White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  The seed of this book was planted with an invitation to give the Francis Biddle Memorial Lecture at Harvard Law School in 2018. Thank you to Tomiko Brown-Nagin and John Manning for extending the opportunity to speak at my alma mater, which forced me to think ambitiously about what I might say that would be worthy of the occasion. That lecture formed the basis of the proposal for this book, which I submitted to Beacon Press.

  Thank you to my editor, Joanna Green, for having great faith in the idea and helping me clarify that I was writing not only about concentrated poverty but also its opposite, affluent space, and the entire system of residential caste. Thank you to the wonderful team at Beacon Press for the passionate work you did at every stage of production and promotion for this book. You have backed me through three books and helped me grow as a writer. I am eternally grateful.

  Thank you to the scholars, writers, journalists, civil rights lawyers, and advocates who have grappled with the age-old problem of American caste and its many manifestations. I could not have written this book without your magnificent work. In presenting my own theory, I tried to offer something of an intellectual and social history, particularly of the contributions of Black scholars to this struggle. Your truth-telling matters.

  Georgetown Law has been my employer for a quarter century now. I could not have written this or prior books without being part of this community that works at racial justice. I am particularly grateful to our dean, Bill Treanor, and associate dean Paul Ohm, who provided me with financial support and a research leave to write this book.

  My faculty colleagues Sheila Foster and Robin Lenhardt read the entire manuscript and gave me substantive comments throughout. You both raised the bar as I was struggling to the finish and greatly improved the final draft. I appreciate your friendship and support.

  Thanks so much to the scholars and advocates who read and gave me vital feedback on particular chapters: Heather Abraham, Bill Buzbee, Peter Byrne, Yael Cannon, Julie Cohen, Michael Diamond, Jane Ehrenfeld, James Forman Jr., Megan Haberle, Sophie House, Sherrilyn Ifill, Adam Levitin, Hilary Malson, Naomi Mezey, Ajmel Quereshi, Mike Seidman, Bob Stumberg, Phil Tegeler, David Troutt, and Robin West, along with many participants in the Georgetown Law Faculty Scholarship Workshop. All of you contributed in very important ways that made the book better.

  Thank you to Heather Abraham and the student-attorneys she supervised at the Georgetown Law Civil Rights Clinic—Jenna Casolo, Tunu Wadutumi, and Valencia Richardson—who filed and pursued freedom of information requests with the Maryland and federal departments of transportation, regarding the Baltimore Red Line, the Title VI complaint that was closed without formal findings. Thanks to my colleague Aderson Francois, for agreeing to have the clinic take on this project, which took a year. My research assistant, Oge Maduike, and I waded through the documents that the Maryland Department of Transportation disclosed to the clinic. Collectively we unearthed devastating truth that I tell in the book.

  Thank you to my research and technical assistant, Tia Hockenberry, who also filed a successful FOIA request about the Schenectady School District’s Title VI complaint and did yeoman’s work in seeking permissions for images and maps used in the book.

  Thank you to my colleague Yael Cannon for introducing me to her friend and client Lakia Barnett and giving me the idea of featuring Lakia in a chapter to underscore the constraints that descendants face in seeking opportunity.

  Thank you to the people who gave me time and interviews for this book: Earl Andrews, Darryl Atwell, Lakia Barnett, DeVone Boggan, Yael Cannon, Rev. Linda Davis, Samuel Jordan, Jason Kise, Elwyn C. Lee, Laurence Spring, and Phil Tegeler. I am particularly grateful to those who allowed me to feature your stories in depth, endured my follow-up questions, and permitted me to include images of you in the book. Special thanks to Mr. Andrews for the cold day we spent riding buses and rail in Baltimore, which brought home what it is like trying to get somewhere in that slow, fragmented “system.” I am also very grateful to Dr. Lee, who took me on a half-day tour of the Third Ward of Houston, and to Rev. Davis and a long-time resident-leader of Cuney Homes who preferred to remain anonymous, who both spoke to me, enabling me to better understand the struggles and strengths of descendants.

