The new deal
In response to the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, his administration, and the U.S. Congress developed the New Deal to reinvigorate the U.S. economy, put people to work, and provide assistance to those who could not work. The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Social Security Administration were two of the many organizations launched by the U.S. federal government as part of the New Deal. Despite a rhetoric of lifting all, the racialized system within the United States meant that whites gained from these programs more than Black people did. Feagin (2014) found that
Black workers continued to suffer much discrimination from the whites who administered the New Deal agencies…in most federal relief programs [B]lack workers got lower wages than whites, were employed only as unskilled laborers, and were employed only after whites were. (p. 58)
Housing continued to be a problem for African Americans, and in fact, grew worse during the Depression. Feagin (2014) wrote that “New Deal housing programs increased residential segregation areas by restricting the new federally guaranteed home loans to homes in segregated areas and by locating public housing so that it would be segregated” (p. 58).
To help address the housing shortage, the federal government created two organizations as part of the New Deal. The Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC), created in 1933, was designed to reduce bank foreclosures by helping owners refinance their loans. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), created as part of the National Housing Act of 1934, was also designed to decrease home foreclosures caused by the Depression. Working within the existing racist mindset, however, the FHA supported segregationist policies already dividing many cities. They refused to provide funding to developers unless they committed to exclude African Americans from specific communities. Not only did they manipulate developers, but the FHA
[R]efused to insure mortgages for black families in neighborhoods—a policy that came to be known as ‘redlining,’ because neighborhoods were colored red on government maps to indicate that these neighborhoods should be considered poor credit risks as a consequence of African Americans living in (or near) them. (Rothstein, 2015, p. 207)
African Americans suffered disproportionately under the Great Depression. The programs created to ameliorate some of the effects of the economic crash benefited poor whites but blocked poor Black Americans. Housing remained one of the key mechanisms for enforcing the racial divide in the United States, but the programs created to help poor Americans move up became the means of keeping African Americans segregated and restricted.
The Eugenics color map
Redlining, the color code of HOLC rating system, was influenced by eugenics and biased race research. Rothstein (2017) noted that “[a] neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes” (p. 64). In short, neighborhoods populated by decedents of English, Germans, Scots, Irish, and Scandinavians were far more likely to be greenlined (FHA loan eligible) than African American neighborhoods, which were usually redlined or yellowlined (non-FHA loan eligible). The ghettos created by early neighborhood segregation in response to the First Great Migration were solidified through redlining by federal programs meant to assist people in need. The blatant racism of HOLC mapping becomes even clearer in the appraisal notes written for different neighborhoods. One appraiser in St. Louis, justified redlining a middle-class neighborhood for “it had little or no value today … due to the colored element now controlling the district” (p. 64).
The systemic racism underpinning these HOLC maps devastated African American home ownership and generational wealth (wealth and security passed from parents to children) produced by home equity. Feagin (2014) argued that “A great many white families secured their significant family assets as a result of an array of white “affirmative action” programs, including large-scale federal and state homestead acts from the 1860s to the 1930s” (pp. 20-21). He further argued that “Many whites accumulated enough home equity to use later on for start-up capital for businesses or funding education for children and grandchildren” (p. 212). These economic options were not open to people of color who had been legally relegated to sub-par neighborhoods and then told that those areas were now even less desirable because of the federal government’s redlining policy (Rothstein, 2015).
In Baltimore, the HOLC maps benefited economically successful white neighborhoods like Homeland and Roland Park, which were designated green and blue respectively. Likewise, HOLC maps hindered underprivileged African American neighborhoods like Sandtown and Winchester, which were designated yellow and red respectively. The FHA and private financial institutions refused to underwrite mortgages in places like Sandtown and Winchester, or did so at exorbitant rates, which contributed to their ongoing cycle of poverty. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights noted in 1973 that the “housing industry, aided and abetted by Government, must bear the primary responsibility for the legacy of segregated housing… Government and private industry came together to create a system of residential segregation” (Rothstein, 2017, p. 75).
Today, if one superimposes the HOLC housing maps with maps of poverty in Baltimore City, the result will be an almost identical match—yellowlined and redlined neighborhoods still struggle, while many blue and green neighborhoods thrive. The Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America (Nelson et al., 2018) project and the article “After nearly a century, redlining still divides Baltimore City” on the Citylab website illustrate this reality (Bliss, 2015).
WWII baltimore
During the Depression and before WWII, African Americans in Baltimore continued to struggle. To help struggling residents, some community organizations rallied for equal rights and equal pay. These organizations included the local chapter of the NAACP and the Cooperative Women’s Civic League, as well as local labor unions, such as The Caulker’s Association, the Railway Men’s Benevolent and Protective Association, the Colored Projectionists’ Association, and the International Longshoreman’s Association (Skotnes, 2014, pp. 24-25, 35). Together with the Black-owned newspaper, the Afro-American, these organizations made progress against segregation in some areas of workers’ rights, housing, and education (Orser, 1994, pp. 69-70).
However, the advent of WWII changed Baltimore drastically and caused a commercial boom that increased housing and labor demand in all sectors of the city. Peitila (2010) wrote that “After Pearl Harbor, Baltimore became a twenty-four-hour city, living according to the peculiar rhythms of shift work…twenty-eighth in population, Maryland ranked as the twelfth state in the value of its war contracts” (p. 75). Due to the worker shortage and despite the state’s history of slavery and systemic racism, African American men and women were hired to help in the war effort. But these workers also needed housing, and Baltimore had few houses to spare for Black people.
