“Urban Renewal”
To address so-called “urban blight” in the United States, the federal government, in coordination with states and cities, passed the Housing Act of 1949. This act was the first in a series of policies that “were designed to provide the money for retooling the city, preparing for the postwar era, and switching from the war machine to a new means of productivity” (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 57). Thompson Fullilove (2016) found that “once those [i.e., blighted] areas had been defined, the city had the task of developing a ‘workable plan’… once the plan was approved, the designated areas could be seized by using the government’s power of eminent domain” (p. 58).
After the land was seized and its occupants—mostly African American occupants—displaced, cities then partnered with developers to build “businesses, educational and cultural institutions, and residences for middle- and upper-income white people. In some instances, high-rise public housing projects were built on the cleared land” (p. 59).
“Urban blight” became yet another euphemism that gave white politicians and commercial developers access to areas of the city deemed valuable for economic development. Despite representing some of the city’s most depressed residents in need of revitalization, African Americans were pushed out, relocated to another depressed area of the city, and left in the same if not worse circumstances.
Blockbusting
As this development was occurring, real estate speculators were increasing their use of a prejudice-driven tactic called blockbusting to clear entire neighborhoods once populated by middle- or upper-class whites and selling or renting houses at large profits to African Americans who had few choices for home ownership. At its most basic level, blockbusting was the process of scaring white people out of neighborhoods so corrupt investors could buy their houses at a reduced price and then sell or rent those same houses to African Americans at a huge profit. Historian Edward Orser (1994) noted that blockbusting was
The intentional action of real estate speculators to place an African American resident in a house on a previously all-white block for the express purpose of panicking the whites into selling for the profit to be gained by buying low and selling high. Blockbusting stepped into the artificial void created by the dual housing market [where whites could buy wherever they wanted but Blacks could not], relying upon African American housing needs and white racial fears to manipulate the process of racial change for their own ends. In doing so, they provided a commodity to African Americans that they previously had been illegitimately denied. But the transaction was typically exploitative, victimizing both sellers and buyers. (p. 84-85)
Once white owners sold their houses to speculators at a loss, African Americans were then duped into contract or lease option housing schemes that prevented them from owning the homes they thought they were buying. Home contracts did not require down payments or closing costs from buyers. These terms were initially attractive to African Americans with little or no credit and considered “high-risk” because of their race and lower income. But, unknown to the buyers, these housing contracts were not real mortgages (Orser, 1994, p. 91). The person who listed the home sale—a real estate speculator—held the home title and maintained the mortgage with a bank or lender. In turn, the speculator established a legally binding contract with the “buyer,” usually an African American family.
Within these complex home contracts small-print terms allowed the speculators to raise rent or terminate contracts at any point for almost any reason, which happened frequently. Some of these contracts were even verbal agreements, and so even easier to dissolve. Once the speculator declared the contract null and void, the family would have to vacate the home. Then the process would start all over again with another unsuspecting “buyer” eager to escape old and neglected neighborhoods (Orser, 1994, p. 91). Rothstein (2017) notes that it was “[t]he FHS’s redlining [that] necessitated the contract sale system for [B]lack home owners unable to obtain conventional mortgages, and this created the conditions for neighborhood deterioration” (p. 97).
In Baltimore, the Edmonson Village (Orser, 1994, p. 4) and Fulton Avenue (Pietila, 2010, p. 89) areas experienced this cycle of blockbusting and contract housing. But there were many other neighborhoods that collapsed into a cycle of poverty due to blockbusting and contract housing. The rapid increase of blockbusting and new availability of GI Bill suburban homes led to the massive out-migration of white people from U.S. cities including Baltimore. This became known as “white flight.” In turn, the tax base of the city collapsed, leaving urban areas depressed and African Americans with fewer and fewer properties they could purchase. This situation made an already bad housing shortage worse (Orser, 1994, p. 4).
Today, the results of this destructive process are evident by the thousands of vacant rowhouses throughout Baltimore in neighborhoods like Park Heights, Druid Hill, and Ashburton (Orser, 1994, p. 94). The long, brutal history of slavery, segregation, redlining, blockbusting, contract housing, prejudiced employment, and other forms of systemic racism eventually led people to organize and rise up in resistance through the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Civil Rights
The ongoing nationwide housing crisis for African Americans and other forms of systemic racism led to significant civil unrest in the 1950’s (Feagin, 2014, pp. 155-157). While a number of civil rights advancements were made—many supported by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the NAACP—positive steps like Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka which desegregated schools, did little to reduce the overall impact of segregation. Civil rights advanced at a slow and sometimes violent pace (Feagin, 2014, p. 274). As the 1950’s ended and the 1960’s began, national civil rights leaders like Medgar Evers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged to champion Black resistance to systemic racism. In 1963, Medgar Evers was assassinated, which led to serious unrest in Maryland. Pietila found that “In Maryland, boycotts and sit-ins erupted into rioting in the Eastern Shore town of Cambridge,” and that the governor “declared martial law and sent 425 National Guardsmen to quell the violence with the help of state troopers” (p. 189).