  My research assistants worked tirelessly on this project and I am profoundly grateful to them: Jason Kise, Oge Maduike, Ivanley Noisette, Juliette Singarella, Tanesha Williams, and Lynn Zhang. Time and again you found sources to support my argument and helped advance my thinking. Jason Kise was particularly helpful in using data and tools from Social Explorer to produce some maps that appear in the book and in sharing his personal experience living in varied neighborhoods, which illuminated practices of opportunity hoarding and surveillance.

  Andrea Muto was my library liaison for years and my partner, especially, in archival research. Special thanks to Andrea, Thanh Nguyen, and the wonderful staff of the Georgetown Law Library for extensive research and cite-checking support, much of it undertaken by the following student research assistants who improved specific chapters: Joey Cahill, Austin Donahue, Gabriela Figueras, Zhengyan Gu, Julie Kidder, Laixin Li, Melissa Moran, Jordan Pino, Ramya Reddy, and William Spruance.

  Thank you to my students over the years in my writing seminar on segregation. I learned a lot from your research papers. In particular, I relied on sources or events brought to my attention by Victoria Brown, Tiauna Mathieu, Sarah Miller, Makenna Osborn, Tamera Overton, Noemi Schor, Rachel Smith, and Christiann Tavitas.

  Thank you to the individuals and organizations that pioneered color-coded race and opportunity mapping, and those that gave me permission to feature maps in this book. I so appreciate John Relman for hosting a panel at his law offices on the power of race-coded maps to mobilize people and juries to understand and help dismantle residential caste. That event and Relman’s personal testimony powerfully influenced my thinking about how I would use maps and organize my argument about the cumulative processes of residential caste in this book. Thank you to Paul Jargowsky for producing your Architecture of Segregation map series, which also greatly influenced me, and for taking the time to explain the data and research animating your work on concentrated poverty.

  My assistant Ashley Freeman was a great aide and ally. Thanks also to the entire faculty support staff at Georgetown for your cheerful assistance.

  Thanks to the sister-writers who provided support, encouragement, inspiration, or just a laugh about the madness that is book writing, as I toiled: Amy Alexander, Julie Cohen, Annette Gordon-Reed, Natalie Hopkinson, Diane McWhorter, Michele Norris, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and Darlene Taylor. Amy Alexander introduced me to her “vis ed guy,” who in turn introduced me to John David Coppola, who magically improved the visual quality of images used in the book.

  Thank you to Politico Magazine for giving me the opportunity to write a series of pieces that previewed themes of this book. The feedback from Politico editors and readers was very helpful in honing my thoughts.

  Thank you to my friends and family for enduring another book. The sister network sustained me, as did my earth-angel cousins, Elizabeth Cashin McMillen and Dorothy Reed. Heartfelt thanks to my pastor, Rev. Dr. Darryl Roberts, for your uplifting sermons, particularly in a year of pandemic, that reminded me always to lean on God.

  Finally, to my husband, Marque, and sons, Langston and Logan, thank you for your love, support, and patience. I could not have done this without you.

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London, 1787), 229, 240.

  2. Thomas R. Dew, “Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature,” in Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South, ed. Eric L. McKitrick, 20, 31 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 30, 31.

  3. John C. Calhoun, “Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate, February 6th, 1837,” in The Works of John C. Calhoun, ed. Richard K. Cralle (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1853), 2:630; incompletely reported in Co
ng. Globe, 24th Cong., 2d Sess. 157–59 (1837).

  4. Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens in Public and Private: With Letters and Speeches, Before, During, and Since the War (Philadelphia, 1866), 723.

  5. J. H. Van Evrie, Negros and Negro “Slavery”: The First an Inferior Race; The Latter Its Normal Condition (New York, 1861), 188. Van Evrie was a doctor and editor of the Weekly Day Book and author of several books defending slavery.

  6. S. Rep. No. 42–41, pt. 2, at 318 (1871), quoted in Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 169.

  7. S. Rep. No. 42–41, pt. 11, at 76 (1872), quoted in Hodes, White Women, 169.

  8. William L. Katz, Eyewitness: The Negro in American History (New York: Pitman Publishing, 1967), 389–90.

  9. “Showing Glendive in MT,” The Homepage of James W. Loewen, accessed August 8, 2018, https://sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntownsshow.php?id=1687. Glendive is in Montana. Its anti-Black sentiments and apparent actions to violently oust Negroes were widely shared. See James Loewen, Sundown Towns (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), cited in Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017), 42, 262.

