White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  I am writing about the geography and dogma of anti-Black oppression because I care about descendants and because geography as caste ensnares us all. Under the old Jim Crow, Blackness was the primary marker for discrimination and exclusion. American caste now exists at the intersection of race, economic status, and geography, and this system of sorting and exclusion has been hardening. It thrives on certain cultural assumptions—that affluent space is earned and hood living is the deserved consequence of individual behavior.

  Like race, “ghetto” is a social construct. At some point, this word used to describe high-poverty neighborhoods became pejorative, as powerful as the N-word. To paraphrase sociologist Elijah Anderson, American society is very invested in the ghetto as a dangerous place, where people at the bottom of the social order live.8 Our words and mechanisms for subordination have changed. The problem of Black belonging continues, but it is most felt by descendants in the hood.

  Descendants are the group least likely in American society to experience the accoutrements of citizenship. Exit from the hood and from the bottom of the social order is improbable. Among the modern state action designed to contain descendants are militaristic policing in which Blackness itself becomes the pretext for stopping people, mass incarceration, the criminalization of poverty, a school-to-prison pipeline, and housing and school policies that invest in, rather than discourage, poverty concentration.

  Less understood is that concentrated Black poverty facilitates poverty-free affluent white space and habits of favor and disfavor by public and private actors. White space would not exist without the hood and government at all levels created and still reifies this racialized residential order. In particular, this book illuminates three anti-Black processes that undergird the entire system of American residential caste—boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance. Many people acquiesce in or participate in these processes. Yet the practices necessary to maintaining residential caste also undermine most non-Black people. The successful have seceded from the struggling. Highly educated and affluent people tend to live in their own neighborhoods and support policies like exclusionary zoning and neighborhood school assignments that lock others out and concentrate advantage.9

  As with slavery and follow-on institutions like peonage and convict leasing, the hood is a source of wealth extraction and exploitation that benefits American capitalists—from the prison industrial complex to Opportunity Zones that enabled investors, through loopholes, to shelter 100 percent of capital gains in luxury properties rather than distressed hoods the program was marketed to help. In another example, in the 2000s, predatory lenders targeted segregated Black neighborhoods for their most usurious subprime mortgages. This predation culminated in a foreclosure crisis that eviscerated Black and Latinx wealth, reduced the Black homeownership rate to 1968 levels, and eliminated gains of the civil rights revolution in housing.10 White homeownership rebounded while the rate of Black homeownership continued to decline under unchecked financial processes that disparately harmed. By 2020, the Black-white homeownership gap had widened to a chasm not seen since 1890.11 And yet we don’t tell stories that encourage the prosecution and jailing of white-collar criminals who steal Black wealth and create national financial crises. We have a pervasive narrative about Black “thugs” but no similar policydriving story about corporate criminals.

  While state and private actors plunder, extract, surveil, and contain in the hood, they overinvest in and protect white space. Apologists have constructed many modern stereotypes to support the status quo and retain the benefits of exclusion and exclusivity—from golden schools, neighborhoods, and infrastructure to artisanal food. The idea that descendants belong apart from everyone else is the often-unspoken-but-sometimes-shouted-out-loud norm animating most fair housing and school integration debates. Stereotypes also hide the fact that concentrated poverty is by no means solely a Black problem. The footprint of concentrated poverty is expanding; the percentage of Blacks, Latinx, and whites who live in such conditions is rising. Concentrated poverty grows fastest in the suburbs.12 Yet it is far easier for politicians and media figures to stoke division among those mutually locked out of opportunity than to build multiracial coalitions that transcend division and demand fairness from elites.