The civil rights movement did, however, produce some success. President John F. Kennedy, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, helped the U.S. Congress pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was meant to end race-based discrimination. This legislation and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were steps in the right direction, but as with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments passed after the Civil War, legal rights did not automatically create social and economic ones. Local governments and local institutions of housing, real estate, and education resisted federal laws as much as possible, especially in the south, which led to widespread civic upheaval in 1967 and 1968 (Feagin, 2014, pp. 204-205).
Johnson’s War on Crime
In 1964, as President Johnson prepared to sign the Voting Rights Act into law, he also signed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act. This Act represented a part of Johnson’s new “war on crime,” which aimed at cleaning up urban violence and stemming the tide of what some saw as a downward trend towards increased societal disintegration. The Act “offered a response to the threat of future disorder by establishing a direct role for the federal government in local police operations, court systems, and state prisons for the first time in American history” (Hinton, 2016, p. 2).
The Law Enforcement Assistance Act and its sister the Safe Streets Act of 1968, not only increased the power of the federal government to engage in local policing, but they also provided millions of dollars to “promote the modernization of law enforcement” (p. 2). Existing views within criminology asserted that Black individuals were predisposed towards violence. The expansion of America’s “carceral state” meant that the law enforcement prejudice against African Americans was now better funded and organized at the federal level.
Historian Elizabeth Hinton (2016) noted that “[i]t is one of the essential ironies of American history that this punitive campaign [the war on crime] began during an era of liberal reform and at the height of the civil rights revolution, a moment when the nation seemed ready to embrace policies that would fully realize its egalitarian founding values” (p. 1). In reality, Johnson’s “war on crime” tapped into the systemic racism already prevalent in America’s criminal justice system. As civil right protests and protests against the Vietnam war erupted across the United States, the Johnson Administration blamed African American men (p. 13). Describing this focus, Hinton (2016) noted
This group [Black men] quickly emerged as the foremost target of federal policymakers. It seemed that antipoverty programs had failed to reach the ‘hard-core’ black urban youth who appeared particularly susceptible to collective violence, and by extension, crime. Without evoking race explicitly, the White House and Congress then built a set of punitive policies that focused on controlling this group by expanding the field of surveillance and patrol around them. (p. 13)
The “war on crime” thus became a justification for law enforcement to go after Vietnam war protesters and to keep African American men under surveillance. Given the deeply ingrained ideology of black men as naturally violent and aggressive, more prone to commit crime and more resistant to government, it is not surprising that most law enforcement officials continued arresting black men in much larger quantities than white men.
MLK Assassination and Uprisings
In 1967, growing tensions erupted into what came to be known as the “Long, Hot Summer of 1967.” Race uprisings—167 of them in large and small cities across America—began in Newark, New Jersey in response to housing and employment shortages and in response to the decreasing economic opportunities for African Americans (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 153). In Newark alone, 26 people died, and nationwide, the revolts caused more than 100 deaths (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 150). Though Baltimore did not experience uprisings in 1967, segregated housing in Baltimore was still a flashpoint. The dual housing market created by real estate speculators and developers still strongly benefited whites and left African Americans with little or no options for safe, affordable homes. This racially charged situation inspired local activists to invite Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Baltimore “to lead a march against segregated housing on Memorial Day” 1967 (Pietila, 2010, p. 192). However, Dr. King never had a chance to march in Baltimore: on April 4, 1968, he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
The nationwide response to Dr. King’s assassination, the Holy Week Uprising, was devastating. Many urban African American communities experienced unrest more destructive than the 1967 uprisings. Cities were torn apart, and black communities that were already stressed by decades of systemic racism suffered further isolation. Baltimore experienced its First Race Uprising following Dr. King’s assassination. Protesters in downtown Baltimore caused massive property damage (Pietila, 2010, p. 195).
