Four Hundred Souls

by Four Hundred Souls (retail) (epub)

  Where the FHA had once excluded African Americans from participating in the conventional real estate market, it now made Black buyers vulnerable to new exploitative and predatory practices. These public-private partnerships provided methods for the extractive relationship between African Americans and capital.

  Very quickly, brokers and bankers wielded the new homeownership programs to enrich themselves while leaving poor Black families homeless with shattered credit. Speculators and real estate brokers took hold of dilapidated urban properties, performed cosmetic repairs, then flipped the properties to Black families, often headed by Black women. The terms of the programs had allowed mortgage bankers to be repaid in full if the owners went into foreclosure, and because mortgage payments were tied to the income of the owner—not to the value of the house—appraisers working for the FHA were easily enticed to take bribes to inflate the value of the city houses. Mortgage bankers who made their money on originating mortgages and other fees were quick to foreclose, recoup their investment, and begin the practice all over again. Everyone got paid except the poor and working-class Black families who were preyed upon. And within a few years, nearly seventy thousand homes had fallen into foreclosure and tens of thousands more were in default, meaning they were only a few payments away from foreclosure.

  As news of the fraud and corruption in these programs peaked in 1972, headlines rarely got the story right. The real story was that the real estate industry and mortgage bankers were fleecing African Americans with an assist from an utterly passive federal government. The government’s failure to seriously enforce its own fair housing laws—as demonstrated by the paltry funding appropriated to fight racist housing discrimination—had left Black buyers and renters vulnerable to the racism of the real estate industry. Instead, members of Congress, the media, and the private sector itself pinned the crisis in the programs on the disproportionately Black program participants. Everyone involved described Black mothers, in particular, as “unsophisticated buyers,” even as white businessmen, a U.S. senator, and multiple agents working within the FHA were indicted for conspiracy and fraud.

  In 1973 Richard Nixon used the scandal surrounding the HUD homeownership programs as an excuse to impose a moratorium on all subsidized housing programs. Nixon dismissed HUD as the nation’s “largest slumlord” and argued that HUD’s crisis was proof that local government, as opposed to the federal government, should make its own decisions regarding housing. It was an argument fueled on “common sense” that confirmed the suspicion and hostility with which federal programs were held.

  Nixon and his replacement, Gerald Ford, used the failures of the 1968 HUD Act to hoist their new approach to low-income housing and urban development: the Housing and Community Development Act (HCDA), passed in August 1974. The HCDA deployed “block grants,” instead of direct federal appropriations, to fund federal programs. Block grants were “blocks” of money sent to localities, which would decide how the money was spent. While this fed into the folksy notion that locals knew better, it ignored that for decades African Americans had called on the federal government to protect them from the unchecked, abject racism in local governments.

  The legislation also acquiesced to the segregative impulses that had guided much federal decision making regarding housing policies. Ford decided to focus on “existing” housing instead of new building for low-income housing, willfully conceding the status quo. All too often “existing” or used housing was in cities, while new construction was affordable only in outlying and mostly white suburban localities. Six years after the experiment initiated by the HUD Act, the federal approach to housing returned to its roots of local control and segregated housing.

  This history is critical to understanding why some communities came to be designated as prime or subprime in the color-blind discourse of 1990s and 2000s. The foreclosures hastened by reckless federal policies unleashed by the 1968 HUD Act, along with a lackadaisical routine to address housing discrimination, legitimized the devaluation of Black homes and Black communities. These became the pretext, in a post–civil rights world, for treating Black housing consumers differently: from higher or adjustable interest rates to higher risk fees to the subprime designation.

  The crisis from the 1970s also rehearsed earlier arguments that African Americans lacked sophistication and basic impulse control when it came to purchasing property. Instead, they wanted more than they could handle and nearly crashed the economy as a result. Then as now, it was a deft way of turning the discussion away from the corporate underpinnings of public policy—in this case, housing policy. It was then and it is now a failure to grapple with the central contradiction of public policies that rely on private sector institutions to fulfill them. The reliance on the private sector to address the social provision of housing has resulted in public policies that reflect the racism embedded in the U.S. housing market.

  This has continued to hasten housing insecurity within African American communities—from new lows in Black homeownership to the overrepresentation of African Americans among the rent-burdened. The continued American reliance upon the private sector as the main source of housing production has meant a continuation of the inequality that systematically disadvantages African Americans in search of home.

  1974–1979

  COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE

  Barbara Smith

  In 1974 the city of Boston was in the middle of a race war. A federal judge had ruled that public schools must finally desegregate and establish a busing plan to make it happen. Boston’s particular brand of virulent racism was well known to members of the Black community. But across the nation, many were surprised by supposedly liberal white Bostonians’ violent opposition to integration, which rivaled anything that had occurred in the Deep South more than a decade earlier.