  Ultimately, I argue for abolition of the processes of anti-Black residential caste and repair, the building of new institutions of opportunity for descendants, and the nation. The goal should be to transform the lens through which society sees residents of poor Black neighborhoods, from presumed thug to presumed citizen, and to alter the relationship of the state with these neighborhoods, from punitive to caring. I offer positive examples of places that are beginning to do this. I also call on the state at all levels to cease and desist from habits borne of white supremacy. This work will be difficult, perhaps as arduous and long-arced as the movements for abolition of slavery and modern civil rights. There is cause for hope. Black voters mattered in 2020. Joe Biden centered racial equity and justice in his presidential campaign and won decisively. Black voters mobilized in Georgia for Senate runoff races and helped clinch a governing, though bare, majority for Democrats in Congress, with the tie-breaking privileges of the first Black, South Asian, and woman to be vice president, Kamala Harris. A plurality of whites and sizeable majorities of Asian, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people prevailed in politics. This coalition can grow and pursue saner, just policies both nationally and locally. Despite backlash and fatigue, Black Americans have more allies than they have ever had in US history. Together, we must first understand the processes of residential caste, then dismantle them.

  CHAPTER 1

  BALTIMORE

  A Study in American Caste

  The Black Butterfly and the White L. A public health researcher coined these monikers for distinct cultural spaces in the city that invented racial zoning but also inspired descendants like Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall to chart paths for justice.1 Baltimore is illustrative of a wider pattern, of a past and present of investing in exclusionary areas and disinvesting in Black neighborhoods. Other metropolitan regions with large populations of descendants are caught in the same vicious cycle.

  At the onset of the Civil War, Baltimore was home to the nation’s largest free urban Black population. About 90 percent of its twenty-seven thousand Blacks were free in 1860. Like other strains of humanity that found their way to Baltimore—Jewish, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Italian, Irish—African Americans lived in small enclaves adjacent to other groups. Public places, including parks, theaters, hotels, restaurants, and department stores, were open to Blacks as late as 1905, though attitudes were changing. White Baltimoreans who had lived with a sizeable population of Negroes for generations suddenly could no longer tolerate proximity to them in any realm. With the rise of eugenics, there was a growing intolerance among the wealthy for anyone who diverged from affluent protestant whiteness. Exclusion and exclusivity secured property values and social status.2

  The movement for racial zoning began when Blacks moved to McCulloh Street, two blocks from the graceful mansions of Eutaw Place. A prominent Black lawyer, W. Ashbie Hawkins, purchased a house at 1834 McCulloh and rented it to his brother-in-law and law partner, George W. F. McMechen. McMechen had graduated from what is now Morgan State University and Yale Law School. Other Blacks with solid incomes, including a postal clerk and school teachers, rented houses on McCulloh. Blacks occupied the west side of the block and whites remained on the east side.

  White residents took umbrage at their new neighbors. They formed the McCulloh Street–Madison Avenue Protective Association, resolving: “The colored people should not be allowed to encroach on some of the best residential streets in the city and force white people to vacate their homes.” Whites threw stones and bricks into the McMechens’ new home and dumped tar on their steps. One particularly incensed white neighbor campaigned for a new city ordinance that would criminalize Blacks moving to a majority-white block and vic
e versa and the city council embraced it.3

  Mayor J. Barry Mahool, known nationally as a progressive social-justice reformer signed the law. “Baltimore Tries Drastic Plan of Race Segregation,” a New York Times headline hollered on Christmas Day 1910. The mayor, interviewed at length for the article, bemoaned that Baltimore had about one hundred thousand “colored” people or one-sixth of the city’s population, and that well-to-do Blacks were buying property in white neighborhoods, unlike their allegedly more deferential brethren in the Deep South, who knew their place. On many blocks, Mahool complained, whites were forced to live with Blacks, and panicked whites often sold. Elsewhere, Mahool made his position and racial ideology clear: “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidents of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority.”4 The Times featured an image of the handsome, dapper, and presumably disease-free McMechen.5

  Racial zoning was born, and numerous southern and midwestern cities followed suit. W. Ashbie Hawkins fought Baltimore’s law for the next seven years. He, too, was a descendant. His father, up from slavery, had served as a reverend. Hawkins became an advocate for racial equality. An alumnus of historically Black Morgan State, he had enrolled at the University of Maryland School of Law in 1889. A year later, the school succumbed to demands from white students, forcing him and another Black student to leave. After completing his legal education at Howard University, Hawkins immediately began to agitate.

