Reimagining Equality

by Anita Hill

  Mary Church Terrell may have had the blessings of Greener, Anthony, and Douglass to speak on behalf of her race and gender, but others would vie for the role as well. Journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and educator Mary McLeod Bethune were among the array of leaders who championed the cause of black women. But perhaps no two women were more directly related to the struggles of women trying to build their homes than Ida B. Wells and Nannie Helen Burroughs. Both women were fiery and unapologetic in their quest to move black women and the entire race out from under the dual oppression they experienced. While many of the black women leaders of the day were from educated and relatively wealthy, prominent black families, Wells and Burroughs were not. Wells was the daughter of slaves, and her well-known crusade against lynching gave some blacks hope that the nation would soon put an end to the violence that threatened homes throughout the South on an almost daily basis.

  Burroughs championed education for what she called “ordinary” black folks and the professionalization of domestic service. In these ways, her ideas about education were not unlike Booker T. Washington’s. “We specialize in the wholly impossible” was her patented response to her critics and others, like Washington himself, who doubted that a school for black women could sustain itself without Northern whites’ financial support.

  Though her challenge to black religious leaders to address the obstruction of women’s progress in the Baptist Church, as well as racism in the larger society, may have put her at odds with church leadership, it aligned her with the efforts of W. E. B. Du Bois, who was viewed as Washington’s rival for control of the destiny of black folks. Yet Burroughs’s very nuanced take on the political and social future of blacks was closer to the reality of black life than either Washington’s or Du Bois’s views. Hers were the kind of practical, yet entirely progressive and uniquely multifarious ideas that would pave the way for the majority of black women to imagine equality. She understood the hardships black Americans faced, but had faith in their ability to overcome them and make a home in the country that rejected them.

  Despite the apparent challenges, Nannie Helen Burroughs showed her idealistic optimism in a speech she delivered one hundred years ago to the National Baptist Convention:

  A new day is dawning for us. In spite of the fact that we are facing problems more grave and aggravating than any other race in the world and have less of material things to utilize in the solution of them, yet we are abundantly rich in faith and in physical powers to endure the hardships incident to foundation laying. The most hopeful sign is the awakening within to the fundamental needs and a setting in motion of a new force to beat back fanatic race prejudice. We have just seen clearly enough to discover that in the real American is the making.19

  Burroughs’s audience responded with thunderous applause. She would come to be known as “the black goddess of liberty” who dared to posit that black women would lead the way to defining “the real American.” The practical side of Nannie Helen Burroughs knew that “foundation laying” for black women had to begin where they were strongest: in the home, whether their own homes or those in which they were employed. She also knew that all Americans had to have a different image of what “home,” or at least the work done in it, meant in the public sphere if blacks were to achieve equality through it.

  Abigail Adams’s arguments for women’s legal protections in the home were, for their time, bold and insightful. Women of all races and backgrounds knew that this hallowed space, often thought to be beyond the law’s reach, was indeed a place where they could be tyrannized and that any chance they had to live as independent members of society must begin there. And Booker T. Washington knew that African Americans must first establish a place in communities if they were ever to enjoy the state of being at home in America.

  Black women’s actual control over their homes, like that of all women, has been limited by gender conventions. Throughout history, and even today, economic conditions of most black families have meant that black women work outside the home. They have had to function in both the private and public sphere, without the benefit of protections afforded by race or gender in either. Nannie Helen Burroughs combined the thinking of both Adams and Washington, pursuing recognition outside the home of what women did inside the home. Due to their history and experiences, a safe and secure home for black American women is achieved differently than for black men and other women. Thus Burroughs viewed the home as a unique measure of equality that cannot be divorced from other measures. That perspective, as well as the fundamental social changes that the entire country was embarking on in the twentieth century, would shape how women and men of all races experienced day-to-day life, and Nannie Helen Burroughs knew that well.

  All together, Adams, Burroughs, and Washington helped shape thinking about the meaning of equality and how it would be achieved, not only for their times but for the future as well. As the home became the icon of the American Dream through the help of government policies and private actions, those pushing for equality would come to challenge domestic abuse, promote women’s rights to own their own homes and to join professional work ranks, and sue on behalf of African Americans’ rights to own homes in neighborhoods of their choice.

  Chapter 4. Lorraine’s Vision: A Better Place to Live

  Home: An environment offering security and happiness.