  10. John Hancock, “The New Deal and American Planning: The 1930s,” in Two Centuries of American Planning, ed. Daniel Schaffer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 201 (quoting a memo about zoning written by Bettman and other members of the American City Planning Institute in collaboration with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Land Use Planning Committee).

  11. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 1:188.

  12. Richard Nixon, “What Has Happened to America?,” Reader’s Digest, October 1967, 50.

  13. “Words Fail; Miami Cops Get Tough with Negro Thugs,” Standard-Speaker, December 27, 1967, https://www.newspapers.com/clip/52372056/walter-everett-headley-1905–1968.

  14. “‘Welfare Queen’ Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign,” New York Times, February 15, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/02/15/archives/welfare-queen-becomes-issue-in-reagan-campaign-hitting-a-nerve-now.html (noting that this “item in Mr. Reagan’s repertoire is one of several that seem to be at odds with the facts”).

  15. Presidential Statement on Signing Legislation Rejecting U.S. Sentencing Commission Recommendations, 31 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 1961, 1962 (October 30, 1995). At the time, the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine was one hundred to one.

  16. William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio, and John P. Walters, Body Count: Moral Poverty . . . and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 26 (wrongly predicting a wave of violence by “superpredators”). Instead a dramatic reduction in violent crime ensued, see Elizabeth Becker, “As Ex-Theorist on Young ‘Superpredators,’ Bush Aide Has Regrets,” New York Times, February 9, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/09/us/as-ex-theorist-on-young-superpredators-bush-aide-has-regrets.html.

  17. Mia de Graaf, “Bill Maher Controversially Describes Murdered Teenager Michael Brown as ‘Thug Who Didn’t Deserve to Be Shot,’” Daily Mail, October 27, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2809048/Bill-Maher-controversially-describes-murdered-teenager-Michael-Brown-thug-didn-t-deserve-shot.html.

  18. Aaron Blake, “The First Trump-Clinton Presidential Debate Transcript, Annotated,” Washington Post, September 26, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-first-trump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.1e206d08268c.

  19. Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump), Twitter, May 29, 2020, 12:53 a.m., https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1266231100780744704.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Sarah Maslin Nir, “White Woman Is Fired After Calling Police on Black Man in Central Park,” New York Times, May 26, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/nyregion/amy-cooper-dog-central-park.html.

  2. Sarah Maslin Nir, “The Bird Watcher, That Incident and His Feelings on the Woman’s Fate,” New York Times, May 27, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/nyregion/amy-cooper-christian-central-park-video.html.

  3. Jonah E. Bromwich, “Amy Cooper, Who Falsely Accused Black Bird-Watcher, Has Charge Dismissed,” New York Times, February 16, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/nyregion/amy-cooper-charges-dismissed.html.

  4. Hannah Natanson, “The White House Put Up a Wall. The People ‘Made It Beautiful,’” Washington Post, June 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-white-house-put-up-a-wall-the-people-made-it-beautiful/2020/06/10/aa28d364-aa9f-11ea-9063-e69bd6520940_story.html.

  5. Defense Exhibit 2 at 15–16, State v. Lane, No. 27-CR-20–12951 (Minn. 4th Dist. Ct. July 7, 2020), https://mncourts.gov/mncourtsgov/media/High-Profile-Cases/27-CR-20–12951-TKL/Exhibit207072020.pdf (transcript of Thomas Lane body worn camera).

  6. Defense Exhibit 2 at 15–16, State v. Lane, 13.

  7. See Sheryll Cashin, Loving: Interracial Intimacy and the Threat to White Supremacy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 169–89.

  8. Elijah Anderson, “The Iconic Ghetto,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 642, no. 1 (July 2012): 8–24.

  9. Richard V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2018), 19–38; Sheryll Cashin, Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 19–40; Douglas S. Massey, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007). See also Jonathan Spader et al., “Fostering Inclusion in American Neighborhoods,” in A Shared Future: Fostering Communities of Inclusion in an Era of Inequality, ed. Christopher Herbert et al. (Cambridge, MA: Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 2018).

