- [Chris] All right, why
don't we get started?
- [Woman] It really does, it really does.
- [Chris] Thank you all for coming.
So, my name is Chris Yokel.
I'm a member of the English classroom here
and I've also been involved in One Book,
basically since I started
here, the past years.
So, this is kind of our
key event for the spring
in terms of the One Book.
So this year's One Book is
"The Hate U Give" by Angie Thomas.
It's a young adult novel this
young girl named Starr Carter,
who basically is an eyewitness
to her kind of best friend from childhood,
her male friend getting
shot by a police officer,
and the book really grappled
with kind of the fallout of that.
But then also just really the
black experience in America.
So, Starr and her family live in a,
what we might call a typical
poor black neighborhood,
but she goes to a sort of
white rich prep school.
So, a lot of the story is about
her kind of living this dual existence
in her sort of black home
world, white school world.
She talks about being a white Starr,
and then so she's kind of too
black for her white friends,
but then at home,
she's sort of too white
for her black friends
'cause she goes to a white prep school.
So it's a lot about identity.
Well, today particularly,
we're gonna be getting into
some legislative background
that informs the book.
So...
And Robyn will....
There's a scene from the film
version that Robyn will show
where Starr and her dad, Maverick,
have a conversation about
what he calls the trap.
So, you know, she finds out
in the midst of the story
that her friend Khalil had
become involved in selling drugs,
for like the kind of drug
lord in the neighborhood.
And, you know, she starts
to kind of question
everything she knows and she
wonders like, why, you know?
Why would he do something like this?
And so, her and her dad
had this conversation
where it's like,
well, what else was
available to him, right?
Walmart's certainly not
coming to our neighborhood,
like, there's no opportunities for us,
so that's what often drives young men
into doing things like selling drugs.
And the reality is is there's
a lot of actual history
and government policy behind that.
So Robyn is here today to talk about that,
to talk about economic
and housing segregation,
redlining, historic policies in the U.S.
that actually have led
to things like this,
led to generalization
and led to kind of limited opportunities
for African Americans.
So, it's just shedding
some historical light
on contemporary realities
surrounding things that are
obviously very, you know,
kind of hot button issues,
even in our country right now, right?
As we talk about racial issues and stuff.
So, Robyn, she's an associate
professor of history
here at the school and also
the Civic Learning Fellow
for the last center.
- [Robyn] Yes.
- So, it seems perfectly appropriate
that she would be the one
talking about this topic.
So, I'll turn it over to Robyn.
- Thank you, Chris.
(audience applauds)
So thanks for coming everyone,
and thank you, Chris, for inviting me.
And I don't know, how many
of you have read the book?
"The Hate U Give."
A couple of you, okay.
So, I used "The Hate U Give" last semester
in my history 114, which
is the survey course
that covers the second half
of U.S. history from 1877 on.
So I've read it and it was really,
I was saying to Chris earlier,
that I had a fair amount of information
about the segregation
of African Americans,
but in researching for
this presentation today,
I was stunned all over again
at the sort of purposeful planning
of both federal and state
and local governments
in segregating African American people
to particular communities.
And as Chris said, I wanna
start with a clip from the book,
excuse me, from the movie
that was made from the book.
It explains the title of the book
and it also gives you
just a little snippet
of what they call the trap,
or Marv calls the trap.
- Tryna make some sense out of it.
(sentimental music)
- It's thug life.
The hate you give little infants--
- Effs everybody.
I know what it stands for.
What do you think it means?
- I think it's about us.
- Us who?
- Black people, poor people,
everybody at the bottom.
- Right, you on it.
Pac was tryna school us
on how the system's designed against us.
Why else you think so many
people in our neighborhood deal?
- They need the money.
- And there ain't no
real jobs around here,
so they fall into the trap.
- So, we're gonna think
about what this trap is
and how black families,
how black Americans are
caught into this trap.
And in thinking about
this presentation today,
I was thinking that Americans, I think,
at least white Americans as a whole,
tend to think of segregation
as perhaps something
that just happens, right?
