In 1966, Dr. King had joined the Chicago open housing movement, rented an apartment on the West Side, and participated in marches through white neighborhoods, sparking hostility and sometimes violence. When King led a group of seven hundred marchers through Marquette Park on the South Side, thousands of whites tried to thwart them. They jeered, threw rocks, bottles, and firecrackers. In video footage, King ducks as sounds like gunfire ring through the air. A racist David landed a stone on King’s head; the pacifist kneeled for a moment among supporters before rising to resume his nonviolent resistance. “I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today,” King later told reporters.6 He had become convinced that housing segregation was the critical mechanism for unequal distribution of public services—schools, hospitals, housing code enforcement, garbage collection, parks and recreation—and the Kerner Report would validate that sentiment.7
The report did not condone violence. It did, however, amplify the sources of Black grievance. Black ghettos convulsed with frustration about police brutality, rampant unemployment, substandard housing with unaffordable rents, sorry schools, racism and disrespect from whites, weak or nonexistent public services, and powerlessness to change anything. First among deeply held frustrations were police practices, which the commission subjected to withering scrutiny:
Police have come to symbolize white power, white racism and white repression. And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a “double standard” of justice and protection—one for Negroes and one for whites.8
A confrontation with police was often the last straw that ignited a revolt.
Social psychologist Kenneth Clark, in his book Dark Ghetto, an independent study of Harlem in the early 1960s, interviewed many residents. One, identified only as “Man, age about 33,” testified to how descendants experienced the police as something akin to overseers. “The white cops, they have a damn sadistic nature,” he said. “A bunch of us could be playing some music, or dancing, which we have as an outlet for ourselves. We can’t dance in the house, we don’t have clubs or things like that. So we’re out on the sidewalk . . . Right away here comes a cop. ‘You’re disturbing the peace!’ . . . Everyone is enjoying themselves . . . and he’ll want to chase everyone. And gets mad. I mean, he gets mad! We aren’t mad. He comes into the neighborhood, aggravated and mad.”9
The Kerner Report criticized the media for reporting on the disorders without communicating to its majority-white audience “a sense of the degradation, misery, and hopelessness of living in the ghetto.” The report explained that the typical rioter was a young male, lifelong resident, high-school dropout, though better educated than his nonrioting neighbor, and usually employed in a menial job. “He was proud of his race, extremely hostile to both whites and middle-class Negroes and, although informed about politics, highly distrustful of the political system.” He was seeking “fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens.” “Rather than rejecting the American system,” the report concluded, rioters “were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.”
In other words, Black rioters were ordinary Americans, as ordinary as an earlier generation of white participants in lynch mobs or a new generation of white terrorists who bombed, killed, or attacked civil rights protestors and integration pioneers. The commissioners feared that America was lurching toward permanent separation and inequality and that racial polarization would lead to the destruction of democracy. In the report, they argued that the nation had three choices: continue present policies, enrich the ghetto, or integrate Black Americans into the society outside the ghetto. They concluded the country had to choose and vigorously pursue integration although they also called for immediate investments in ghetto neighborhoods. “The primary goal must be a single society, in which every citizen will be free to live and work according to his capabilities and desires, not his color,” the report concluded.
The commissioners’ recommendations, bold and comprehensive, aimed to dismantle segregation. On the housing front, they declared all federal housing programs “must be given a new thrust aimed at overcoming the prevailing patterns of racial segregation.” They called for a comprehensive federal open-housing law and the construction of six million new units of affordable housing outside the ghetto. They also recommended creating two million new jobs, sharply increasing federal funding to eliminate de facto school segregation and provide year-round quality compensatory education in disadvantaged schools, increasing police training, and transforming welfare to a viable income-support system.
Many whites resisted the Kerner Report’s accusations of racism and complicity. An irritated President Johnson ignored its recommendations with one exception. Johnson did follow through on its call to create more police intelligence units, and they were used to surveil Black Power organizations like the Black Panthers.10 After declaring a War on Crime in 1965, he had begun to devote greater resources to policing than the War on Poverty, as uprisings across the nation unfolded. In an important 2016 book, Yale historian and law professor Elizabeth Hinton describes how the Johnson administration abandoned direct investment in grassroots programs that empowered Black citizens to solve community problems. Its early investments in policing were borne of a lens of pathology and delinquency applied to Black urban youth and a profound fear of more uprisings. Black youth and radical activists that were stereotyped as prone to collective violence and criminality were marked for surveillance and social control. Johnson’s War on Crime initiated law-and-order investments that marked the beginning of the federal turn toward a punitive, carceral approach to urban problems, Hinton showed.11 Richard Nixon used the Kerner Report as a messaging prop in his campaign for the presidency. He protested that the report “blames everybody for the riots except the perpetrators of the riots.”12 Nixon rode to the presidency on a law-and-order rhetoric, and the liberal cross-racial coalition that had supported the New Deal, civil rights, and Great Society programs soon collapsed.
