I respect the writer, Anthony B. Bradley, as he appeared as a guest on the Free Black Thought podcast Do NOT Get Divorced. While his information in this essay is a valuable contribution to our knowledge base, there is more to the story of black people and property in America. I know this as an American Native to Virginia with family roots dating back in my home county to the 1700s.
If there are over 40 million black Americans, there are over 40 million stories, experiences and perspectives. Bradley does a good story of sharing an experience of displacement in Birmingham, Alabama. I felt a familiar sense of reading someone else's story from afar. Let me explain and compliment Bradley again before continuing.
1. Destruction of Generational Wealth
There are black families in the U.S. who have owned rental properties as investors since the 1840s. I know intimately a black family whose property holdings included a summer home in Windsor, Connecticut in the 1870s, a summer place in Sag Harbor in the 1920s, a place on Martha's Vineyard today. For this black family, "destructrion of generational wealth" makes no sense. It becomes dogma and a slogan one must accept to go along to get along. Destruction of generational wealth in Birmingham is just one story out of millions of stories out there.
Bradley refers to "slum clearance" projects of the 1950s and 1960s. I grew up in Chesterfield County, Virginia in the 1960s. There was no such thing. What the writer focuses on is one sliver of black life, urban and city life. None of my parents, grandparents, greatgrandparents or great great grandparents ever knew city life. If they were alive, they would read the words of Bradley as something so far away. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nm-g4Ekxe4
Bradley refers to "displaced families." I have no first hand knowledge of such a thing. I do know that city annexation of a suburban black neighborhood forced families to choose in 1970 between remaining in the city or moving out into the suburbs. One can call that choice of a lifetime "displacement." It is better to say families exercised agency in how they responded to annexation by the city.
2. Demolishing Black Neighborhoods
From birth until I went off to college at the age of 18, I lived in all-black neighborhoods. No black neighborhood I lived in was "demolished." This was not my southern, suburban experience. Neighbors chose to move to the suburbs for better schools and lower taxes. As for public housing projects, I was not aware of such a thing until maybe college or law school. The experience in Birmingham is one experience out of many. I fear readers will read essays like this and assume this story presents the blanket Black American experience. It is why I have retired from Blackness as I weary of other jurisdictions unknown to me becoming my human story.
My black family and neighbors were never "confined to the inner city." In point of fact, my family had been suburban since June 1871. Generational wealth passed down the generations, contrary to what seems to have happened in Birmingham. Different families, different stories. Bradley refers to white families moving to the suburbs. The watershed in my life was black family members moving to the suburbs like Chester and Midlothian, Chesterfield County, Virginia. And my black family benefitted immensely from the explosively growth of suburban Chesterfield in the 1970s.
Economic isolation? How about riding the wave of affluence and prosperity, a growing tax base and some of the best public schools in the state? That was my childhood.
Conclusion: I do appreciate the excellent research in Bradley's article. As I grow older, however, I grow weary of never seeing my memories reflected in the race literaure. That's all.
Destruction of wealth, of family structure and of education. Look at NYC. Inner city groups actually believe that politicians can wave a magic wand and grant free housing, free food, and free healthcare. Not only does the communist (and Democratic Socialist) model promise greater poverty and oppression, it will ensure decades of greater ignorance.
Seven months in: my expenses are down, my job opportunities are producing more income, and I have hope for the future. I look forward that Trump 2.1 (year two) will include a significant reduction in federal spending, a correction in federal entitlements and benefits, and more accountability for the criminals who have been stealing my tax dollars for decades.
1) Predictions range from 3 to 5 trillion dollars added to the national debt over the next decade due to the measure passed recently.
2) There will be an increased number of Americans without health insurance. Is this the correction you are talking about?
3) Who are these criminals stealing your tax dollars? Trump donors who pay to play and, in return, reap vast benefits from your taxes with contracts and favors?
Michael, I grew up in the generation that didn't feel entitled to the hard earned wealth of workers. Most of my peers don't support modern slavery which the broken immigration system has established. The USA is the world leader in sex trafficking for example. My public school education taught that food in grocery stores comes from farms not from politicians. We were also taught basic financial principles. As far as the destructive and broken US Healthcare system, for profit insurance companies are driving poor health outcomes for actual people and relies too heavily on expensive pharmaceuticals. The USA is the only developed nation where life expectancy continues to decrease after COVID. So save your misinformation for those who are not critical thinkers.