That there's a tendency
for white Americans to
want to distance themselves
from black Americans because of racism
and that perhaps black
Americans wanna live together
in their own segregated
communities, right?
Something we call defacto segregation.
But today, I want to argue that, actually,
this was purposefully done
and that segregated communities
were actually created
or even engineered by
these different entities,
by individuals, by different
government entities.
And so, we really can't think
of it as defacto segregation,
but dejure defacto, which means by law.
And not only did these
agencies segregate people
into separate communities,
they did it by desegregating communities,
integrated communities
that already existed.
And in the process of doing this,
they actually had to
find end runs around laws
and judicial decisions.
And even the constitutional protections
that after the Americans had,
specifically in the 13th
and 14th amendments.
And then I also wanna spend
a few minutes thinking about
the legacy of this residential segregation
and how it affects many,
many parts of society today.
So, I want to start by
thinking about public housing
and I suspect if I asked all
of you what public housing is,
you would likely say that public housing
is for extremely poor
people or indigent people,
but actually the history of public housing
is very different.
Public housing started as a way
to eliminate a housing
crisis that happened
beginning in the middle of the 1920s.
There was a housing bubble that burst,
and then, of course,
the Great Depression made this
even worse starting in 1929.
But the first public housing
was actually designed for
working and lower class,
working and lower middle class Americans
and not necessarily for
the poorest of the poor.
So, starting in 1933 after
the Great Depression has hit
and Roosevelt comes into office,
and I'm sure you've all
heard of the New Deal.
The Public Works Administration is created
and this is part of the New Deal.
And it's created as a way,
not only to put people back
to work building houses,
but also to alleviate this housing crisis
that is occurring in the country.
The Great Depression...
And during the Great Depression,
there's 25% unemployment.
That's an average figure.
That figure is 50% amongst
African Americans in the country.
And people, because they can't work,
they end up losing their homes.
A lot of people are homeless,
they end up making little tent cities,
which they call Hoover towns,
but that's another story.
And so, this this Public Works
Administration is created
as a way to build housing for people
and put people back to work.
Originally, this plan for public housing
really didn't include black Americans.
But Harold Ickes, who was
the Secretary of the Interior
and a noted Progressive, by the way,
Ickes was, at one time, a
chapter head for the NAACP,
his local NAACP chapter.
He argues for public housing
to include African Americans.
Ickes also comes up with this formula,
this neighborhood composition rule.
So, he proposes that in
neighborhoods that are all white,
public housing should
be for white Americans,
that in neighborhoods
that are mostly black,
they should be for black Americans,
but he also argued that in
integrated neighborhoods,
they should remain integrated.
But the Public Works Administration,
in conjunction, by the way,
because they worked with
local and state agencies,
did not follow Ickes' rule.
So, I'm gonna give you
a couple of examples.
So, in Atlanta, there
was a section of the city
and you can see it looks pretty tough,
pretty poor looking area,
it looks pretty run down,
this is called Tanyard Bottoms,
sometimes known as Tech Flats.
And the city of Atlanta
raised this to the ground
and with the thought that
they would replace it
with public housing and this
was an integrated neighborhood.
And in its place, they
created Tech Homes in Atlanta
and they segregated it white.
Now, because the federal
government complained
that this was only for white Americans.
Oh, by the way, there they
are sitting in their home.
Oh, I have some figures.
This is actually really
interesting, hold on a minute,
I wanted to tell you what the rent was
in one of these homes.
Let's see if I can find it quickly,
without making you wait too long.
Oh, for a three room
apartment in Tech Homes,
you would pay $16 a month in rent.
If you wanted four rooms, $20,
and six rooms, holy mackerel,
when was the last time you saw
an apartment with six rooms?
$38, and that included electricity.
- [Student] Wow.
- Right?
Exactly, yeah, too bad we
don't see that today, right?
So the Tech Homes were white,
and so, in response to
the government's protest,
the federal government's protest
that they were building
only white public housing,
the city of Atlanta
designed University Homes,
which opened in 1938 and
that was segregated black.
Here's another example from St. Louis.