The outcomes of the First Race Uprising, like the outcomes of racial unrest across the country, had a severe impact on Baltimore’s urban life. As Pietila noted, “Baltimore emerged from three nights of mayhem…with six persons dead, seven hundred injured, more than a thousand businesses ransacked and destroyed, countless houses torched, and more than five thousand people arrested” (p. 196). Like the Cambridge uprising in 1963, the National Guard was deployed in Baltimore in 1968, a pattern that continued in the 2015 Freddie Gray unrest. Some downtown neighborhoods impacted by the 1968 uprising still sit vacant today. Just as physical scars from the violence run deep in the physical locations of the uprising, the emotional scars run deep in the memories of people who experienced the unrest. Residents of Baltimore who in 2019 are in their sixties and seventies would have been in their twenties in 1967 and 1968.
In response to the Civil Rights movement and to the 1967 and 1968 race uprisings, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which made discrimination based on “race, color, religion, or national origin” a federal crime. Despite the new law of the land, however, African Americans still suffered race-based discrimination in most areas of their lives. Feagin (2014) found that, “After the 1968 Civil Rights Act went into effect, residential segregation across the color line became unofficial and informal, as it remains today” (p. 172).
When the 1968 Civil Rights Act was passed, the country was still embroiled in the “war on crime,” which continued to disproportionately single out African American men. An extension of the “war on crime” came with a new war – the “war on drugs.” The war on drugs emerged from the racially charged and anti-war environment of the 1968 presidential election. It introduced a new set of racially influenced laws that severely disadvantaged Black individuals (especially men) in the criminal justice system.
Nixon’s War on Drugs
Race uprisings in the late 1960s and ongoing demonstrations against the war in Vietnam left many American voters feeling uncertain and afraid of the future. Richard M. Nixon, the Republican presidential candidate from California, played on these fears by inventing a “war on drugs,” which targeted war demonstrators and African Americans. A shrewd politician, Nixon used his war on drugs as part of his campaign even though the identified “problem” – drugs – and the articulated strategy in response were based on questionable data. In an interview for the book Smoke and mirrors: The war on drugs and the politics of failure, Dan Baum interviewed John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s Domestic Affairs Advisor and White House Counsel. During the interview, Ehrlichman revealed the true motivations behind Nixon’s war on drugs strategy:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and [B]lack people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or [B]lack, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and [B]lacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did (as cited in Baum, 2016, Par. 2).
Baum continued,
Nixon’s invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since—Democrat and Republican alike—has found it equally useful for one reason or another. Meanwhile, the growing cost of the drug war is now impossible to ignore…one of every eight [B]lack men has been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction. (2016, Par. 4)
Nixon’s strategy paid off. When the sitting President, Lyndon B. Johnson, announced that he was not seeking re-election on March 31, 1968 and when the strongest Democratic candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan on June 5, 1968, Nixon’s path to the White House was secured.
While racial profiling in America was not new, America’s relationship between race, drugs, and the justice system would never be the same once Nixon took office (Baum, 2016). The impact of the racist approach to drug laws on African Americans has been devastating. According to the Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (2018), the latest incarceration statistics illustrate the disproportionate sentencing of African Americans in the United States, especially men:
Black-to-white racial disparity was also observed among males. Black males ages 18 to 19 were 11.8 times more likely to be imprisoned than white males of the same age…overall, 15% of state prisoners at year-end 2015 had been convicted of a drug offense…in comparison, nearly half (47%) of federal prisoners service time in September 2016…were convicted of a drug offense. (Department of Justice, p. 1)
Since 1968, entire Black neighborhoods have been devastated by the racist drug policies which, essentially, have left households devoid of fathers, uncles, brothers, and sons (Coates, 2015). Much like the dissolution of family that occurred under slavery, the incarceration of Black men continued to keep African American families separated.
The Freeway Revolt
During Nixon’s term, African Americans were subjugated to more than just racist drug laws. Using the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 as support, federal and state governments passed racist zoning and “redevelopment” laws that forced hundreds of thousands of African Americans from their city homes and into other equally marginalized neighborhoods or poorly constructed public housing. This mass displacement was enacted to make room for “beltways” around cities and freeways through urban centers, which were quickly being transformed from “blighted” Black neighborhoods to profitable commercial centers, such as sports arenas (Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 66). In cities like New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Baltimore, this racist redevelopment led to more uprisings that became known as the “highway revolts” (in Baltimore this was known as the “freeway revolt”) where community organizations protested and filed legal action against these projects.
Organizations like Baltimore’s Relocation Action Movement (RAM) and the Movement Against Destruction (MAD) argued that beltways and county zoning laws prevented African Americans from leaving cities and that freeways displaced Black families and divided their neighborhoods. They also asserted that these racist policies profited white developers and improved commuting for white, middle-class suburbanites while doing little for African Americans (Pietila, 2010, pp. 211, 212, 219; Thompson Fullilove, 2016, p. 64).