RACE IN THE NEIGHBORHOODS
Harris’s unexpected intervention at the National Commission hearing also changed the conversation about race. Sviridoff in his testimony boasted that the city “has succeeded in achieving a higher level of racial integration in housing than any other city in the State of Connecticut, and that probably means any city in the Nation.” Sviridoff’s assumption, shared with Lee, Logue, and the rest of their team, was that disturbing patterns of racial segregation were woven into the deteriorating neighborhoods of New Haven. If they managed to create a “slumless New Haven,” then they could make it a more racially integrated one.45 The urban renewers knew they could not leave this problem to New Haven residents to solve voluntarily. Fearful white residents had consistently resisted efforts to build subsidized housing in their neighborhoods, as they had protested busing for integration. The private real estate market left to its own devices would only perpetuate segregation by giving slumlords and mortgage lenders free rein to discriminate against blacks.
Heated charges in New Haven and elsewhere by the 1960s, however, argued that quite the opposite was happening: urban renewal was fueling “Negro removal.” Since even the urban renewers didn’t deny that some residential and highway projects dislocated those living in their paths, often racial minorities, it is imperative to understand how the likes of Lee and Logue reconciled their ostensible commitment to racial integration with the destruction of the neighborhoods where the city’s most vulnerable populations lived.
When they launched New Haven’s urban renewal in the mid-1950s, Lee and Logue found themselves charged with a city whose overall population was declining, while its nonwhite population (which at this time overwhelmingly meant African American) was simultaneously increasing. The combination led to big jumps in the proportion of black residents—6 percent in 1950, 15 percent in 1960, 26 percent by 1970.46 This expanding black population—poorer and less securely employed than the city’s white population—was increasingly concentrated in slum neighborhoods. For example, when the Oak Street area was razed for the Connector in the late 1950s, this onetime port-of-entry for immigrants was now 50 percent black, whereas the city was barely 15 percent so. Part of the reason for this clustering was simply the uptick in numbers, but it also appeared that in contrast to the previous waves of immigrants who had moved into—and then out of—the Oak Street neighborhood as they made their way in New Haven, blacks got stuck there, without the options to move on that immigrants had enjoyed. Logue blamed “the unwillingness of most white Americans to share their neighborhoods with non-whites,” so that “prejudice … piles the non-whites on top of one another into substandard housing wrung slowly and expensively from retreating whites. All too soon the overcrowding turns the neighborhood into a slum.”47 The renewers were not surprised when an investigation by the New Haven Human Rights Committee in 1964 revealed that nonwhites were almost twice as likely to live in substandard rental units as whites were—29 percent versus 15 percent—and on average they paid more for them, particularly the substandard ones.48 Slum clearance seemed to hold the promise of eliminating these inequities along with the physical structures that sheltered them.
The problem became, however, that racially integrated neighborhoods did not result from urban renewal as much as the renewers hoped. The Yale political scientist Douglas Rae, who carefully analyzed population shifts in twentieth-century New Haven, concluded that the big demographic story in New Haven’s urban renewal was less “Negro removal” than “white removal.” Whites had been gradually leaving the city since the 1920s and the pace quickened between 1950 and 1970, not caused—but likely accentuated—by urban renewal. He identified three significant differences between the relocation fates of white and nonwhite families displaced by urban renewal projects. Nonwhites ended up in public housing more than three times as frequently as whites, often as their best option. Whites moved to purchased homes elsewhere in New Haven more than three times as frequently as nonwhites, because more whites had previously been homeowners and thus received financial compensation when their residences were condemned. And whites (mostly middle-class ones) were leaving the city at almost five times the rate of nonwhites, who could not afford—and were not welcome in—white suburbs. What was emerging by the late 1960s, according to Rae, was “the near-total Africanization of public housing, and … racial tipping in neighborhood after neighborhood.”49 The result was a New Haven that was becoming more and more racially segregated—not integrated.