The city of St. Louis
took this integrated,
integrated 50/50, right, half and half,
half black Americans, half white Americans
in this relatively poor
kind of run-down area
called DeSoto Carr and
they leveled that as well.
And then set to set planning
Neighborhood Gardens,
which was a segregated white community.
(student chattering)
Carr Square Village, in 1942,
eventually was built segregated black
and built on the former site
of the of the DeSoto Carr area.
Same thing in New York City
with the Harlem River Houses
in 1937 being segregated black
and the Williamsburg Homes
being segregated white.
So, just to sum up, right?
Public housing that
was originally intended
to be for black and white Americans,
integrated neighborhoods
are now being segregated.
Okay, so, another way
that the government segregated
black and white populations
was through something
called racial zoning.
And this began in the aftermath
of the Great Migration.
So, between 1915 and 1940,
upwards of six million African Americans
migrated from the deep
south, as you can see,
all over the country.
Some stayed in southern cities,
but others moved both north and west
and this influx of black
Americans into areas
where they had not been any more,
did cause some racial tensions,
but also caused governments to create
the zoning ordinance, right?
So, these were used in cities
where there were large
populations of African Americans
and their goal, right, is
to contain black Americans,
physically, into certain communities.
So the very first zoning law
was in Baltimore in 1910,
and this was literally a
block by block segregation.
So, black Americans were not permitted
to move into neighborhoods and blocks
that were all white and vice versa.
And this came about,
this ordinance came about
because there was a
prominent black attorney
who bought a house and moved
into an all white block.
And so, Milton Dashiel,
the attorney who drafted the ordinance,
you can see his referral
to some black Americans
who wanted to leave their
neighbors behind, and quote,
"Get as close to the
company of white people
"as circumstances will permit."
In other words, they were
getting a little uppity
and wanting to move into
the white neighborhoods
and this ordinance was
a way to to prevent it.
A bunch of other cities,
northern cities, excuse me,
southern and border cities,
issue these ordinance as well,
as you can see here.
And according to the New Republic,
which was pretty new in 1915,
but was also a relatively
Progressive newspaper,
argued that this racial
segregation should continue,
quote, "Until Negroes ceased
"wanting to amalgamate with whites."
Which I found particularly amusing,
considering that the country
had a long history of amalgamation,
starting from when black slave owners
raped their black slaves, right?
So this amalgamation had been
going on for quite some time.
So, in St. Louis in 1910, a
zoning ordinance was passed,
the same sort of idea as what
happened in Baltimore, right?
"The zoning to prevent movement
"into finer residential
districts by colored people."
Same sort of language.
These were pretty effective
as you can see in St. Louis,
notice the statistic at the
bottom that between '47 and '52,
out of 70,000 housing units in St.Louis,
.05% of them were available
to African Americans.
That's pretty dismal.
Well, racial zoning laws
kind of took a hit in 1917.
when the Supreme Court
ruled in Buchanan v. Warley
that the racial zoning law
in Louisville, Kentucky
was unconstitutional.
But interestingly, they did not rule,
the court did not rule that
it was unconstitutional
because it violated the civil protection,
civil rights of black Americans,
but because it interfered with
a property owner's rights.
So, the court argued that
people who own property
should be able to sell
to whomever they wanted.
So, this was kind of a
victory but not really
because it still allowed
cities to segregate,
but to use other methods to do so, right?
So, cities in the wake
of the Buchanan case,
started to move towards city planning.
And this was just a more wide scale way
to accomplish racial segregation.
They realized very quickly
that if they put in their zoning laws,
if they wrote into their zoning
laws, any mention of race,
that they would be struck
down because of Buchanan,
and so, they used a
different sort of framing
in order to justify
their racial segregation.
And actually they were correct
when they thought that
they wouldn't be dinged
if they left out the word
race, because in 1926,
in the case of Euclid v. Ambler,
the Supreme Court said
that zoning regulations
could be upheld as long as
there was some connection
to the public welfare.
So this became the new way
that city planners could segregate
by citing sort of safety
and public welfare
rules or concerns.