  In the mid-1970s, Black Power and Black Nationalism were dominant political ideologies. Within these movements, roles for Black women were frequently even more circumscribed than they had been during the civil rights era. Since 1969, the Nixon administration had implemented numerous strategies calculated to roll back hard-won gains in civil rights. Organizations were dealing with the repercussions of the FBI’s decades of surveillance and its murderous disruption of the Black liberation struggle. During the mid-1970s, the federal government began investigating lesbian feminist communities and impaneled grand juries to locate women radicals who had gone underground to elude capture.

  In this atmosphere of racial turmoil and right-wing backlash, a handful of Black women came together in 1974 to form the group that became the Combahee River Collective. We were sick of the violence. We were sick of being voiceless. We were sick of being exploited. We were sick of being told to walk three or seven paces behind. We were sick of being invisible. We were sick of it all. We wanted and needed Black feminism. Since there were few indications that such existed, we decided to build it for ourselves.

  The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist organization that worked in Boston from 1974 through 1980. Originally a chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization, the collective decided in 1975 to become independent. We named ourselves after the Combahee River, where Harriet Tubman led a military raid during the Civil War that freed more than 750 enslaved people. During the second half of the 1970s, the collective engaged in action on multiple fronts including study, political analysis, protests, campaigns, cultural production, and coalition work around a range of issues, all with the objective of defining and building Black feminism.

  Combahee was never just about talk. Most of us had been politically active well before Combahee, including in the movement to end the war in Vietnam, the Black Panthers, Black student organizing, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Institute of the Black World, Marxist Leninist organizing, support for Eritrean independence, and more.

  Not long after its founding, Combahee supported campaigns to free Joan Little and Ella Ellison, Black wo
men who had been unfairly prosecuted by the criminal injustice system. When Dr. Kenneth Edelin, a Black physician, was convicted of manslaughter in 1975 for performing a legal abortion at Boston City Hospital, we joined in the effort to get his conviction overturned.

  In 1977 Combahee initiated a series of seven political retreats held over three years in locations around the East Coast, where Black feminists who did not live in Boston could meet, strategize, and work together. Among those who regularly participated were the writers Cheryl Clarke, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, and Audre Lorde.

  We accomplished all this and much more while going to our day jobs, going to school, and struggling to get by financially. Combahee never had an airy, spacious office. We never had an office at all. We had no executive director or staff. We did not have funders. If we needed money, usually for photocopying, we would take up a collection. What we did have was each other and a vision.

  After we stopped meeting at the Cambridge Women’s Center, we met in each other’s apartments. As serious as we were about the work, our meetings were full of laughter. Saturday Night Live premiered in the fall of 1975, and we often began with recaps of the latest episode. We always shared food, most of it homemade. Demita Frazier talked with us about vegetarianism, alternative healing, and spirituality. In the summer, we met by the Charles River and took day trips to local beaches. One of our most memorable outings was to Amandla, a concert held in 1979 to benefit the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, featuring Bob Marley and Patti LaBelle.

  Most people know about us because of our Combahee River Collective Statement. In 1977 my sister Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier, and I wrote the statement for Zillah Eisenstein’s Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. With a clear anticapitalist perspective, the statement captured the voices and concerns of Black women and articulated the concept of simultaneous, interlocking oppressions, laying the groundwork for intersectionality. By explicitly challenging homophobia, the statement was groundbreaking, although some, particularly members of our Black community, viewed it as incendiary.

  Few are aware that the widely used and often-maligned concept of “identity politics” originated in the statement. Attacked by both the right and the left, identity politics has been consistently misunderstood. What we meant was that Black women had a right to determine their own political agendas based upon who they were and the multiple systems of oppression that targeted them. Although narrow interpretations of identity politics have been used to justify separatism, Combahee believed in coalitions and was open to working with anyone with whom we shared political values and goals.

  On January 29, 1979, the bodies of two teenaged Black women were found dumped in Roxbury. During the next four months, twelve Black women were murdered, all but one in Black neighborhoods. When Combahee began, a race war was raging. Now we faced a war on Black women. The collective’s Black feminist analysis and relationships with diverse segments of the community put us in a unique position to provide leadership in a time of crisis.

  We produced a pamphlet titled Six Black Women: Why Did They Die about the pervasive reality of violence against women and made a particular effort to circulate it in the Black and Latino/a community. The murders were initially framed as racially motivated, despite the fact that all the victims were women and some of them had been raped. The pamphlet insisted that the murders had to be understood in the context of both sexual and racial violence in order to organize effectively and to increase Black women’s safety. We eventually distributed forty thousand copies and were a major force in building coalitions among communities that had not previously worked together, especially people of color and antiracist white feminists. The fact that we did this bridge building as out Black lesbians was unprecedented. All that the collective had stood for and built since 1974 culminated in our response to the Roxbury murders.