AFTER 1968
As the Kerner Report suggested, the processes of ghettoization and segregation were entrenched by 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated a month after the report was issued and more than one hundred cities ignited in fire, riots, and despair. The Fair Housing Act of 1968, which King’s death and urban immolation propelled to passage, was a weak law with no meaningful enforcement mechanisms until it was amended in 1988. The act did allude to the idea, championed in the Kerner Report, that the federal government should change its entire direction to fund integration rather than segregation. The law required HUD to administer its programs “in a manner affirmatively to further” the act’s goal of housing integration. This “affirmatively further” fair-housing requirement has been held to apply not only to HUD but its state and local grantees.13
George Romney, father of 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, served as Nixon’s first secretary of Housing and Urban Development. A devout Mormon, the pro-civil-rights Republican, as governor of Michigan, had been deeply affected by the deadly Detroit riot. He championed passage of a state fair housing law in its aftermath. As HUD secretary, he pursed housing integration like the missionary he had once been.
Secretary Romney wrote a confidential memo to his staff, outlining his plan to use HUD’s funding to force suburbs that were a “high-income white noose” around Black ghettos to change. He did not alert the White House when he announced his Open Communities initiative. Mayors were used to receiving HUD grants to help pay for roads, sewers, and other infrastructure, the bones for any new residential development. Romney’s initiative conditioned HUD assistance on building affordable nonsegregated housing and stopping exclusionary zoning. Communities that were denied funds complained to the White House. Nixon for
ced Romney to release funds to resistant suburbs. In a private memo to his domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman and chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, Nixon wrote, “I am convinced that while legal segregation is totally wrong that forced integration of housing or education is just as wrong.”14
Nixon told Haldeman to keep Romney at a distance. In a letter to Nixon in which he sought a meeting to defend his Open Communities program, Romney wrote and underlined these words: “It is becoming increasingly clear that the lower, middle income and the poor, white, Black and brown family, cannot continue to be isolated in the deteriorating core cities without broad scale revolution.”15 Nixon refused to meet with Romney and forced him to abandon the initiative. After Nixon’s reelection in 1972, Romney was pressured to resign. He told a friend of his disappointment: “I don’t know what the president believes in. Maybe he doesn’t believe in anything.”16
When Romney, the son, campaigned for president in 2012, he committed to closing HUD altogether.17 Speaking to a group of wealthy donors, Mitt Romney disdained an alleged “47 percent” of Americans, Obama voters, “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”18 By then, the narratives often accompanying small-government, anti-tax conservatism were entrenched. And yet, six years later, following George Floyd’s death, US senator Mitt Romney donned an N-95 mask and marched with protestors in Washington, DC, and tweeted his image with three simple words, “Black Lives Matter.”19
To date, George Romney is the only HUD secretary to have pressured and penalized segregated communities for their sins of racial exclusion. In ensuing decades, the “affirmatively further” requirement was violated regularly by HUD and local governments. HUD distributed billions to localities for community and housing development with few strings attached, the result of “New Federalism” block grants first championed by Nixon. While the new Biden administration has promised to promote fair, inclusive housing, as of February 2021, HUD continues its practice of distributing about $5.5 billion annually in grants for community development, parceled among more than one thousand local jurisdictions nationwide, with no meaningful accountability for affirmatively furthering integration.20
Under Nixon’s direction, the federal government also declared a moratorium on funding public housing construction. With the exception of a program to replace the worst, concentrated public housing with smaller, mixed-income developments, the federal government retreated from the business of funding construction of new public housing. Instead, it uses the tax code to incentivize private investment in affordable housing. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program costs the federal government about $10 billion annually for affordable housing construction primarily in poor communities that already have more than their fair share of affordable housing.21
HUD also funds housing vouchers for low-income tenants, although only one in four eligible persons actually receives such assistance. Formerly known as Section 8, the Housing Choice Voucher Program does not alter the racially and economically segregated housing market that voucher holders face. Historically, whites fare better than Black and Latinx people in moving to opportunity. According to census data, more than half of Black and nonwhite Hispanic voucher holders landed in low-opportunity areas where 20 percent or more residents are poor. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of white voucher holders rented in areas where less than 20 percent of residents are poor.22 In other words, the federal government continues to invest in segregation.