So, here's Robert Whitten
and he's a pretty well-known city planner.
He did a lot of planning
in, as you can see here,
Atlanta, Cleveland, New York.
And notice how in this
this quote from him,
he refers to things like,
"Neighborhoods had to be protected
"from any further damage to values
"resulting from the encroachment
of the colored race."
Now, it does mention
race, but it's specific,
it explicitly frames this
in a protective way of thinking, right?
So this was a way to
protect neighborhoods.
Another aspect to zoning is industrial.
So, at the same time
that these city planners are creating
these racially based segregated planning,
another purpose was to separate
white neighborhoods from industry.
And so, certain segments of the cities
were marked as industrial.
They wanted to keep white citizens away
from smelly, polluting kind of industries,
and tanneries in particular come to mind.
Tanneries are where skins
are prepared, animals,
they turn them into leather.
It's pretty...
These acids and other, you
know, pretty foul stuff.
Interestingly though,
in the city planning,
they labeled land for
future industrialization
right next to black neighborhoods,
right next to African
American neighborhoods.
And they even made a provision
so that zoning could be changed
from residential to industrial
if black families began to move into them.
In my reading, there were
some really clever ways
that some cities went about doing this,
like building a playground
in industrial zone,
in the hopes that black
families would move in.
Or building a school right in the area
to draw black families in.
And these industrial zoning
laws were amazingly effective
at what they did, per these two studies.
So, in 1983, the U.S.
General Accounting Office
noted that commercial
waste treatment facilities
and waste dumps were
more likely to be found
near African American communities,
than white residential areas.
And another study by the
United Churches of Christ,
they proposed that the
percent of minorities
living near incinerators was 89% higher
than the national median,
and that there was only
a one in 10,000th chance,
that's hard to say,
one in 10,000th chance,
of the racial distribution
occurring randomly.
So this was purposeful, in other words,
was the finding of this study.
Okay, so, zoning ordinances
were really helpful
at isolating low-income black communities
from white communities,
but the government in 1973 specifically,
well, later the Hoover administration,
decided to encourage white Americans
to move into a more suburban
area, more suburban areas,
by buying their own homes.
And isn't it fascinating
the way that they frame
own your own home for your
children's sake, right?
The U.S. Department of
Labor is behind this
and they printed a whole bunch of these,
millions of these flyers and
put them up in businesses
and in factories so white
Americans would see these, right?
And then on the right there,
sort of the uber masculine kind of
be a man who owns his own home, right?
Be a real American.
And part of this framing, of course,
is in the face of what
happens during this period,
the Red Scare, where
communism was a specter
that Americans at the time
were like super worried about, you know?
Like that ever went away.
And then in 1922, The Better
Homes movement comes along
and this was during the
Hoover administration,
as a way to encourage white
Americans to build homes,
to buy homes, to keep
their homes maintained.
And look at the little guy
who is the wage earner, right?
He's walking across the real estate board,
which is keeping him from falling
into the pit of financial difficulties.
I love cartoons like
this, so great, right?
And when he gets to the other
side, tada, own your own home.
Really interesting too is
that the Hoover administration
promoted this conference
where they invited business leaders,
real estate developers, you
know, construction companies
and all kinds of people
affiliated with the home building industry
to this big conference.
And I couldn't help but wonder
if this wasn't sort of the precursor
of the home show that we have today.
I'll have to research
that a little bit more.
(student chuckles)
All right, The Better
Homes manual was written,
and as you can see,
it's encouraging people to not
live in apartments anymore,
because apartments are seen as quote,
"The worst kind of housing.
"They're overcrowded because
of the ignorant racial habit
"of African Americans
and European immigrants."
- [Student] What does that mean?
- [Robyn] What do you mean?
- [Student] What does that
mean, the ignorant racial habit?
- The ignorant habit
is they're all crowding
in together into these
apartment buildings.
Well, there was a problem
with home ownership
for most Americans at the time.
First of all, housing was expensive,
especially considering
it wasn't a lot of it.
I told you there was a housing shortage,
so that makes the price of houses go up.
Plus there's a problem with mortgages.