Not sure what generation you are referring to, but the tax system IS skewed towards the rich and powerful. (Unless you want to include among the working class the political donor class.) Migrants come here for sanctuary and economic benefit to their families, as always. I empathize with them and believe there is a better way to give them the opportunity they seek while benefitting the country. I agree with you about for-profit healthcare. You characterize my comments as "misinformation" but then go on to rant about sex trafficking. Your thinking can only loosely be called critical since you can't make a coherent response to my comments.
If you are so concerned about sex trafficking, why would you embrace Donald Trump? His good buddy for many years was a notorious sex trafficker named Epstein who exploited under-age girls.
Yes to all this but three comments: First, exactly how much black owned property was there in the urban renewal neighborhoods? I’m guessing the vast majority were renting, and renters don’t pass on property to their heirs. Second, there was about as much black middle and upper class flight from these neighborhoods as there was white flight, and that’s why you didn’t see a revival of black owned business in the new public housing areas like you had in the earlier legally segregated black communities. Third, the housing quality in the urban neighborhoods was awful (I grew up in Southwest Atlanta in the 60’s and saw it first hand), so in many cases the new public housing was a tremendous upgrade, at least initially.
Anthony Bradley has written a piece here that belongs in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and should be read by every American. The history he recounts here is far too little known. Cycles of poverty persist in the black community in the South. What is the cause of this? The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow are part of it as is misguided 1970s welfare policies. But this still doesn't quite give us the whole picture. The missing link is 1950s and 1960s federally funded Urban Renewal projects which destroyed thriving black residential and commercial districts. This in turn effectively erased Black-owned property from the face of the Earth and shattered the foundations of generational wealth. Michael Barrett's master's thesis on the subject is quite instructive indeed. He concentrates his study on Birmingham, Alabama and its use of slum clearance and urban renewal to enforce racial segregation. He shows that far from being a one off, the stuff Birmingham did mirrored the practices of both southern and northern cities between 1950 and 1970. Local officials in Birmingham leveraged funds from the 1949 Housing Act to level black neighborhoods and communities and redevelop the land in ways that maintained and reinforced racial boundaries. Equitable development was never in the cards. Practicing racial segregation in housing was nothing new for Birmingham. They'd been doing it for centuries.
In the 1870s, the city responded to the influx of black workers coming in by building company-owned, segregated housing of substandard quality which lacked basic amenities like indoor plumbing and were poorly maintained. Birmingham continued to use housing policy as a way to reinforce racial segregation. The city implemented racial zoning laws in the early 20th Century to prevent black families from moving into white neighborhoods. Even after the 1917 Supreme Court ruling in Buchanan v. Warley struck down explicit racial zoning, the city devised artful ways to get around it. They devised comprehensive planning strategies to achieve the same ends without overt legality. This was compounded further by federal redlining policies initiated by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s, which designated Black neighborhoods as "high risk" for mortgage lending. This in turn starved black communities of private investment. The arrival of New Deal public housing programs in the 1930s had little impact on changing this. The Public Works Administration and later the U.S. Housing Authority differed to local authorities on administrative matters like for example the location of housing projects. As a result, you had new public housing being built on the sites of former slums.
The Housing Authority of the Birmingham District oversaw these projects, and they made sure that it consistently prioritized the interests of the white business and political establishment. The passage of the 1949 Housing Act would turn out to be a significant moment in the history of racial segregation in this country. It provided federal funds for slum clearance and urban renewal. Under Title I of the bill, local agencies were empowered to use eminent domain to acquire large tracts of blighted land. What this meant in practice was that black families were pushed into already overcrowded black neighborhoods or into segregated public housing projects. Plans for new private housing for whites were included in the redevelopment, while housing for displaced blacks was ignored. The law did stipulate that displaced persons needed to be relocated to "decent, safe and sanitary dwellings." But in practice, this clause in the bill was utterly ignored. This was repeated again and again in cities across the country. Atlanta and Chicago for instance, did similar such practices. Let's fast forward to today, the black poverty rate in the city remains sky high even though unemployment is down. Simply giving people jobs is not going to fix this problem by itself. Black residents in Birmingham are therefore stuck in deteriorating inner city areas, cut off from economic opportunities. As Mr. Barrett so eloquently argues here, there were three major effects of these practices: the destruction of generational wealth, the concentration of poverty and economic isolation. White flight didn't help matters either as trapped black residents who didn't have the money to move out were left behind while white residents left to move out to the suburbs, taking their tax base and private investment with them.
