Appendix B  Segregated Housing, Segregated Schools and Anti-Black Racism

49.    Excerpted from:  Richard  Rothstein, Segregated Housing, Segregated Schools Education Week (March 24, 2014) http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/26/26rothstein_ep.h33.html (Last Visited: June 24, 2014).

50.    . . . Even sophisticated policymakers now generally assert that black students' residential isolation is de facto, but the proposition is dubious.

51.    The federal government led in establishing metropolitan residential segregation. From its New Deal inception, federally funded public housing was explicitly segregated by government. Nationwide (not only in the South), projects were officially designated either for whites or blacks. Once white families left the projects for the suburbs, most public housing was purposely placed only in black neighborhoods.

52.    In the mid-20th century, the federal government subsidized relocation of whites to suburbs and prohibited similar relocation of blacks. The Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration recruited builders to construct giant developments in the East . . . These builders received federal loan guarantees on explicit condition that no sales or resales be made to blacks

53.    Federal and state bank regulators approved and encouraged "redlining" policies, banning loans to black families in white suburbs and even, in most cases, to black families in black neighborhoods, leading to those neighborhoods' deterioration and ghettoization.\\

54.    The Internal Revenue Service unconstitutionally extended tax favoritism to universities, churches, and other nonprofits that enforced racial segregation. . . .

55.    Urban renewal programs of the mid-20th century often had undisguised purposes of forcing low-income black residents away from universities, hospital complexes, or business districts and into new ghettos. Real estate is highly regulated, but state authorities never punished brokers for racial discrimination, and rarely do so even today when discriminatory practices remain. Public police and prosecutorial power enforced racial boundaries: North, South, East, and West, in thousands of incidents police stood by as mobs firebombed and stoned homes purchased by blacks in white neighborhoods, while prosecutors refused to charge easily identifiable arsonists. These and other forms of racially explicit state action to segregate the urban landscape violated the Fifth, 13th, and 14th Amendments. Yet the term "de facto segregation," describing a never-existent reality, persists among otherwise well-informed advocates and scholars.

56.    Private prejudice certainly played a large role, but the federal government helped create and sustain private prejudice. White homeowners' resistance to black neighbors was fed by fears that African-Americans who moved into their neighborhoods would bring slum conditions with them. Yet slum conditions were created by overcrowding caused almost entirely by government refusal to permit African-Americans to expand their housing supply and by municipalities' discriminatory denial of public services. In the ghetto, garbage was collected less frequently, and neighborhoods were often rezoned for industrial or even toxic use. White homeowners came to see these conditions as characteristics of black residents themselves, not the result of racially motivated government policy.

57.    Even those today who understand this dramatic history may think that because these policies are mostly those of the past, segregation persists mostly because few blacks can afford to live in middle-class neighborhoods.

58.    Yet the federal government also contributed to this unaffordability with discriminatory labor-market policy. At the behest of Southern congressmen, New Deal labor standards, like minimum wages and the right to unionize, excluded from coverage, for undisguised racial purposes, occupations in which black workers predominated.

59.    The federal government granted exclusive collective bargaining rights to segregated private-sector unions, including some that entirely excluded African-Americans from their trades, into the 1970s. Government thus depressed income levels of African-American workers below levels of comparable white workers, contributing to black families' inability to accumulate the wealth needed to move to equity-appreciating white suburbs. . .