NYTimes | Critics of the Fair Housing Act have
glibly attempted to dismiss attempts to end segregation as “social
engineering” — as if rigid racial segregation in housing were a natural
phenomenon. In fact, the residential segregation that is pervasive in
the United States today was partly created by explicit federal policies
that date back at least to World War I. It is now widely acknowledged
that the federal insistence on segregated housing introduced Jim Crow separation in areas of the country outside the South where
it had previously been unknown. It stands to reason that dismantling a
system created by a set of government policies will require an equally
explicit set of federal policies.
The scholar Richard Rothstein exposed the roots of this shameful process in his recent book “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.”
He reported that the government’s first effort to build housing for
defense workers near military installations and factories during World
War I was founded on the premise that African-American families would be
excluded “even from projects in northern and western industrial centers
where they worked in significant numbers.”
The same toxic pattern prevailed under
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, when the government created the first
public housing projects for nondefense workers, building separate
projects for black people, segregating buildings by race or excluding
African-Americans entirely. Particularly telling is the fact that
racially integrated communities were razed to make way for Jim Crow
housing.
The federal insistence on rigid racial separation found its most pernicious expression in the Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934 to promote homeownership by insuring mortgages. As the sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton document in “American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass,”
the government typically denied mortgages to African-Americans,
shutting out even affluent black people from the suburban homeownership
boom that remade the residential landscape during the middle decades of
the 20th century.
Government at all
levels embraced racial covenants that forbade even well-to-do
African-Americans from purchasing homes outside of black communities.
Cut off from homeownership — the principal avenue of wealth creation —
African-Americans lost the opportunity to build the intergenerational
wealth that white suburban families took for granted. The vast wealth
gap that exists today between whites and African-Americans has its roots
in this era.
The argument for what became the Fair Housing Act emerged forcefully in the 1968 Kerner Commission
report, which blamed segregation in large measure for the riots that
ravaged the country in the 60s and called for national fair housing
legislation. The housing law might well have died in committee had the
country not erupted in fresh violence after the assassination of the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. It was signed into law
a week later.
The housing act put
the federal government on record as supporting open housing and
prohibiting the pervasive discrimination that had locked most
African-Americans out of decent accommodations and homeownership. But
the version that passed in 1968 had been declawed — stripped of
enforcement provisions that would have given HUD strong authority to
root out discrimination. Nearly a quarter-century would pass before
Congress strengthened the law. So during that time, African-Americans
were left subject to the harsh discrimination the original act was
supposed to preclude.
This
progressive sounding law — which requires entities that receive federal
money to “affirmatively further” fair housing goals — was consistently
undermined by officials of both parties who had little appetite for
confronting entrenched segregation.
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