Sadly, this practice to some extent still continues to this very day with Birmingham as recently as 2013, routing new interstates through black neighborhoods in the city. What can we do about this? What's the solution to these age-old policies that have disadvantaged black Americans for over a century? I would like to propose some here: first off, a bipartisan equitable housing development bill will be passed through Congress. Second, Congress will pass a law once again with bipartisan support, that gentrification, urban renewal and slum clearance will allow for any and all displaced residents to stay and live in that area as long as they are of good character and have no criminal history. The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and the FBI will be directed by the White House to investigate discrimination and disproportionate impact on black communities in urban planning by cities across the nation. The federal government will launch an initiative to clean up the inner cities. Now let me be clear what I mean by that, I do NOT mean to say the residents of those communities should be pushed out or their homes destroyed. Rather federal officials will work hand and hand with local authorities and the people in the area to beautify and repair the cities. The federal government will invest in the inner cities and bring jobs to these communities. Major corporations like Google, Coca Cola, Walmart, General Electric, Ford, Home Depot, Cosco, John Deere, etc. will start private initiatives as well to set up shop in these communities and hire local residents. More police officers will be sent to patrol these neighborhoods and the FBI will start a special operation to chase gangs and drug dealers out of these areas and bring them to justice. Urban farming will be encouraged in these communities to combat food deserts. The federal government will start affirmative action programs in business and loaning and provide special grants to black, Latino and Native American entrepreneurs to help them get a leg up. Welfare reform will be done as well. Welfare will from now on, only be a temporary measure for one to use until they get back on their feet, it will NOT be handed out like candy and the cost of operating the welfare system will be made significantly less expensive.
A second New Deal will be done and it will have safeguards against racial discrimination installed into it and massive public works projects will be started to people put people including folks in the poor black inner cities, to work. A new GI Bill will be passed but it too will include safeguards against discrimination. Black and minority veterans will be given assistance in finding housing, mental healthcare and reacclimating to civilian life. More affordable housing will be built, public housing will be reformed and the quality of it upped and ex-cons who've earned it will receive high-quality apartment rooms of their own and they will be pointed to job interviews for their chosen field, this would disproportionately help blacks and minorities while also helping whites who are in the same situation. Black churches and mosques will host after school programs for black children and troubled black youth. They will also hold classes on fatherhood and raising children. Community events should be held where the police and the community establish good relations.
Excellent article that jibes with what I have learned over the years about Jacksonville, Florida. The major blow to Black neighborhoods here was the interstate system, but that was preceded by a local expressway authority that decimated several established African American communities with large Black home ownership. These bifurcated neighborhoods either no longer exist or exist in various states of upkeep that suggest what might have been. Subsequent federal civil rights acts induced many former Black residents to move to previously white areas that were modestly priced. I hope some scholar will examine this time frame to pull together a comprehensive local picture. (Predictably, school desegregation fell hardest on the Black communities even as white flight to the suburbs accelerated. I am currently reading
"Integrated : how American schools failed Black children" by Noliwe Rooks, publshed this year. Good overview of the subject.
The freeway system seems to have been the major impetus for much of this "development." Detroit and Portland, Oregon also lost minority communities due to the expansion of the transportation system.
In an Economics course in the late 1960s at Columbia, I studied “The Federal Bulldozer” by Martin Anderson (Columbia Business School), as well as a tract by SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) both of which indicted the HUD Urban Renewal programs for the destruction of principally minority communities in major cities. SDS, being a socialist organization, recommended more government action to “fix” the problems created, while Martin Anderson recommended eliminating the programs, but I found it fascinating how well they agreed on the evil results of the existing Urban Renewal programs.
