THE NATION'S LARGEST AFRICAN AMERICAN ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVE
January 3, 2018 - Vol. 1, Issue 16
WEEKLY FEATURE
|
|
Redlining:
The Making of a Segregated Neighborhood
11
|
|
The Honorable Charles Z. Smith
|
|
In
Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect,
Robert J. Sampson states of the reality of segregated neighborhoods:
“Withdrawal of needed services, government subsidized development by the private sector, zoning, redlining, blockbusting, or something so simple yet powerfully symbolic as gated communities with no sidewalks, it is no longer possible to think of neighborhoods as purely natural areas created by the aggregation of individual preferences alone.”
1
Following the Great Depression, the construction of segregated neighborhoods was often reinforced by redlining. In
Encyclopedia of African American History,
Leslie M. Alexander and Walter C. Rucker, Jr. define redlining as a discriminatory practice “
whereby companies or institutions deny goods or services to certain groups on the basis of race or where they live.”
They go on to emphasize its racial component:
“African Americans living in highly populated urban areas tend to experience the worst impacts of redlining. Redlining was historically supported by a combination of government policies and private sector practices.”
2
Richard Rothstein in
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,
elaborates,
“Real estate agents steered whites away from black neighborhoods, and blacks away from white ones. Banks discriminated with ‘redlining,’ refusing to give mortgages to African Americans or extracting unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans.”
3
In his interview with The HistoryMakers, academic administrator, professor and author Manning Marable remembers his experience of de facto segregation in Dayton, Ohio in the 1950s and 1960s:
“Because of residential patterns and because there were no magnet schools back then, Negroes lived on the west side, schools on the west side were black, even though technically you didn’t have de jure segregation, you had de facto segregation ‘cause of redlining and discrimination in housing policy. Not a single black family lived in Oakwood, Ohio or in Kettering, Ohio. These were white neighborhoods in the southern part of Dayton. Jewish people generally lived and were confined to Dayton View, Dayton, Ohio, through the same pernicious form of discrimination except it was anti-Semitism rather than white racism, anti-black racism. Black people were confined to the west side. That’s where we lived”
4
[Manning Marable, THMDA 1.2.7].
Similarly, Charles Z. Smith, a former Washington Supreme Court Justice, describes his observations of redlining in Seattle:
“I returned to Seattle, Washington in 1965, and at that time, it was still difficult to find housing outside the Central Area, if you were not white. When we built this house in 1968, it was redlined. And the banking institutions would not give me mortgage money. I had friends in the mortgage business who said, “Anything you want, we’ll give.” And I’d apply, and they’d find out where we were going to build, and they’d find a reason not to get it. So it took us five years to get financing to build our house here because it was redlining. Everybody denied that they were redlining, but that has changed”
5
[The Honorable Charles Z. Smith, THMDA 2.7.8].
In
Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America
, her work on the topic, Beryl Satter speaks to the undue justification for redlining:
“Biased Federal Housing Administration policies further inflamed white resistance to black neighbors. In the FHA’s view, the presence of a single black family was reason enough to refuse to insure mortgage or home improvement loans to an entire block. The redlining of a block could spell its doom, since property owners there could neither obtain loans to improve their homes nor sell them to the typical buyer who used a mortgage to purchase property. Whites now had a motive to keep blacks out that went well beyond amorphous anxieties about the ‘decline of the human race’—racist fears that could potentially be countered by knowledge and goodwill. Instead, since the presence of a single black family usually led to mortgage redlining, whites had a powerful economic incentive to keep such families out.”
6
Educator Lauranita Dugas describes her recollection of such activities in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, on the city’s South Side: “
The real estate agents then would--the first black family that got in and then they would start getting the white families to move out by selling them, ‘The black plague is coming. You better go while you can get some good money.’ And they did that all over town. They were doing it here when we moved in. We looked at houses, I tried to look at houses in South Shore. And the white real estate agent told me, ‘No, black people will never get into South Shore’”
7
[Lauranita Dugas, THMDA 1.4.8].
However, the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and the enforcement of the legislation on a state, federal and corporate level led to the creation of predatory reverse redlining in the 1990s. These policies then informed the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. Of reverse redlining, Robert Doyle Bullard notes in
The Black Metropolis in the Twenty-first Century: Race, Power, and Politics of Place
that: “
The extension of credit on unfair terms to particular geographic areas because of the race or national origin of their residents, also hits African Americans especially hard. The absence of mainstream banking institutions and their services in African American neighborhoods helps create market conditions in which reverse redlining thrives. Redlining and reverse redlining are opposite sides of the same coin. Both have negative consequences for black wealth creation in cities and suburbs. These patterns are institutionalized by lending practices and reproduced again and again by subsequent generations.”