  The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

  Constructing the American Dream

  “That our people should live in their own homes is a sentiment deep in the heart of our race and of American life.”1 Just where this notion came from is unclear, but in the 1920s commerce secretary Herbert Hoover, the man who would one day become president and make that statement, embarked on a strategy to make it a reality. His backing for the Own Your Own Home (OYOH) campaign and open support for the Better Homes movement blurred the line between government policy and private enterprise. Both OYOH and Better Homes promoted home purchasing as the 1920s version of the American ideal.2 OYOH’s coalition of bankers, local officials, builders, and developers, enlisted to help fulfill Hoover’s vision of America, promoted home ownership as a symbol of manhood. In the organization’s pamphlets, home ownership was credited with placing a man “among the bigger men of your community,” and home ownership was equated with “SUCCESS.” Flyers and brochures distributed by those in the movement all but promised that a man who buys a house, “whether it be for cash or on the installment plan, secures . . . a happy wife and raises therein patriotic well-educated American children.” Not only has he “done the most patriotic and religious thing possible,” but he has also accomplished “the most opportune thing for the betterment of human conditions.” As the headline in one brochure asserted, “The Man Who Owns His Home is a better Worker, Husband, Father, Citizen, and a real American.”3

  Logically, black men who wanted to become “real Americans” would follow the call to home ownership. But in the 1920s, having been locked out of rural land ownership, most “real” African Americans could not afford to own homes in the cities and towns that were growing throughout the nation.

  The message of the OYOH campaign was not directed solely at men; the brochures assured women that home ownership carried the potential for better motherhood. Sociologists Paul Luken and Suzanne Vaughan argue that the OYOH campaign was fashioned to order work and family relationships through a vision of home ownership. Luken and Vaughan note that the discourse coming out of the OYOH effort shifted responsibility from social institutions to parents and made women primarily accountable for their children’s welfare.4

  In fact, under the OYOH philosophy, renting an apartment would be near hazardous to women’s maternal well-being: “If you are to maintain your ancient, glorious vocation, you need to be a genuine Home Maker, in your own Home,” an OYOH pamphlet told women. The “walls of a rented dwelling” were “arbitrary”; shelter could be found under the “roof of a real Home.”
Thus the Standard American Home was a single-family dwelling situated in a suburb (or, if in the city, at the very least near a park or some other space that afforded children access to “sunlight, fresh air and a safe place to play”), with appropriately appointed separate rooms for male and female children and parents. Boys’ rooms were to be masculine, with hard, durable surfaces, the campaign dictated. Girls’ rooms were to be adorned with frilly curtains and painted in soft colors. Both should be sunny and well ventilated. The standard anticipated small, quiet, and dainty girls and rambunctious, active boys. From birth, home was the place that designed masculinity and femininity and gender roles. The ideal of femininity, as represented in the home ownership model in particular, was out of reach for most black women of that era, as the majority of them were more likely to work in someone else’s home than own their homes.

  But as critical as home ownership was as a social and political creation, it was even more important as an economic instrument. In 1933, with President Hoover’s departure from office, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) to help stimulate home construction and stave off the Great Depression’s rampant housing foreclosures. Much like the OYOH campaign, the agency, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal package, was controlled by prominent real estate developers chosen by the president. In pursuit of the agency’s mission, its leadership began mapping out neighborhoods for their potential to support long-term mortgages. Under the HOLC’s appraisal standards, suburban, middle-class communities earned the highest mark; they were green zones. Poor neighborhoods were rated the lowest: the red zones.

  Race also factored into the agency’s appraisal of neighborhood “desirability.” The HOLC evaluated communities on the basis of their racial and ethnic homogeneity. Racially homogenous neighborhoods were preferred over mixed-race neighborhoods and thus were more eligible for mortgages. On its face, the term “homogenous” neighborhoods is race neutral. Yet predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods were routinely “red zoned” for loans and investment despite their homogeneity and regardless of the income levels of residents. Neighborhoods with homeowners of various ethnic or racial identities were downgraded, too, regardless of the residents’ income levels. And investors, builders, businesses, and buyers got the green light from the HOLC to pour resources into exclusively white neighborhoods, particularly those occupied by wealthy or middle-class homeowners. Thus the United States government gave its financial blessing to segregated neighborhoods.

  This government assessment system, coupled with private lending discrimination against individuals, institutionalized racial prejudice in ways that would only begin to be overcome decades later Historian Andrew Wiese makes clear in his book Places of Their Own that despite receiving little government assistance, remarkably many blacks in both the North and the South pulled together the resources they needed to create suburbs of their own.5 Nevertheless, the general landscape of suburban America was segregated, and blacks’ access to it was limited.

  A Place for Equality

  Just what “race” President Hoover had in mind when he centered home ownership “deep in the heart of our race and American life” is unclear, but blacks were no exception to the desire to own a home. In the 1930s, most rented urban flats. For many, that meant life in squalid conditions that were “virtual slave cabins stacked on top of one another,” according to Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson in The Warmth of Other Suns.6 In Chicago, a quarter of a million African American families were crammed into a wedge of a community that ran south and west of downtown Chicago. Ironically, the Depression presented an opportunity for a few black families, whose housing needs were increasing and whose incomes in service industries were holding steady, to participate in Hoover’s idea of “American life,” with or without government encouragement.