An example of the segregated housing in Baltimore during WWII are the communities of Dundalk and Turner Station located on the south eastern side of the city. Dundalk is a small company town originally built by Bethlehem Steel (then one of the world’s largest steel companies) and expanded during WWII to accommodate white workers. However, Bethlehem Steel was unwilling to build similar housing for African Americans moving to Baltimore to support the war effort. These black families were forced to build their own homes in Turner Station, a small neighborhood next to Dundalk. David and Henrietta Lacks were two of the many African Americans who moved to Turner Station seeking a better life.
In 1941, David, Henrietta, and their four children moved from rural Virginia to Turner Station so David could work at Bethlehem Steel. After giving birth to their fifth child in 1951, Henrietta developed cervical cancer and sought treatment on August 8 at Johns Hopkins Hospital. As part of her treatment, but without her knowledge or consent, Henrietta’s doctor, Dr. Howard Jones, removed cells from her cervix and gave them to a cancer researcher. These cells, now called “HeLa” cells, would later be instrumental in advancing biomedical research worldwide because they are “immortal,” that is “they will divide again and again and again” (Faussadier, 2017). HeLa cells “are some of the most extensively used cell lines in Biomedical research” (research on polio, cancer, HIV/AIDS), yet neither Henrietta nor her family benefited from their use (Faussadier, 2017). Henrietta Lacks died on October 4, 1951 never knowing that her cells had been removed and used for medical research (Skloot, 2011, p. 86). Her story illustrates the experience of many blacks in Baltimore whose labor and services were exploited without appropriate pay, opportunity, or respect in return.
By 1942, the high labor demand for the war effort and the accompanying low residential availability for African Americans led to a housing crunch as “three thousand additional blacks [arrived] in the city each month” (Pietila, 2010, p.84). Jobs in the defense industry sparked the “Second Great Migration,” where millions of African Americans fled the south and moved north to cities like Baltimore. The migration of millions of African Americans pushed these northern cities into a housing crisis. So, what at first was an upturn in the economic situation for African Americans in Baltimore during WWII became a housing catastrophe because whites did not want people of color living in or near their neighborhoods. This situation forced African American families to co-occupy homes with other families, and some people of color were even housed in segregated public facilities (Feagin, 2014, p. 58).
Fearing a greater influx of African Americans, however, Baltimore, refused federal money to build permanent public housing for Black families and instead opted for temporary “trailers so that they can be easily moved out after the war is over” (as cited in Pietila, 2010, p. 80). Despite this segregation and systemic racism, large numbers of African Americans also enlisted in the armed services to defend the nation that continued to deny them equal rights and equal participation in American life.
The GI Bill
One benefit of serving in WWII was the promise of the GI Bill, which provided veterans with assistance through education, job training, and low-cost mortgages. However, African Americans were often excluded from these benefits and were hired for “mostly menial and low-paying” jobs (Feagin, 2014, p. 59). Political scientist Ira Katznelson (2005) found that Black veterans “were refused loans for nakedly racist reasons, targeted as being high-risk candidates… in New York and the northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill supported home purchases by non-whites” (p. 140). Katznelson also found that the GI Bill “produced practices that were more racially distinct and arguably more cruel than any other New Deal-era program. The performance of the GI Bill mocked the promise of fair treatment” (p. 141). When discussing the African American experience with Title III of the GI Bill, which covered property loans, historian Kathleen Frydl (2009) wrote “it is more accurate simply to say that [B]lacks could not use this particular title” (as cited in Coates, 2014).
With few options for mortgage assistance and meager income from low-paying jobs, thousands of African American veterans had little choice but to move to - or remain in - segregated urban neighborhoods, most of which had been yellowlined or redlined by the HOLC and FHA. Public housing was available, but it was temporary. In Baltimore, attempts to integrate African Americans into the city were foiled by racist government agendas, so new black housing projects were relegated to sites like Cherry Hill, which was a less desirable area given its proximity to a municipal incinerator (Pietila, 2010, p. 86). As a result of these racist policies, African American populations remained concentrated in socio-economically challenged areas.
Segregation reinforced economic disparity, depressed housing costs, and increasingly separated struggling sections of the city from the thriving parts of town. Urban researcher Hans Skifter Andersen (2002) noted, areas experiencing urban decay or “blight” often become ensnared in a cycle of “self-perpetuating negative social, economic and physical processes … that make them increasingly different from the rest of the city” (p. 153). Anderson described the structural and personal dynamic that characterized Baltimore’s urban decline,
Segregation is a product of structural factors in cities and of decisions taken by individual households. In their search for location, people choose between places that have different perceived qualities regarding housing, physical and social environment, access to transport, jobs, services and natural beauties, and status and cultural identity. When these qualities are more unevenly distributed in space, which means that differences between “bad” and “good” or “ordinary” areas are more obvious, segregation will tend to become stronger because the incentives for house hunters to choose or avoid certain urban areas will be increased. (p. 155)
Further, he notes that once begun, segregation initiates a downward spiral that further isolates these areas and creates increased poverty and displacement.
Segregation takes place as an interaction between social and spatial differentiation and leads to a concentration of poor and excluded people – or special ethnic groups – in certain parts of the cities. This concentration leads… to changes in the quality of the neighbourhoods and to an exclusion of places as possible living areas. This exclusion of places then adds to spatial differentiation in the cities and increases segregation. Another self-perpetuating process … indicates that living in deprived housing estates could lead to further social exclusion of people staying there, which again tends to increase social inequality. (p. 155)
As the United States, and Baltimore, emerged from the Great Depression and World War II, underlying structural inequalities and racial tensions remained. In many ways, cities replaced the plantation as the visual depictions of racial inequality in America.
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