  Almost half a century ago we could not have known that in the twenty-first century, the paradigm-shifting Black Lives Matter movement would arise and use Black feminist analysis to address injustices not primarily rooted in gender or sexuality. We could not know that the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, which was centrally involved in unseating the governor of Puerto Rico in 2019, would draw inspiration from Combahee.

  In many ways, the equivalent of political lightning struck in 1974 to bring together in one improbable place the women who created Combahee. I am grateful to have been there for the creation.

  AND THE RECORD REPEATS

  Chet’la Sebree

  There’s dust, a scratch in a groove,

  and here we are repeating

  the same two seconds of “Strange Fruit.”

  It’s the same sound from the 78 rpm

  to the vintage vinyl to which we listen

  in our apartments, where we return

  bruised and bloodied and beaten,

  unrecognizable in our mothers’ arms,

  if we find the right path back to them.

  All our lives we’ve cried a rallying cry,

  from the river, from the water wanting

  baptism, a rebirth to an earth

  where it wasn’t dangerous to be

  young and gifted and us—slinging

  school bags over shoulders—where

  we could go to church and

  little Black girls could remain

  little Black girls

  not only in memoriam.

  Through a liturgy, no,

  a litany, we learned to pray.

  Warriors taught us

  to dance through minefields—

  pirouette and grand jeté a revelation

  in the face of annihilation,

  bouquets blossoming

  between cracks in concrete.

  In pressed page

  and in song

  and on stage,

  we felt the weight

  of sun and rainbows and shade,

  patient tenderness and pennilessness,

  felt a rhapsody reverberate our ribcages.

  The good Lorde told us

  we weren’t meant to survive,

  but we’ve always been good

  at going about our lives

  in factories and on our knees

  in houses we cleaned

  with tables at which

  we would never eat.

  But still we fell in line,

  took to boot, tank, and sky.

  In Busan, in Ardennes, in Hue,

  young men threw themselves

  over booby trap and grenade

  never to return to an ostensible parade.

  Strangers in a homeland

  still no man’s—

  the barbed lancets of a bee.

  But, still, there was honey.

  There were arias and

  Chisholm-chiseled sightlines

  as the tale of our roots writhed.

  So we broke step

  as we dreamed dreams

  deferred again and again,

  as we congregated

  over hot buttered toast,

  took our seats at the table,

  called on our mothers

  to grease and braid hair of babes,

  as we curled close together

  in Harlem and Trenton

  on nights alight with our injuries.

  To the disquieting phrasing

  of Black bodies swinging,

  we still curl close

  to loved ones

  in different cities,

  teach our children

  their ABCs and 123s,

  how to pas de bourrées

  and kick-ball-change,

  as we work to lift


  our fists, the needle,

  put on a new record to play.

  1979–1984

  THE WAR ON DRUGS

  James Forman, Jr.

  In the spring of 1983, at a crucial moment in the history of American drug policy, Harlem congressman Charles Rangel gaveled to order the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. In Washington, D.C., heroin’s resurgence had led residents to deluge city officials with letters demanding relief from the growing number of addicts congregating on corners and sleeping on park benches. In Los Angeles, phencyclidine, more commonly known as angel dust or PCP, seemed to be taking over; the Los Angeles Sentinel, the city’s leading Black newspaper, complained that the city had become “the PCP capital of the world.” In New York and Miami, entrepreneurs were discovering that baking powder, cocaine, and a stove were all they needed to create the inexpensive and potent new product that would soon come to be called crack.

  President Ronald Reagan, for his part, had already seized on illegal drug use as a political issue. “We’re making no excuses for drugs—hard, soft, or otherwise,” Reagan said in a radio address to the nation in October 1982. “Drugs are bad, and we’re going after them.” Repeating what would become one of his signature phrases, Reagan claimed that “we’ve taken down the surrender flag and run up the battle flag. And we’re going to win the war on drugs.”

  Decades later, we know what that war has helped produce: ruined lives, hollowed-out communities, and mass incarceration. But could the war have been fought differently?

  Dozens of witnesses appeared before Rangel’s committee with an answer to that question. Almost to a person, they agreed: if America was going to meet its drug crisis, it needed to make a robust commitment to drug treatment. According to the head of the National Institute for Drug Abuse, people who participated in adequately funded programs reduced their drug use, committed fewer crimes, and were more likely to find and keep a job.