Descendants trapped in thickets of poverty that HUD and others created have often sued. In rulings issued from the 1970s through the 2000s, federal courts found that HUD and local governments knowingly and willingly promoted and maintained segregated public housing. Courts also found that HUD and localities failed to “affirmatively further” integrated housing. In 2005, for example, after almost a decade of litigation, a judge castigated HUD for rendering Baltimore “an island reservation for use as a container for all of the poor of a contiguous region.”23
Courts approved remedies for intentional segregation in Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Dallas, East Texas, New Haven, New York, and beyond. Even where victories were won, HUD and defendants often delayed complying with court orders. While descendants and their lawyers managed to file lawsuits in about twenty places, in the rest of the nation, HUD and locals felt no pressure to give up their segregation-promoting ways. Because of its long history in funding public housing and local development, HUD is part of the story of segregation in every American metropolitan area.24
Dorothy Gautreaux, lead plaintiff
The first major legal victory for public housing tenants was Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) had located more than 99 percent of public housing in the city in poor Black neighborhoods. Dorothy Gautreaux, a resident of the Altgeld Gardens housing project, was part of a small band of tenant organizers who helped push housing issues onto the civil rights agenda in the city. Warmth, intensity, and a laser-like focus on specific tactics were her hallmarks. When Gautreaux applied to live in public housing, she and her husband were desperate to move their four children out of a single-bedroom apartment. She rightly believed that waiting for placement in a white or rare mixed project would be futile. So she accepted a prompt assignment into Altgeld Gardens, an overwhelmingly Black venue that would become a training ground for a young community organizer named Barack Obama decades later. She and tenants at other housing projects wanted to challenge racial exclusion. They had a lawyer, Alex Polikoff, who stuck with the case for twenty-six years. Gautreaux died in 1968, at age forty-one of kidney failure, the result of years of hypertension. She did not live to see the impact of the case that bore her name.25
In its 1976 Gautreaux decision, the Supreme Court sanctioned a metropolitan-wide remedy that opened white and integrated suburbs to low-income Black movers because HUD, the national government, was also liable. This decision came two years after the Court, in Milliken v. Bradley, had virtually eliminated metropolitan-wide school desegregation remedies. After Milliken, involving the Detroit area, white suburban school districts everywhere were free to remain segregated, which added incentives to white flight and secession from urban school districts.
Gautreaux did work wonders for the twenty-five thousand low-income people who received housing vouchers to move to more than one hundred communities as a result of this lawsuit. Social scientists demonstrated improved employment for parents and college education for children compared to the trajectories of families who opted to stay in high-poverty Chicago neighborhoods.26 The case gave birth to similar court-ordered or federally sponsored housing mobility programs in other regions and the innovation of “scattered site” public housing in which units are dispersed throughout a city. Ironically, because of fierce legal resistance from descendants like Dorothy Gautreaux, the city that had created a national model for concentrated Black public housing also spawned a model for deconcentrating poverty.27
HUD learned somewhat from the lawsuits brought against it. The Clinton administration made some strides to support mobility strategies for low-income tenants. In the 1990s, HUD nudged its grantees to plan for integrated housing although they were never held accountable for results. Enforcement of the Fair Housing Act’s ban on discrimination in sales and rentals typically lagged with Republican administrations. But antidiscrimination enforcement under Democratic administrations could not undo entrenched patterns of segregation. After decades of lobbying and lawsuits from civil rights organizations, in 2015, the penultimate year of the Obama administration, HUD finally completed a regulation to “affirmatively further fair housing.”28
The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule required localities across America to analyze their housing patterns for racial bias, disclose those patterns to the public, and set goals for how they will reduce identified segregation. Ob
ama’s HUD held out the threat of withholding funds for noncompliance, but it also offered a spirit of cooperation, technical assistance, and data to help communities promote integration. In January 2018, HUD secretary Ben Carson, himself a descendant, whose parents had migrated from the South to Detroit, suspended the AFFH rule after fewer than one hundred communities had undertaken compliance. The Trump administration retracted other modest rules and practices the Obama administration had put in place to encourage integration in housing and education.29 Infamously, President Donald Trump attempted to weaponize the already suspended AFFH rule in his reelection bid. In the revolutionary summer of 2020 as many whites were grappling anew with systemic racism, Trump tweeted:
I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood. . . . Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!30
Some conservatives had criticized the AFFH rule for not directly pressuring localities to deregulate and change their exclusionary zoning codes. Carson had claimed he wanted to make housing markets more inclusive through local deregulation.31 Instead, Trump used the suspended rule as one more arrow in his quiver of white identity politics. This was a move not seen in post-civil-rights America. The president of the United States actively promoted economic segregation and, by inference, racial segregation. This may have been a learned family tradition. Trump’s father was successfully sued for racial discrimination against Black renters in his apartment complexes; Donald Trump was also named as a defendant.32
So-called blue states like California have not done much better in eliminating exclusion. To date, the California legislature has failed to pass a critical bill suspending local single-family zoning in order to encourage density and help solve the state’s massive affordable housing crisis.33 Racial integration remains deeply contested. Sociologists theorize that segregation perpetuates itself on the social habits and networks it creates. Segregation engenders daily habits and ingrains biases of comfort and discomfort. Social networks, particularly for whites, tend to be racially homogenous and greatly influence where people choose to live.34
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