I understand how this happened before the mid-60s, but are there more recent examples, perhaps from the 80s and later, that illustrate how urban renewal has contributed to the destruction of black wealth? And is this only happening in the South?
It happened all over. The article discusses Chicago briefly, but Detroit's Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods were also affected. Also, Portland experienced the same thing, but it not only affected the Black community, but also first and generation, European immigrant communities who were still not perceived as white.
Cannot say about the 1980s--let's see what other thinkers have to say. Brilliant article.
Was it a factor that as renters rather than owners, most black residents were not considered worthy of compensation for 'slum' clearance? Presumably their landlords were paid off for accepting demolition?
Having moved to San Francisco's Fillmore neighborhood, before it was wiped from existence in the 1990s-2000s, I have firsthand experience of this tragedy. James Baldwin (Urban Renewal is Black Removal) understood this.
The expansion of Public Housing during the Great Society added more momentum to the process.
The problem, of course, is the myth of good intentions.
But also the creation of a class of politicians (Willie Brown in SF), whose political and personal fortunes were based upon their willingness to both promote and profit from the destruction.
(There is somewhere in my mind a pragmatic voice that says, "If someone robs your home and sleeps with your wife, you don't ask whether their intentions were pure, but if they take your home and bulldoze your neighborhood, but tell you it is for your own good, you just go along with it." I can't say if it is a memory, or just my inner monologue.)
The Columbia University expansion into Harlem continues the trend.
Sadly, most "conservatives" make hay from the resulting social dissolution, rather than taking up the fight and standing in solidarity with impacted communities. Perhaps, given the political shift, there will be more solidarity and less hay. Perhaps the emergence of leaders like Corrin Rankin can make a difference. https://cagop.org/meet-our-chairwoman
I respect the writer, Anthony B. Bradley, as he appeared as a guest on the Free Black Thought podcast Do NOT Get Divorced. While his information in this essay is a valuable contribution to our knowledge base, there is more to the story of black people and property in America. I know this as an American Native to Virginia with family roots dating back in my home county to the 1700s.
If there are over 40 million black Americans, there are over 40 million stories, experiences and perspectives. Bradley does a good story of sharing an experience of displacement in Birmingham, Alabama. I felt a familiar sense of reading someone else's story from afar. Let me explain and compliment Bradley again before continuing.
1. Destruction of Generational Wealth
There are black families in the U.S. who have owned rental properties as investors since the 1840s. I know intimately a black family whose property holdings included a summer home in Windsor, Connecticut in the 1870s, a summer place in Sag Harbor in the 1920s, a place on Martha's Vineyard today. For this black family, "destructrion of generational wealth" makes no sense. It becomes dogma and a slogan one must accept to go along to get along. Destruction of generational wealth in Birmingham is just one story out of millions of stories out there.
Bradley refers to "slum clearance" projects of the 1950s and 1960s. I grew up in Chesterfield County, Virginia in the 1960s. There was no such thing. What the writer focuses on is one sliver of black life, urban and city life. None of my parents, grandparents, greatgrandparents or great great grandparents ever knew city life. If they were alive, they would read the words of Bradley as something so far away. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nm-g4Ekxe4
Bradley refers to "displaced families." I have no first hand knowledge of such a thing. I do know that city annexation of a suburban black neighborhood forced families to choose in 1970 between remaining in the city or moving out into the suburbs. One can call that choice of a lifetime "displacement." It is better to say families exercised agency in how they responded to annexation by the city.
2. Demolishing Black Neighborhoods
From birth until I went off to college at the age of 18, I lived in all-black neighborhoods. No black neighborhood I lived in was "demolished." This was not my southern, suburban experience. Neighbors chose to move to the suburbs for better schools and lower taxes. As for public housing projects, I was not aware of such a thing until maybe college or law school. The experience in Birmingham is one experience out of many. I fear readers will read essays like this and assume this story presents the blanket Black American experience. It is why I have retired from Blackness as I weary of other jurisdictions unknown to me becoming my human story.