So back in the '20s,
if you wanted to take a
mortgage out on a home,
you had to put 50% down, 50% down.
And your payments were
interest only payments
and then there was a balloon payment,
five to seven years later,
you had to pay the whole
blinking thing off, right?
Isn't that crazy?
- [Student] Yeah.
- Yes, and so, there's no...
You don't build any equity,
basically, on the house.
- [Student] Were women
allowed to have mortgages?
- I don't think that they were,
because women were not
allowed to make contract,
to sign, you know, have any contracts.
- [Student] Yeah, and I read
the book and that's true.
- And as I mentioned before,
the Great Depression made this
even worse, consider, right,
that foreclosure rate stood
at more than 1,000 a day,
the beginning of the Great Depression.
If you can't work, you can't make money,
you can't pay your mortgage,
it's as simple as that.
- [Woman] Robyn, do you
know what would happen
like to that housing that
was foreclosed on and how?
- Well, for a time they
were just closed up,
but then when the Home Owners'
Loan Corporation came around,
they started buying up these mortgages.
So they'd buy up the mortgage
and they'd remortgage them for people
and made them more able to afford them.
So, they'd buy the mortgage
and they started giving them
15-year repayment schedules,
later on, that gets increased to 25 years.
They're amortized so that
you're paying like you do today,
if you buy a home,
you pay part interest and
part on the principal.
So you build up equity,
is the way of building
up equity into the home.
Then when the loan is paid
off, the home is yours, right?
But the problem was how
to know if purchasers,
how to know if the people
that you were giving these mortgages to
could afford to pay these mortgages.
And so, the HOLC enlist the
help of real estate agents
around the country,
realtors around the country,
to help them figure out which, you know,
who could pay for these
mortgages and who couldn't.
Now, keep in mind that
in the code of ethics
of the National Association
of Real Estate Brokers,
there is this clause that says that,
"A realtor should never be instrumental
"in introducing to a neighborhood
"members of any race or nationality
"whose presence will
clearly be detrimental
"to property values in that neighborhood."
So they're going into this assignment
already with a bias, obviously.
And so, this is probably the zoning
that most of you are most
familiar with, redlining,
redlining for mortgage security.
So, realtors went into these communities
and they labeled them.
They created these zoning
maps and they labeled them.
Each area was labeled either green, best,
blue, still desirable,
yellow, definitely declining
or red, hazardous.
And then the neighborhoods
that were hazardous, of course,
or even definitely declining
were the people who lived
in those neighborhoods
were unlikely to get
mortgage help from the HOLC.
And there's a really explicit racial angle
to this to this zoning.
So, if you notice here under green, best,
one of the comments is, "Not
a single foreigner or negro."
That was one of the reasons
why it was declared best.
A red district has little or no value
due to the colored element or
the adverse racial influence,
which are noticeably increasing.
So, it's very explicitly race
bias, very explicitly racial.
And I wanna take a minute
out of this PowerPoint
and show you this wonderful,
wonderful website.
I don't know if any of you
who are educators in this room
have ever seen this.
This is called mapping inequality
and this was a collaborative
between several universities.
There were like four different teams
from three different universities
or the other way around
and they have digitized
all these zoning maps
all around the country.
So this helps us to see a little bit
what the HOLC had in mind, right?
So, these are hot spots
where good mortgage lenders
with available funds
are willing to make their maximum loans.
Still desirable, still good,
but not as hot as A areas.
And then the declining ones, mm,
mortgage lenders are
more conservative here.
And then of course hazardous.
They recommend lenders refuse
to make loans in these areas
or only on a conservative basis.
And so, this is a map of
Providence, Rhode Island.
They didn't do Fall River or New Bedford
or I would have included those, but--
- [Student] It's number one on the--
- [Robyn] Yeah, take a look
at what is labeled rot, right?
- Yeah.
- Isn't this...
I think this might be Fox Point.
- [Student] No, Fox Point's--
- [Student] It's too
far away, maybe it's 26.
That'll--
- It's 26.
- Ah!
- Oh!