During the 1950s, when Logue was most active in New Haven’s redevelopment, African American community leaders had welcomed the urban renewers’ integrationist efforts in housing and schooling.50 In a world where inequities between blacks and whites were stark, racial integration seemed like a desirable, even radical, remedy. After all, Metropolitan Life’s huge middle-income Stuyvesant Town opened in Manhattan in the late 1940s as whites-only and stubbornly resisted integration efforts through the 1950s. Given the overwhelming evidence that white New Haveners could not be enticed into black-dominated schools and neighborhoods, African Americans understandably sought access to white privileged spaces. As the local integrationist-oriented NAACP bluntly argued, “Urban renewal programs often present minority families with a long-awaited opportunity to move out of racial and economic ghettos into better neighborhoods with better housing.”51 After the Dixwell renewal plan was enthusiastically endorsed at a public hearing well attended by black community leaders and citizens in 1960, Logue elatedly called the assembly “far and away the best substantive solid support we have ever had.”52
Indeed, New Haven’s black population supported urban renewal enthusiastically. A 1957 Harris Poll documented that “Lee is widely praised in the Negro community for always having been a friend of the Negro people” and “for having sponsored and carried out integrated housing without incident.”53 Still by 1965, 83 percent of blacks polled—more than any other ethnic group—favored urban renewal.54 Nor were whites blind to redevelopment’s integrationist agenda. In a 1966 survey of public opinion on urban problems conducted in four Connecticut cities, white New Haveners frequently criticized urban renewal as a pro-black program that was leading to housing integration. The pollsters concluded, “Some say redevelopment has caused problems, but others are more frank and state that it favors Negroes and is threatening their property values.”55 New Haven’s black leaders, working through established organizations and institutions, fit comfortably within the renewers’ pluralist democratic political model. Through having a voice on the CAC and enjoying other forms of public visibility, they felt they were influencing redevelopment planning and pushing the city toward greater racial progress.
Convinced of the rightness of their cause, Lee and Logue and many established black leaders downplayed what was lost when neighborhoods were destroyed and intimate social bonds were broken—among neighbors and classmates, and between houses of worship and their congregations and tradesmen and their customers. They focused instead on the expected gains in housing quality and neighborhood racial integration.56 With that mind-set, the Redevelopment Agency early on made no secret of the numbers displaced from urban renewal projects. Calculations of displaced residents in fact provided a way of measuring success in moving slum dwellers out of substandard housing and, they hoped, into redeveloped, integrated neighborhoods.
But as time passed, and the renewers were faced with the enormous demand for housing and so many impediments in delivering it, the ideal of integration faded. Just finding adequate homes for displaced minorities proved challenging enough. As early as 1956, the first director of New Haven’s Family Relocation Office resigned, despairing that “this job is impossible. There is more prejudice up North than there is in the South—only here it is often more subtle. When you answer an ad in the newspaper, all you hear is ‘no children, no pets, and whites only’—so how is it possible to find a place for Negro families too large for public housing and unwanted by private landlords?”57 More often than
not, the relocation office resorted to moving minority tenants to another deteriorating but affordable black neighborhood or into public housing.
By the 1967 hearing, Harris’s position on race signaled a significant shift from the stance taken by the black community’s civil rights leaders during the previous decade. Harris was less concerned with integration and more interested in giving residents influence within the communities in which they lived: “We don’t want to be going into white neighborhoods where we are not wanted. Let us stay in the slums, but fix it up so it will be decent, so we can live there. Sure, we should be integrated, but why force ourselves on people if it is going to create problems?”