Does that make sense as a matter of human dignity? https://twyman.substack.com/p/the-human-condition?utm_source=publication-search
3. Economic Isolation
My black family and neighbors were never "confined to the inner city." In point of fact, my family had been suburban since June 1871. Generational wealth passed down the generations, contrary to what seems to have happened in Birmingham. Different families, different stories. Bradley refers to white families moving to the suburbs. The watershed in my life was black family members moving to the suburbs like Chester and Midlothian, Chesterfield County, Virginia. And my black family benefitted immensely from the explosively growth of suburban Chesterfield in the 1970s.
Economic isolation? How about riding the wave of affluence and prosperity, a growing tax base and some of the best public schools in the state? That was my childhood.
Conclusion: I do appreciate the excellent research in Bradley's article. As I grow older, however, I grow weary of never seeing my memories reflected in the race literaure. That's all.
Destruction of wealth, of family structure and of education. Look at NYC. Inner city groups actually believe that politicians can wave a magic wand and grant free housing, free food, and free healthcare. Not only does the communist (and Democratic Socialist) model promise greater poverty and oppression, it will ensure decades of greater ignorance.
How's Trump 2.0 working out for you?
Seven months in: my expenses are down, my job opportunities are producing more income, and I have hope for the future. I look forward that Trump 2.1 (year two) will include a significant reduction in federal spending, a correction in federal entitlements and benefits, and more accountability for the criminals who have been stealing my tax dollars for decades.
1) Predictions range from 3 to 5 trillion dollars added to the national debt over the next decade due to the measure passed recently.
2) There will be an increased number of Americans without health insurance. Is this the correction you are talking about?
3) Who are these criminals stealing your tax dollars? Trump donors who pay to play and, in return, reap vast benefits from your taxes with contracts and favors?
Michael, I grew up in the generation that didn't feel entitled to the hard earned wealth of workers. Most of my peers don't support modern slavery which the broken immigration system has established. The USA is the world leader in sex trafficking for example. My public school education taught that food in grocery stores comes from farms not from politicians. We were also taught basic financial principles. As far as the destructive and broken US Healthcare system, for profit insurance companies are driving poor health outcomes for actual people and relies too heavily on expensive pharmaceuticals. The USA is the only developed nation where life expectancy continues to decrease after COVID. So save your misinformation for those who are not critical thinkers.
Not sure what generation you are referring to, but the tax system IS skewed towards the rich and powerful. (Unless you want to include among the working class the political donor class.) Migrants come here for sanctuary and economic benefit to their families, as always. I empathize with them and believe there is a better way to give them the opportunity they seek while benefitting the country. I agree with you about for-profit healthcare. You characterize my comments as "misinformation" but then go on to rant about sex trafficking. Your thinking can only loosely be called critical since you can't make a coherent response to my comments.
If you are so concerned about sex trafficking, why would you embrace Donald Trump? His good buddy for many years was a notorious sex trafficker named Epstein who exploited under-age girls.
Yes to all this but three comments: First, exactly how much black owned property was there in the urban renewal neighborhoods? I’m guessing the vast majority were renting, and renters don’t pass on property to their heirs. Second, there was about as much black middle and upper class flight from these neighborhoods as there was white flight, and that’s why you didn’t see a revival of black owned business in the new public housing areas like you had in the earlier legally segregated black communities. Third, the housing quality in the urban neighborhoods was awful (I grew up in Southwest Atlanta in the 60’s and saw it first hand), so in many cases the new public housing was a tremendous upgrade, at least initially.
Anthony Bradley has written a piece here that belongs in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and should be read by every American. The history he recounts here is far too little known. Cycles of poverty persist in the black community in the South. What is the cause of this? The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow are part of it as is misguided 1970s welfare policies. But this still doesn't quite give us the whole picture. The missing link is 1950s and 1960s federally funded Urban Renewal projects which destroyed thriving black residential and commercial districts. This in turn effectively erased Black-owned property from the face of the Earth and shattered the foundations of generational wealth. Michael Barrett's master's thesis on the subject is quite instructive indeed. He concentrates his study on Birmingham, Alabama and its use of slum clearance and urban renewal to enforce racial segregation. He shows that far from being a one off, the stuff Birmingham did mirrored the practices of both southern and northern cities between 1950 and 1970. Local officials in Birmingham leveraged funds from the 1949 Housing Act to level black neighborhoods and communities and redevelop the land in ways that maintained and reinforced racial boundaries. Equitable development was never in the cards. Practicing racial segregation in housing was nothing new for Birmingham. They'd been doing it for centuries.