8
Academic administrator and executive Carver Gayton identifies the long term effects of redlining as he talks about the demographic changes within Seattle’s Central District, his childhood neighborhood:
“Talking about changes in the Central District and I was saying, gosh it’s not like the old days when, blacks were in the CD and we had this, you know, real togetherness. But now, it’s all this gentrification and I wish it was like it was back in the day. Well one thing I said, you know, the reason why we all lived together don’t you? Because we couldn’t move anywhere else--we were redlined and we lived in the ghetto. But we fought for open housing and so as a result, a lot of middle class blacks moved out and went to the white, more affluent areas and left them poor folks. But that’s even changed now with this prime property and cheaper property in the South End, Seattle, Washington. Blacks have moved down to the South End because you get more for your money and so whites have moved in, and so people are lamenting the fact that so many whites have moved in. Black families held onto their property and the property values went up considerably. So things change, I mean we’ve gotten almost full circle over my lifetime in terms of the makeup of the Central District”
9
[Carver Gayton, THMDA 1.3.6].
Of the adverse legacy of redlining, Timothy Berthold concludes in
Foundations for Community Health Workers
:
“Through racial inequalities in housing and banking, the inequalities in wealth were made greater, and neighborhood stability suffered. These factors influence neighborhood quality, access to healthy food, opportunities for employment or small business development, crime levels, and eventually, human health and life expectancy. Federal housing policies were not necessarily intended to add to health inequalities, but that was their effect.”
10
|
|
The HistoryMakers Archive in Action
Karen V. Hansen, Brandeis University
12
|
|
|
What innovative ways do you include The HistoryMakers digital archive into your lesson plan or academic research?
Sociology Department Chair and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Professor
Karen V. Hansen
at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, incorporated The HistoryMakers digital archive into her graduate seminar, “Gender, Class and Race” with a goal of exploring the nexus of inequalities through oral history.
Her graduate students focused on the narratives of clinical psychologist
Anne Ashore-Hudson
, newspaper report
Karen DeWitt
and quilt maker and storyteller
Serena Strother
. Through their use of the archive, students assessed the merits and limitations of working with oral histories from the perspectives of social scientists. Professor Hansen observed that one student commented,
“The incorporation of The HistoryMakers archive was a really important and brilliant part of the course,”
and that students remarked that they found the inclusion of The HistoryMakers digital archive,
“enlightening, engaging and challenging.”
For her future curriculum, Professor Hansen plans to incorporate the usage of the digital archive into three of her undergraduate courses: “Families, Kinship, and Sexuality;” “Gender and Biography,” and “Comparative Historical Methods.”
What innovative ways do you include The HistoryMakers digital archive into your lesson plan or academic research?
|
|
1. Robert J. Sampson,
Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect.
University of Chicago Press, March 25, 2012.
2. Leslie M. Alexander, Walter C. Rucker, Jr.
Encyclopedia of African American History
. ABC-CLIO, February 9, 2010.
3.
Richard Rothstein,
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
Liveright Publishing, May 2, 2017.
4. Manning Marable (The HistoryMakers A2005.228), interviewed by Shawn Wilson, October 4, 2005, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 2, story 7, Manning Marable describes the de facto segregation of Dayton, Ohio
5. The Honorable Charles Z. Smith (The HistoryMakers A2007.308), interviewed by Larry Crowe, June 3, 2008, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 2, tape 7, story 8, The Honorable Charles Z. Smith talks about Seattle's discriminatory housing practices, pt. 2
6. Beryl Satter,
Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America.
Henry Holt and Company, March 2, 2010.
7. Lauranita Dugas (The HistoryMakers A2010.032), interviewed by Larry Crowe, May 28, 2010, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 4, story 8, Lauranita Dugas remembers raising her children in the Rosenwald Apartments in Chicago, Illinois
8. Robert Doyle Bullard,
The Black Metropolis in the Twenty-first Century: Race, Power, and Politics of Place.
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
9. Carver Gayton (The HistoryMakers A2008.080), interviewed by Larry Crowe, June 4, 2008, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 3, story 6, Carver Gayton describes the Central District of Seattle, Washington
10. Timothy Berthold,
Foundations for Community Health Workers.
John Wiley and Sons, May 2, 2016.
|
|
Spot an error in
The HistoryMakers Digital Archive
? We want to fix it! Send a brief description of the error to:
digitalarchive@thehistorymakers.org
|
|
|
|
|
We're here to help! Please direct questions about
The HistoryMakers Digital Archive
to:
digitalarchive@thehistorymakers.org
|
|
|
Browse our collection at:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