  By the late 1930s Chicago’s once-promising Washington Park subdivision had fallen on hard times. Nevertheless, it would serve as a backdrop for a dramatic civil rights episode, a landmark case that would become the preamble to African Americans’ crusade into housing markets previously closed to them. As with many area neighborhoods, the community in this part of the city’s South Side was by law off-limits to blacks, except for the janitors, chauffeurs, or house servants who lawfully resided in basements, barns, or garages on the properties owned by whites. All deeds to Washington Park property included a variation of a clause developed by the Chicago Real Estate Board to serve as a model for racial exclusion, following the philosophy of the HOLC and the preference for racially homogeneous neighborhoods. Through the work of the Real Estate Board—which, according to law professor Allen R. Kamp in “The History Behind Hansberry v. Lee,” sent community organizers to Chicago’s neighborhoods to instruct residents on how to write and enforce such restrictions7—85 percent of Chicago’s communities were off-limits to blacks.

  Depression-era financial losses suffered by middle-class homeowners made it necessary for some families to vacate Washington Park residences. Those same losses also meant that few whites were available to buy in the area. Yet the three-by-four-block community still held on to the racially restrictive covenants. This exclusivity, along with its proximity to the park from which the neighborhood drew its name (a sprawling urban oasis designed by the famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted), had once made it a “desirable” place for whites.

  In 1937 Carl Hansberry, father of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, embarked on a mission to change Chicago’s housing restrictions by buying a home in Washington Park. He found a white owner desperate to sell to any buyer, regardless of race, who had money to purchase the home he could no longer afford. Hansberry moved his wife and their four children, including eight-year-old Lorraine, into the formerly racially segregated suburb. Determined to keep blacks out of their community, the Hansberrys’ new white neighbors terrorized them and vandalized their home. During one incident, Lorraine barely missed being hit in the head with a brick.

  Her father was just as determined to stay as his neighbors were to drive the Hansberrys out. When white neighborhood homeowners challenged his purchase, Hansberry sued. He pursued his fight against legally sanctioned racial restrictions on housing all the way to the Supreme Court, where he won his suit on a technicality. Hansberry v. Lee led to a landmark Supreme Court decision that allowed blacks to challenge the racial restraints covering Chicago’s neighborhoods, ushering in an era of civil rights litigation.

  Hansberry prevailed on a procedural issue about how to define the class of sellers who could be sued in such cases. Over a decade later, in Shelley v. Kraemer, the Supreme Court would decide a similar case on the merits of the claim brought by an African American who attempted to buy into a restricted neighborhood. In Shelley, the court ruled that covenants barring sales on the basis of race were illegal.

  After the Hansberry ruling, the headline in the Chicago Defender, a newspaper owned and read by African Americans, hailed the victory: “Hansberry Decree Opens 500 New Homes to Race.”8 The case also loosely served as the basis for Lorraine Hansberry’s trailblazing drama released twenty-two years later: A Raisin in the Sun, her blockbuster play about a family’s effort to purchase a home in the suburbs. At the drama’s end, as her fictional Younger family moves into a home over the protests of their new white neighbors, members of the family seem to put aside their internal differences, and the audience is left hopeful that they are about to secure the home that each member is yearning for. All seems to end well.

  The happy conclusion that Hansberry portrays in Raisin did not, however, match her own experience as a pioneer in the civil rights struggles. Though she was only eight years old, the experience of moving into the family’s new home left a searing impression on Lorraine Hansberry. Indeed, it gave her a chance to see the dark side of the quest for equality. Years later, she wrote about it in a letter to the New York Times that the newspaper would not print, but that appeared in her posthumou
sly published work, To Be Young, Gifted and Black. Hansberry described the community in which her family resided as “hellishly hostile,” where “howling mobs surrounded our home.” While her father was battling in the courts in Washington, her “desperate and courageous mother,” armed with a loaded German Luger pistol, stood guard nightly over Lorraine and her three siblings inside their new home. Despite the decision in his favor from the Supreme Court in 1940, Carl Hansberry suffered “emotional turmoil” and died prematurely “as a permanently embittered exile.” His victory in court was, Lorraine wrote, “the sort of ‘progress’ our satisfied friends allude to when they presume to deride the more radical means of struggle.”9 The harsh reality of her own experience and the events that occurred in the years after her father’s suit are perhaps why Lorraine Hansberry used biting irony in Raisin to tell the story of how the home became a battleground in the fight to advance racial equality.

  In the 1930s and ’40s, blacks would continue to move from rural settings to urban ones, and in moving would continue their quest to be at home in their residences, neighborhoods, and nation. In urban settings, cars replaced wagons, and black women, often leaving their own children, learned to navigate the bus routes past black homes and out of black communities into white neighborhoods and white houses that would be their workplaces and, in some cases, the only source of family income.

  Long before Lorraine Hansberry was born, Booker T. Washington was promoting his “comfortable, tasty, framed cottage” as the key to racial equality. Carl Hansberry’s actions would serve as a clear marker of the rejection of the accommodation approach to entry into the ideal housing situation that Washington promoted. Both Washington and Hansberry seemed committed to the ideal of the nice house with a yard for the kids, but they disagreed on how it should be achieved. Nevertheless, one can imagine that, had Washington lived to see whites’ continued resistance to his idea of residential racial inclusion, he might have been willing to resort to the courts.