Racism and Injustice in Real Estate Postcards

The Chicago Freedom Movement January 7, 1966 to August 26, 1966 During the Jim Crow era (1870s–1960s), many Black Southerners moved to Northern cities, in a journey that came to be called the Great Migration (1916–1940). They fled racial terror in the South, but they found discrimination in the North too. Racist real estate policies and practices kept Black people out of white neighborhoods and stuck in ghettos, without good quality maintenance and public services.

To fight these conditions, Civil Rights leaders came to Chicago. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King moved into a slum on Chicago’s West Side. King joined Albert Raby, a teacher-turned-activist; James Bevel, a local preacher; and others working for housing justice.

They began with rent strikes, unionizing tenants, and repairing buildings. On July 10th, they held a rally, “Freedom Sunday.” 30,000 people came out to Soldier Field, then marched to City Hall and posted their demands: an end to slums and segregation.

Next, they marched into white neighborhoods. White homeowners reacted violently: they threw bottles, rocks, and bricks, heckled marchers, and set cars on fire.

Police offered no protection. After many days of marching, realtors and bankers responded, promising to stop segregation and discrimination.

Later, Movement leaders noted that Chicago’s business and banking leaders did little to keep their promises.

Housing segregation persists to today. But their marches led to the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. The Chicago Freedom Movement remains an example of the power of community action to work against oppression and fight for fair, free, and just neighborhoods.

Coretta Scott King and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., helping repair homes in segregated neighborhoods

13th Amendment Slavery is legal in the United States The 13th Amendment, passed at the end of the Civil War, abolished slavery, “except as a punishment for a crime.�

Unpaid slave labor was the bedrock of the early American economy. The 13th Amendment loophole allowed people in power to find other ways to exploit, or abuse and profit from, black labor. One way was convict leasing: states would rent out people in prison to private companies to do hard labor for low or no pay. To supply these laborers, police targeted black and brown communities.

People in prison still labor for the state and for companies for very little pay. The majority of people in prison and jail are still people of color.

Companies like WalMart, Starbucks, and McDonalds have all profited from prison labor. People in prison are sometimes paid 20 cents an hour or less.

When people leave prison, they often have trouble finding places to live and affording rent and mortgage payments. Without homeownership, they are less able to build wealth.

In this way, the loophole in the 13th Amendment encourages racist policing, mass incarceration, and the exploitation of unpaid black and brown labor.

In Louisiana...

People who are incarcerated at Angola still work cotton fields from sun up to sun down.

Seizure of Property The beginning of the U.S. War on Drugs One in five people in the U.S. who are incarcerated, or are in jail or prison, are there for a drug crime. In 1970, President Nixon passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, which marked the beginning of the so-called War on Drugs. In the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. prison population doubled, mostly with people of color. Black and Latinx people make up 58% of the U.S. incarcerated population, despite making up only 29% of the overall U.S. population.

Marijuana possession has one of the most severe punishments, even though several states have made marijuana legal.

If someone goes to prison for one year or more for breaking this law, the police can seize, or legally take, any property that they obtained or used while breaking this law, including houses, money, and vehicles.

Police sell what they seize to fund police stations. This encourages police officers to make more drug arrests.

In this way, black and brown people are targeted by police and legal property seizure becomes another form of theft against people of color by U.S. institutions.

In Louisiana... $26,600,000 in assets has been seized through criminal convictions from 1996–2017

Racial Covenants Racial covenants are restrictive covenants that make it difficult for non-white people to buy or lease land. In 1926, the Supreme Court case Corrigan v. Buckley accepted the use of racial covenants. After this case, racial covenants became more common. These written agreements were used by property owners, real estate estate boards, and neighborhood associations to keep neighborhoods segregated. In 1968, racial covenants became illegal.

Making the covenants illegal did not address the covenants that were written and that are still in some deeds and leases today. Racial covenants are not being enforced now, but buying and leasing land is still a racial issue.

Key Terms: restrictive covenant—a written agreement between two or more parties that restablishes prohibited practices segregation—the separation or isolation of a race, class, or ethnic group

Racial covenants were used to continue the segregation of neighborhoods and keep people of color in urban settings.