In the 1870s, the city responded to the influx of black workers coming in by building company-owned, segregated housing of substandard quality which lacked basic amenities like indoor plumbing and were poorly maintained. Birmingham continued to use housing policy as a way to reinforce racial segregation. The city implemented racial zoning laws in the early 20th Century to prevent black families from moving into white neighborhoods. Even after the 1917 Supreme Court ruling in Buchanan v. Warley struck down explicit racial zoning, the city devised artful ways to get around it. They devised comprehensive planning strategies to achieve the same ends without overt legality. This was compounded further by federal redlining policies initiated by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s, which designated Black neighborhoods as "high risk" for mortgage lending. This in turn starved black communities of private investment. The arrival of New Deal public housing programs in the 1930s had little impact on changing this. The Public Works Administration and later the U.S. Housing Authority differed to local authorities on administrative matters like for example the location of housing projects. As a result, you had new public housing being built on the sites of former slums.
The Housing Authority of the Birmingham District oversaw these projects, and they made sure that it consistently prioritized the interests of the white business and political establishment. The passage of the 1949 Housing Act would turn out to be a significant moment in the history of racial segregation in this country. It provided federal funds for slum clearance and urban renewal. Under Title I of the bill, local agencies were empowered to use eminent domain to acquire large tracts of blighted land. What this meant in practice was that black families were pushed into already overcrowded black neighborhoods or into segregated public housing projects. Plans for new private housing for whites were included in the redevelopment, while housing for displaced blacks was ignored. The law did stipulate that displaced persons needed to be relocated to "decent, safe and sanitary dwellings." But in practice, this clause in the bill was utterly ignored. This was repeated again and again in cities across the country. Atlanta and Chicago for instance, did similar such practices. Let's fast forward to today, the black poverty rate in the city remains sky high even though unemployment is down. Simply giving people jobs is not going to fix this problem by itself. Black residents in Birmingham are therefore stuck in deteriorating inner city areas, cut off from economic opportunities. As Mr. Barrett so eloquently argues here, there were three major effects of these practices: the destruction of generational wealth, the concentration of poverty and economic isolation. White flight didn't help matters either as trapped black residents who didn't have the money to move out were left behind while white residents left to move out to the suburbs, taking their tax base and private investment with them.
Sadly, this practice to some extent still continues to this very day with Birmingham as recently as 2013, routing new interstates through black neighborhoods in the city. What can we do about this? What's the solution to these age-old policies that have disadvantaged black Americans for over a century? I would like to propose some here: first off, a bipartisan equitable housing development bill will be passed through Congress. Second, Congress will pass a law once again with bipartisan support, that gentrification, urban renewal and slum clearance will allow for any and all displaced residents to stay and live in that area as long as they are of good character and have no criminal history. The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and the FBI will be directed by the White House to investigate discrimination and disproportionate impact on black communities in urban planning by cities across the nation. The federal government will launch an initiative to clean up the inner cities. Now let me be clear what I mean by that, I do NOT mean to say the residents of those communities should be pushed out or their homes destroyed. Rather federal officials will work hand and hand with local authorities and the people in the area to beautify and repair the cities. The federal government will invest in the inner cities and bring jobs to these communities. Major corporations like Google, Coca Cola, Walmart, General Electric, Ford, Home Depot, Cosco, John Deere, etc. will start private initiatives as well to set up shop in these communities and hire local residents. More police officers will be sent to patrol these neighborhoods and the FBI will start a special operation to chase gangs and drug dealers out of these areas and bring them to justice. Urban farming will be encouraged in these communities to combat food deserts. The federal government will start affirmative action programs in business and loaning and provide special grants to black, Latino and Native American entrepreneurs to help them get a leg up. Welfare reform will be done as well. Welfare will from now on, only be a temporary measure for one to use until they get back on their feet, it will NOT be handed out like candy and the cost of operating the welfare system will be made significantly less expensive.