  On August 20, 1892, the 273rd anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown, Hawkins wrote a column for a new Black-owned paper, The Afro-American, under the headline “An Alarming Condition.” He decried “the very poor facilities provided . . . for the education of colored children.” Their schoolhouses and equipment were “a disgrace,” their school terms “too short.” And the state showed “reckless disregard of the character” and professional training of their teachers. He wrote a few years before the US Supreme Court endorsed the fiction in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate could be equal for Black people. Hawkins anticipated the Negro’s fraught legal position: “We have a right to every facility offered others, but unfortunately for us we do not seem to have the power to enforce it.”6

  This did not stop Hawkins from trying. He was a leader in the Niagara Movement, founded by W. E. B. Du Bois and others. Hawkins filed lawsuits challenging residential segregation, unequal pay for Negro teachers, and segregation and unequal conditions on trains and boats. In one case, a Negro woman, Dr. Julia P. H. Coleman, wrote the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, headquarters in New York in 1918, reporting that she had attempted to enter the ladies’ car of a train in Baltimore, bound for Washington, DC. Conductors had barred her and pushed her to the pavement. “I went to the nearest telephone and called up Mr. Ashby [sic] Hawkins,” she wrote. She insisted on bringing a test case “for the benefit of the race” and asked the NAACP to lend its support.

  Together, she and Hawkins prevailed. Hawkins explained in a letter to the NAACP that they had won an initial judgment and one cent in damages, but he appealed and won additional damages and reaffirmation from the Baltimore courts “that this railroad had no authority to segregate interstate passengers.” He vowed to keep filing cases against the railroad predicting it would “get tired of undertaking to keep up this segregation.” Hawkins became Thurgood Marshall’s hero and a model for the NAACP’s new legal department.7

  Hawkins also challenged the racial zoning ordinance that was enacted in Baltimore. He filed a lawsuit and succeeded in having early versions set aside, though a fourth version of the law survived. Hawkins was undeterred. As lawyer for the NAACP, he filed a brief opposing a racial zoning ordinance in Louisville, Kentucky, in Buchanan v. Warley, in which the Supreme Court struck down all racial zoning, in 1917. The posture of that case surely helped. A white property owner who wished to sell to a Negro succeeded, with the assistance of the NAACP, in convincing the Court that this violated his property rights. Hawkins continued to fight residential restrictions for Black Americans until he died in 1941. He also agitated through politics, running as an independent for US Senate in 1920. It was a protest campaign for “race representation,” he said, to force the Republican Party of Lincoln to which Blacks hewed to support Negro candidates in local and legislative races and respond to Black community interests.8 In his final campaign plea to Black voters, published in 1920, again in an opinion piece in The Afro-American, Hawkins articulated inequities endured by descendants:

  For fifty years we have religiously supported the candidates of the Republican Party . . . and it is an open secret that our reward for this loyalty is nothing more nor less than studied neglect. . . . the local Republican party has done nothing to remedy the miserable condition of our rural school system . . . it has connived at “Jimcrow” regulations . . . it has refused to compel the transportation companies to abide by the law . . . The letter of the law provides for equal accommodations . . . and still no State agency can be induced to compel compliance therewith. . . . what use is this party to us?9

  Hawkins then argued that Maryland counties controlled by white Republicans taxed colored families and used those funds solely for white schools. “Not a cent of local taxes is spent on the education of colored children,” he protested. “We are expected to do the voting and nothing else . . .” Negroes, he argued, were not allowed to have positions of responsibility or material rewards that whites did not want them to have. He called on Black voters to show “race pride” and vote their interests.10

  Hawkins, left, and McMechen were brothers-in-law who practiced law together until Hawkins died in 1941. A high school in Baltimore is named after McMechen.