Wooster Square, the redeveloped neighborhood where Logue felt that he “really learned to do the urban renewal business right” with more rehab than demolition and a high level of citizen engagement, proved Harris’s point.58 Although the Redevelopment Agency hoped to integrate this insular Italian community and took pride in putting up the Columbus Mall, a 221(d)(3) rental project where 24 percent of the residents were nonwhite and 33 percent of the families had been relocated from redevelopment elsewhere, Logue knew—and regretted—that there was a disturbing racial history to the neighborhood’s urban renewal. He had been visited by a delegation of parishioners, led by their parish priest, to discuss how urban renewal might proceed in the Wooster Square community. The plan they advocated, for all its pioneering attractions like extensive residential rehab, the Conté Community School, and a new fire headquarters, came with the price of satisfying the neighborhood’s desire to limit the growing number of African American residents. Highway 91 became a way to cut off the area where most blacks lived and develop it as the Long Wharf industrial district. Moreover, rehabilitation turned out to benefit homeowners, usually white, much more than racially diverse renters, who were often forced to move during renovation or could no longer afford the higher rents afterward.59 No surprise that Harris found little to like in integrating a neighborhood such as Wooster Square.
The predominantly black Dixwell offered urban renewers and their allies within the black establishment a better shot at creating a racially integrated neighborhood. The plan called for substantial Wooster Square–type rehabilitation, for which loans arranged by the Redevelopment Agency would be crucial, given the paucity of residents’ savings and rampant discrimination by private lenders. Complementing that rehab would be selective clearance and new construction of projects like Dixwell Plaza and the Florence Virtue Homes, a 221(d)(3) cooperative sponsored by the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church, a community institution with deep roots and a serious commitment to the project. The church, too, got a new home on the Dixwell Plaza, next to the Grant School.60
Critics charged that strategies for selling the Florence Virtue co-ops—such as renaming them “University Park–Dixwell”—were blatant efforts to whiten a neighborhood close to Yale’s campus and replace black tenants with white ones. But that accusation misses the more complex goal shared by white city officials and civil rights leaders alike to attract white families into a more integrated community—which then might be better positioned to demand higher-quality schools, stores, and other amenities for everyone. In fact, the architect John Johansen’s prospectus for the 129-unit Florence Virtue Homes proudly hailed the project as “the first privately sponsored, FHA insured, cooperative development in the country providing integrated housing … a daring experiment in reverse integration.”61 When the homes opened with 55 percent black and 45 percent white residents, it was considered a victory, to be followed, it was hoped, by integration of the nearby park, community center, church, shopping center, and Grant School, where, to the Redevelopment Agency’s relief, white children quickly enrolled.62 Other co-ops, sponsored by the New Haven Human Relations Council and a neighborhood Catholic church, an elderly housing project, and a market-rate apartment building aimed at introducing class as well as racial diversity into Dixwell, were also constructed.
But Harris and his HPA would have recognized with some frustration that the racial and political realities of New Haven allowed Italian community leaders to use the resources of urban renewal to keep Wooster Square substantially segregated. In contrast, black leaders in Dixwell considered their best option to be inviting whites to integrate their community—which inevitably meant displacing less economically advantaged black residents. Many of those would find their way to Harris’s Hill neighborhood. Within the fragile racial environment of New Haven, the aspiration for racial integration that black leaders shared with the renewers often came at a greater cost to black than white residents.