A second New Deal will be done and it will have safeguards against racial discrimination installed into it and massive public works projects will be started to people put people including folks in the poor black inner cities, to work. A new GI Bill will be passed but it too will include safeguards against discrimination. Black and minority veterans will be given assistance in finding housing, mental healthcare and reacclimating to civilian life. More affordable housing will be built, public housing will be reformed and the quality of it upped and ex-cons who've earned it will receive high-quality apartment rooms of their own and they will be pointed to job interviews for their chosen field, this would disproportionately help blacks and minorities while also helping whites who are in the same situation. Black churches and mosques will host after school programs for black children and troubled black youth. They will also hold classes on fatherhood and raising children. Community events should be held where the police and the community establish good relations.
Excellent article that jibes with what I have learned over the years about Jacksonville, Florida. The major blow to Black neighborhoods here was the interstate system, but that was preceded by a local expressway authority that decimated several established African American communities with large Black home ownership. These bifurcated neighborhoods either no longer exist or exist in various states of upkeep that suggest what might have been. Subsequent federal civil rights acts induced many former Black residents to move to previously white areas that were modestly priced. I hope some scholar will examine this time frame to pull together a comprehensive local picture. (Predictably, school desegregation fell hardest on the Black communities even as white flight to the suburbs accelerated. I am currently reading
"Integrated : how American schools failed Black children" by Noliwe Rooks, publshed this year. Good overview of the subject.
The freeway system seems to have been the major impetus for much of this "development." Detroit and Portland, Oregon also lost minority communities due to the expansion of the transportation system.
In an Economics course in the late 1960s at Columbia, I studied “The Federal Bulldozer” by Martin Anderson (Columbia Business School), as well as a tract by SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) both of which indicted the HUD Urban Renewal programs for the destruction of principally minority communities in major cities. SDS, being a socialist organization, recommended more government action to “fix” the problems created, while Martin Anderson recommended eliminating the programs, but I found it fascinating how well they agreed on the evil results of the existing Urban Renewal programs.
I understand how this happened before the mid-60s, but are there more recent examples, perhaps from the 80s and later, that illustrate how urban renewal has contributed to the destruction of black wealth? And is this only happening in the South?
It happened all over. The article discusses Chicago briefly, but Detroit's Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods were also affected. Also, Portland experienced the same thing, but it not only affected the Black community, but also first and generation, European immigrant communities who were still not perceived as white.
Cannot say about the 1980s--let's see what other thinkers have to say. Brilliant article.
Was it a factor that as renters rather than owners, most black residents were not considered worthy of compensation for 'slum' clearance? Presumably their landlords were paid off for accepting demolition?
Having moved to San Francisco's Fillmore neighborhood, before it was wiped from existence in the 1990s-2000s, I have firsthand experience of this tragedy. James Baldwin (Urban Renewal is Black Removal) understood this.
The expansion of Public Housing during the Great Society added more momentum to the process.
The problem, of course, is the myth of good intentions.
(https://hoodline.com/2016/01/how-urban-renewal-destroyed-the-fillmore-in-order-to-save-it)
But also the creation of a class of politicians (Willie Brown in SF), whose political and personal fortunes were based upon their willingness to both promote and profit from the destruction.
(There is somewhere in my mind a pragmatic voice that says, "If someone robs your home and sleeps with your wife, you don't ask whether their intentions were pure, but if they take your home and bulldoze your neighborhood, but tell you it is for your own good, you just go along with it." I can't say if it is a memory, or just my inner monologue.)
The Columbia University expansion into Harlem continues the trend.
Sadly, most "conservatives" make hay from the resulting social dissolution, rather than taking up the fight and standing in solidarity with impacted communities. Perhaps, given the political shift, there will be more solidarity and less hay. Perhaps the emergence of leaders like Corrin Rankin can make a difference. https://cagop.org/meet-our-chairwoman
I heard some of this growing up. So sad. So wrong!! Thank you for the truth! 🙏