  Though Hawkins succeeded in eliminating racial zoning, Baltimore’s segregationists turned to exclusionary tools deployed in every American city with a sizeable Black population. Wealthy Roland Park, at the northern edge of Baltimore, became one of the first streetcar suburbs in the United States to insert restrictive covenants in property deeds, which constrained owners from renting or selling to Blacks. But the Roland Park covenants included one exception. In the subsection titled Nuisances, deeds typically stated: “At no time shall . . . said tract or any part thereof, or any building erected thereon, be occupied by any negro or person of negro extraction. This prohibition, however, is not intended to include occupancy by a negro domestic servant.”11 Though white Baltimoreans enforced restrictive covenants throughout the city, they did not resort to acute violence, as whites did in places like Chicago.12

  A common practice of denying credit to African Americans spread when the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) mapped Baltimore during the Great Depression, applying the “hazardous” D rating to virtually every neighborhood where Blacks predominated or had “infiltrated.” This practice, known as “redlining,” institutionalized a two-tiered system of traditional lending and investment in white areas, predatory lending by speculators, and disinvestment in Black areas. Negroes were “dangerous” and “undesirable,” a “detrimental influence,” according to HOLC’s eugenics-infused underwriting standards. Jews were also marked as threatening to property values.

  Yet Black Baltimore had strengths. Sandtown-Winchester is currently associated with its felled native son, Freddie Gray, and grimness both real and imagined. In its heyday, this West Baltimore neighborhood was known as Baltimore’s Harlem. It brimmed with Black-owned businesses and nightclubs where Billie Holiday, cab Calloway, and others wowed audiences. After the neighborhood received the D rating from HOLC, it could not attract private investment for homes, and the city decided to place public housing intended solely for Black people there.13

  Only two Black neighborhoods evaded the D rating. W. Ashbie Hawkins lived in Wilson Park, a small enclave, restricted, ironically, to educated Blacks. A mile away, Black luminaries like W. E. B. Du Bois resided in tiny Morgan Park. Thes
e two strivers’ islands surrounded by whites, garnered the B, or “still desirable,” rating.14 Forever and always, the so-called Black community suffered class tensions, evident in a 1915 The Afro-American article, typical of the newspaper’s decades of crusading against segregation and exclusion. Under the heading “Segregation a Boon to Real Estate Sharps,” an unnamed reporter wrote that those Negroes who wanted to buy “desirable property” were forced to pay at least 20 percent more than whites and that, in segregated sections, colored folk paid extortionate rents for houses with falling ceilings and other badly needed repairs. The reporter observed that Negroes who were “conservative housekeepers, intelligent and . . . homeowners” would avoid declining areas that were attracting “unintelligent” renters and “undesirable persons.”15

  HOLC’s D rating tracked Baltimore’s Black population, which was contained in the west and east by restrictive covenants. HOLC gave color codes to each rating: A was green (“Best”), B was blue (“Still Desirable”), C was yellow (“Definitely Declining”), and D was red (“Hazardous”). Maps 1.1 and 1.2 of Baltimore, which appear in the insert of color-coded maps in this book, show how whiteness was valued, and Blackness devalued. Restrictive covenants and HOLC ratings worked in tandem to construct the “Black Butterfly” and the “White L” at the city center—geographically opposed places and identities that produce racial inequality to this day.

  During World War II, speculators made fortunes by buying properties in declining white areas adjacent to Black neighborhoods and reselling them to Blacks for as much as 80 percent more. They saddled Black buyers with substandard properties, in need of intense capital improvements for which no traditional banks would make loans. Descendants who wished to buy or improve their properties were relegated to the exploitive financing terms of speculators. Syndicates of private investors turned substandard housing into gold, providing the financing for usurious rent-to-buy land installment contracts to Negroes, who often never succeeded in gaining ownership, much less the funds to fix deteriorated housing.16