to instruct states to obey them. Curiously, the Court had no qualms striking down state regulations of corporations during this time, only of citizens.²⁵ It was as if they too had swallowed the great Southern lie.

Justice Henry B. Brown etched the lie into the history books with his opinion for the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson, the famous decision wherein the Court put its stamp on segregation so long as the “separate” accommodations were “equal.” (They never were, of course, but we will return to that detail later.) After referring to Whites as the “dominant ...