  10. Jacob S. Rugh, Len Albright, and Douglas S. Massey, “Race, Space, and Cumulative Disadvantage: A Case Study of the Subprime Lending Collapse,” Social Problems 62, no. 2 (May 2015): 186–218; Ylan Q. Mui, “Ex-Loan Officer Claims Wells Fargo Targeted Black Communities for Shoddy Loan,” Washington Post, June 12, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/former-wells-fargo-loan-officer-testifies-in-baltimore-mortgage-lawsuit/2012/06/12/gJQA6EGtXV_story.html?utm_term=.a5c6098216d7.

  11. Adam J. Levitin, “How to Start Closing the Racial Wealth Gap,” American Prospect, June 17, 2020, https://prospect.org/economy/how-to-start-closing-the-racial-wealth-gap.

  12. Elizabeth Kneebone and Natalie Holmes, “U.S. Concentrated Poverty in the Wake of the Great Recession,” Brookings, March 31, 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-concentrated-poverty-in-the-wake-of-the-great-recession.

  CHAPTER 1: BALTIMORE

  I. Lawrence Brown, “Two Baltimores: The White L vs. the Black Butterfly,” Baltimore Sun, June 28, 2016, https://www.baltimoresun.com/citypaper/bcpnews-two-baltimores-the-white-l-vs-the-black-butterfly-20160628-htmlstory.html. See also Lawrence T. Brown, The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).

  2. Antero Pietila, Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City (Chicago: Rowan and Littlefield, 2010), 9, 14, 25, 32.

  3. Pietila, Not in My Neighborhood, 8, 19–20.

  4. Christopher Silver, “The Racial Origins of Zoning in American Cities,” in Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows, ed. June Manning Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997), 27.

  5. “Baltimore Tries Drastic Plan of Race Segregation,” New York Times, December 25, 1910, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1910/12/25/105900067.html.

  6. W. Ashbie Hawkins, “An Alarming Condition,” Afro-American, August 20, 1892. In 1907, the Afro-American raised capital by selling stock exclusively to Black stockowners, including Hawkins a
nd employees of the paper. This emancipated the paper from white influence, allowing it to crusade against racial segregation and voter disfranchisement and to cultivate a militant Black readership. Hayward Farrar, The Baltimore Afro-American: 1892–1950 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 5–6.

  7. Julia P. H. Coleman to NAACP, May 26, 1918; W. Ashbie Hawkins to NAACP, February 22, 1919, NAACP Administrative File, Subject File, Discrimination, Transportation, Julia Coleman, 1918–19, Reproduced from the Collections of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Farrar, The Baltimore Afro-American, 33; Larry S. Gibson, The Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice (New York: Prometheus Books, 2012), 136.

  8. Pietila, Not in My Neighborhood, 16, 23, 31, 74; Dennis A. Doster, “‘This Independent Fight We Are Making Is Local’: The Election of 1920 and Electoral Politics in Black Baltimore,” Journal of Urban History 44, no. 2 (March 2018): 134–52, doi.org/10.1177/0096144217746163.

  9. W. Ashbie Hawkins, “We Have Disproved Every Charge,” Afro-American, October 29, 1920; Doster, “‘This Independent Fight We Are Making Is Local.’”

  10. Hawkins, “We Have Disproved Every Charge.”

  11. Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, “Rowland Park: One of America’s First Garden Suburbs, and Built for Whites Only,” Johns Hopkins Magazine (Fall 2014), https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2014/fall/roland-park-papers-archives.

  12. Pietila, Not in My Neighborhood, 35, 49.

  13. Pietila, Not in My Neighborhood, 61–70. See also Robert K. Nelson et al., “Baltimore, MD, Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=12/39.2994/-76.6166&opacity=0.82&city=baltimore-md&adview=full; Courtland Milloy, “In Freddie Gray’s Neighborhood, There Are Signs Things Are Getting Better,” Washington Post, August 30, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/in-freddie-grays-neighborhood-there-are-signs-things-are-getting-better/2016/08/30/61efaf34-6ece-11e6-8365-b19e428a975e_story.html; Michael Anft, “Three Years After His Death, Freddie Gray’s Neighborhood Faces a New Loss,” Medium, April 19, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/three-years-after-his-death-freddie-grays-neighborhood-faces-a-new-loss/558434.