Segregation

Enforced Segregation

At the end of the 19^th century, the United States was not a racially or ethnically segregated country. Only a small percentage of African Americans lived in the North. The whites in the South prevented segregation in order to prevent the centralization of black power.[1] The usual mode of transportation was walking and many people in the cities worked out of their homes or in small shops. Class usually separated neighborhoods within a city. Friendships between black and white people were common, particularly among the middle and upper classes.[2]

At the turn of the century, approximnately 80% of employed black Americans worked in the sharecropper system in the rural South.[3] A sharecropper was often indebted to a specific planter who he depended on for loans to buy items necessary for farming.[4] The African Americans in the tenant system were even worse off. Their supervisors treated them like inmates in prison gangs. They had to contend with potential beatings, threats, and sexual violence.[5] In American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton write that the system in the rural South was “created by white landowners to replace slavery.”[6]

Industrialization brought a need for cheap labor in the cities. European immigrants and southern rural African Americans fulfilled the need. Sometimes immigration slowed down or stopped completely as it did during World War I. Around the same time, Mexican boll weevils were destroying southern cotton crops and farmers began raising livestock and food crops instead. These farmers no longer needed so many workers.. Southern blacks had to move to cities because work was no longer available to them. Factory bosses would often recruit African Americans workers from the rural south.[7]

The influx of poor, rural African Americans was problematic. There were cultural differences between them and the northern whites. Denton and Massey write that the whites were “repelled by what they saw as the uncouth manners, unclean habits, slothful appearance, and illicit behavior of poorly educated, poverty-stricken migrants who had only recently been sharecroppers.”[8] The factory owners’ use of poor, rural African Americans to break strikes magnified the hostility. Of course, such strikebreaking was only possible because black people were not welcome into the unions. The factory owners could use them to do work that the strikers refused to do.[9]

Between the 1900s and 1920s, the influx of the new population fed racist ideology in the north. It also contributed to the concept of “whiteness” where even new immigrants could feel superior.[10] Due to the new situation, northern African Americans found themselves grouped with the poor, rural southerners. White-led race riots broke out all over northern cities. White mobs attacked African Americans if they caught them in white neighborhoods. The police never arrested the white rioters but sometimes arrested their African American victims. It was increasingly impossible for upper class blacks to find work and housing that was equivalent to their status. [11] Life with white people was becoming increasingly dangerous. African Americans began segregating themselves as a matter of safety.[12]

Still, many middle class African Americans found life in the ghetto to be intolerable. Usually, the richer blacks lived on the physical periphery of poor neighborhoods while the poorest lived in central locations. Sometimes the wealthier people moved past the boundaries into the white neighborhoods. When this happened, the whites would try to convince their new black neighbors to leave warning them of violence to come. These whites would mobilize their churches, realtors, and neighborhood organizations to drive out their new neighbors. If these entreaties did not work, the new neighbors would have rocks thrown at their homes and crosses burned on their lawns.[13] Sometimes homes were bombed. Eventually, middle class white people decided to use legal means to homogenize their neighborhoods such as paying African Americans to move out of neighborhoods and boycotting businesses that provide goods such as boarding houses to African Americans.[14]

In 1910, the Baltimore city council legally established segregated neighborhoods for blacks and whites. Between 1911 and 1913, major cities in Virginia began establishing similar laws. Similar laws then spread to other major cities in the South. However, in the 1917 case Buchanan v. Warley, the Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting anyone from moving into a particular neighborhood because of his or her race was unconstitutional.[15]

Still, whites successfully used rental agreements to limit the selling of property to other whites. In 1924, the National Association of Real Estate Brokers added an article to their code of ethics that stated that, “a realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood . . . members of any race or nationality . . . whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.”[16] This resulted in further overcrowding in black neighborhoods, which led to a need for more housing in these small areas, which led to high housing costs. Thus, poor blacks were paying more for homes than middle class whites.

This also led to “blockbusting,” the lucrative practice of buying up a group of homes in a white neighborhood and selling them to African Americans. "Unethical" realtors would buy homes in white neighborhoods and sell them to blacks. Then they bought the remaining homes from panicked whites at a low price and sold them to more blacks at a higher price. Poor African Americans then expanded to the areas that the wealthier blacks abandoned. As Massey and Denton write:

Following resegregation, neighborhoods fell into progressive neglect and disrepair as owners were shuffled in and out of homes, which sat vacant between sales. Nor could owners who were paying rent and mortgages beyond their means afford repairs and routine maintenance. . . . Complaints to city inspector by black homeowners usually went unheard, because real estate agents were typically careful to pay off local officials; many were only too happy to turn a blind eye to problems in the black community if there was money to be made.[17]

Meanwhile, black neighborhoods spread and deteriorated.

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[1] Nancy A. Denton and Douglas S. Massey, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 25.

[4] Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2005) 31.