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Gentrification After Katrina, the city of New Orleans was devastated. The city needed to rebuild many of its neighborhoods. Some of these neighborhoods were mostly occupied by black people and people of color. These neighborhoods were rebuilt and the value of the property became higher. More middle class families began to move into these neighborhoods from outside the city. The newer, nicer nieghborhoods replaced the old, “urban” neighborhoods. People who lived in the old neighborhood could not afford to live in the rebuilt neighborhood and were displaced from the city.

Key Terms: gentrification—the process of rebuilding homes and businesses in a declining area (such as an urban neighborhood) paired with middle-class people from elsewhere moving in; can result in the displacement of earlier residents “urban”—a description of neighborhoods that are mostly home to people of color displace—to remove from the usual or proper place

Gentrification in New Orleans increased after Hurricane Katrina and resulted in the displacement of many original residents.

Social Disparity in The New Deal 1930s Did you know The New Deal included policies that supported segregation?

In the 1930s, the United States was in its worst economic recession. President Franklin D. Roosevelt presented The New Deal as a counterattack to get the nation back on its feet.

The aim of the historical New Deal was to create a series of policies and organizations that aimed to restore prosperity. The New Deal created many organizations for employment, such as the Work Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). It created a Social Security program that assured a better and secure life for citizens.Nonetheless, the Social Security program was designed to exclude agricultural and domestic workers. These workers did not have access to Social Security for retirement, injuries or unemployment. The majority of these workers were African-American, Latinos, and foreign-born.

The New Deal pursued social uplift, but NOT for everyone.

Area Description Surveys 1930s Your opportunities depended on a “grade” decided by the government.

In the 1930’s, several policies and organizations were created to fight the Great Depression. The Home Owners Act of 1933 was one of them.

This act established the Home Owner Loan Corporation (HOLC), the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and the Federal Housing Administration Loan Program (FHA Loans). FHA loans offered the opportunity for homeowners to have lower interest rates and more time to pay back their loans. The HOLC and the FHA were also the organizations responsible for producing the Area Description Surveys used to create redlining maps.

These maps decided which neighborhoods qualified to have beneficial loans depending on the condition of each neighborhood. They observed and decided their “grade value”(A, B, C, D) by segregationist criteria included in the survey.

Area Description Surveys were used to create redlining maps.

Criteria included: - Class & Occupations - Favorable influences - Detrimental influences (i.e. “Negro presence”) - Family Income, - Foreign-Born Families - Negro % - Ownership % - Rent % - Terrain - Neighborhood Age and others...

Jim Crow “Jim Crow� refers to a series of laws that upheld the practice of segregation and discrimination in the southern United States in the late 1870s. It was an attempt to re-create a system of white supremacy after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Jim Crow laws took away the rights of many black people and poor white people to vote with literacy tests, poll taxes, and complicated voter registration systems. Jim Crow laws also segregated many public areas, including buses, schools, drinking fountains, and many other public gathering spaces. Some laws also enforced segregated housing and prevented marriage between people of different races.

The effects of Jim Crow were cities that were divided between black and white neighborhoods. There was a higher concentration of poverty in the black neighborhoods, and the facilities offered to black people were rarely as nice as the facilities offered to white people. Even though the laws no longer exist, the effects of Jim Crow are still evident in our cities today.

Jim Crow was a set of discriminatory laws in the southern United States after Reconstruction that segregated the races.

Exclusionary Zoning

Exclusionary Zoning in New Orleans

Exclusionary zoning stops affordable housing from being allowed in certain neighborhoods of a city. This practice is used to keep lower-income people out of areas of cities with more resources and opportunities, like higher-income jobs and better schools. The main way this happens is residential neighborhoods are zoned only for single-family or two-family homes. Exclusionary zoning can also mean limits on how big houses can be, or how many lots of land can be combined to create a housing development like an apartment building.

All of these policies make it hard to create affordable housing. Racial minorities are more likely to have lower incomes, so they have more of a need for housing that is affordable. Because of this, they are more likely to suffer discrimination because of exclusionary zoning policies.

Zoning refers to what types of buildings are allowed to be built on different areas of land.

Exclusionary zoning prevents the creation of affordable housing and limits opportunities for people with lower incomes.

Single or two-family zoning Single or two-family footprints All other possible residential zoning All other possible residential footprints