Lee and Logue demonstrated their racial liberalism in other ways that aligned them more with the integrationists than with critics like Harris. Although some of their actions might be considered tokenism, they viewed them as symbolic racial politics much needed in their segregated city. Lee lived in Newhallville, a black neighborhood, until 1964. Soon after taking office, he appointed George Crawford (the namesake for the architect Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor elderly housing) as the first black corporation counsel to the City of New Haven, and he desegregated New Haven’s fire department as well as its housing projects, the latter at the encouragement of the civil rights organization Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).63 The mayor also launched a front-page fight in 1963 by announcing publicly that the segregationist governor George Wallace of Alabama would be “officially unwelcome” in New Haven, despite his invitation from the Yale Political Union, Logue’s old debating society.64 That same year Lee forced notoriously racist building trade locals in New Haven to accept black members if they wanted any more city construction contracts.65 And in what became a very controversial move, Lee, fed up with suburban blindness to the city’s problems, encouraged black residents of New Haven to block late-afternoon rush-hour traffic with a “sit out” in the middle of one of the city’s main arteries to convince homeward-bound suburban commuters “to walk through the slums and see the conditions which prevail.”66 What proved even more contentious was Lee’s appointment of a human rights committee in June 1963 that, after a year of intense politics and public hearings, recommended passage of a nondiscrimination Equal Opportunities Ordinance, which the New Haven Board of Aldermen in turn approved.67 The law provided the pressure needed to expand the controversial scattered-site housing effort that so outraged white middle-class homeowners.68
Intense as these conflicts proved, they paled when compared with the prolonged struggle to desegregate New Haven’s schools. In 1958, when two new high schools opened, Lee quietly set the boundary between the two districts so as to equalize the black student population attending each.69 But the next stage of school integration was harder to do sub rosa. In 1964, the school board announced, under pressure from the national NAACP, a plan to desegregate New Haven’s neighborhood schools with extensive busing. In a district where 38 percent of the students were nonwhite, ten of the thirty-one elementary schools had nonwhite enrollments over 50 percent, as did two of the four junior-high schools. Six of those twelve schools were at least 79 percent nonwhite, four of them exceeding 90 percent. What followed was a vicious battle fought in racially charged public assemblies as well as emotional living room meetings. As one alderman from an embattled white ward described it, “The busing battle had a startling effect upon the social atmosphere, filling it with electricity and bringing out the worst in everybody … In private, no holds were barred, and even in the big public meetings the normal restraints of politeness dropped away. Pointed ad hominem attacks were standard procedure.”70
The election of November 1965 became a referendum on school integration, with heated aldermanic contests and a fierce challenge to Lee by the Republican busing opponent Joseph Einhorn. Even The New York Times stepped into the fray, endorsing Lee and arguing that his defeat “would not only block progress for New Haven but would dishearten people working for reform and innovation in many other American cities.” Prominent liberals made pilgrimages to New Haven to pr
oclaim their support. The famed singer and racial activist Marian Anderson came to dedicate the Crawford Manor elderly housing, Vice President Hubert Humphrey lent his considerable credibility on civil rights to Lee’s campaign, and Senator Robert Kennedy showed up “to help Mayor Lee” because if President Kennedy “were alive today, he would be here. What my brother hoped to do with the New Frontier, Dick Lee is doing in New Haven.”71 Lee ultimately won by his largest majority in seven successful campaigns—67 percent of the vote with a full sweep of the aldermanic races. Some of that enthusiasm for Lee surely came from a reawakened confidence in the urban renewal program after long delays. But the two initiatives could not be separated: reelecting Dick Lee the urban renewer and Dick Lee the racial integrationist came as one package, Einhorn having condemned them both with one stroke.
The aspiration for a more racially integrated city has often been overlooked in analyses of urban renewal. “Negro removal” is assumed to have been the goal of slum clearance and highway construction projects, confusing all-too-frequent outcomes with intentions and missing how at least some urban renewers committed themselves to creating a more racially integrated American society. Logue couldn’t have made his own ambition clearer. In a letter to Chester Bowles in 1957, he reaffirmed what they had both learned in India about how social change and infrastructural improvement were entangled: “In the North, race relations and slums and blight are interwoven in such a way as to convince me that the only real hope of a solid, sustained improvement in race relations lies in an imaginative and vigorous urban renewal program.” He went on to complain that labor unions could do so much more to advance both goals—and improve their image—by investing pension funds in building decent, integrated, moderate-cost housing, an idea he had floated to Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers several years earlier.72 Logue seemed not to recognize, however, that the effectiveness of his racial agenda was seriously compromised by the infrastructural choices the renewers had made to replace slums with less densely populated, modernist alternatives like the Florence Virtue Homes in Dixwell. Such new buildings could never accommodate the scale and economic diversity of those demolished. Even if this modernist utopian ideal was achievable, a new New Haven could not be built with anything like the speed in which urban renewal was destroying the old one.
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