- Okay, down here, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a little hard to tell
because this is before
they relocated the
Providence River and all,
but it's really fascinating.
Most of Providence is in the D category,
C category, excuse me.
- [Student] But Fox Point
was Portuguese at this point.
26 was Portuguese.
- Right here.
- [Student] Yeah, right.
They were immigrants, they
were, well, just immigrants.
- Yeah, so, you can actually...
(students chattering)
Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Really, really fascinating.
- I taught in the Bronx about that
and I can remember the American
Federation of Teachers,
my dues went into a bank
that redlined the
neighborhood I had lived in.
- [Robyn] There you go!
- Yeah.
- There you go, super!
Great, yeah.
Thank you and thank you.
(laughs)
I'm gonna come back to
those maps in a few minutes.
I wanna show you...
We're gonna look at a section of Harlem.
So...
All right, so, in addition to the HOLC,
the National Housing Act, of course, 1934,
insured these mortgages, right?
Insured these mortgages up
to 80% of the purchase price.
But again, if you look at this
little section from the manual,
here you'll see that
incompatible racial groups
should not be permitted to
live in the same communities.
If a neighborhood is to retain stability,
it is necessary that the property
shall continue to be occupied
by the same social classes
and racial classes.
And this impacts a decision
or impacts a community
in Detroit in this way.
So, a builder was trying to
build a development in Detroit.
But because this piece of
property that he purchased
was very close to a black neighborhood,
he couldn't get the loans
that he needed from the FHA.
The FHA refused to give him the loans
to start building this community.
So, he literally
constructed a cement wall,
a half mile long, six feet
high and one foot thick
between the black neighborhood
and the his property.
And sure enough,
the FHA then approved the
loans for this neighborhood.
And actually the wall still stands today
and it's been turned into
this incredible work of art.
People in Detroit, at least
on the one side of it,
have created these wonderful
murals all along the wall.
Pretty dramatic, right?
Of course, in World War
II, post-world War II,
the idea of the segregated
suburbs really took hold,
where people like William
Levitt created Levittown's,
applies for both FHA and FHA help
in order to get loans from local banks
to build their communities
and of course they weren't approved.
These plans were not approved,
the loans were not approved
if African Americans lived nearby
and threatens integration
into these neighborhoods.
Before we go into
restrictive cart covenants,
I wanna go back for one minute
'cause I told you we would
look at Manhattan for a minute.
So, this is the same community, excuse me,
this is the same website we
were looking at a minute ago.
This is Manhattan and this area here
is what's called Sugar Hill, in Harlem.
And if I click on it, we
can look at the details
and this is just to emphasize the fact
that these decisions
were very much racial.
So, if we go down the list here,
we can see that according
to this information,
it's 90%, quote, "Negro."
Look at the estimated
annual family income.
- [Student] What year is this again?
- [Robyn] This is late 1930s, early 1940s.
- [Student] Interesting to
see the difference now--
- [Robyn] Oh, yeah, but look
at the estimated family income,
10 million dollars in Sugar Hill.
Do you know why, Chris?
Being, you know?
- 10 million?
- 10 million.
- [Student] Wow, I was
reading and it said...
(students chattering)
- This was sort of the epicenter
of the Harlem Renaissance.
So, people that were
living in this community
were people like Ella Fitzgerald
and Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington,
Thurgood Marshall lived here
at one point, W.E.B. Dubois.
There were a lot of very
wealthy black Americans
who lived in this community
and yet it was redlined.
Now, if we go down,
let's go down and see if we
can find a green neighborhood,
because green is the best
neighborhood, we know.
Let's click here.
(student drowned out by buzzing)
(laughs)
Oh, don't mess up on me.
Come back, come back.
A7, that little green square.
Notice that there are
no Negroes living there.
Look at the family income.
(student scoffs)
- Wow!
- Interesting.
- [Student] Oh God, what a difference.
- 10,000 to 100,000 and that's green.
They get the mortgages,
they get the insurance.
Fascinating, right?
You don't need any other argument,
any other evidence to support the fact
that this was so racially
motivated than that.
All right, let's talk about
restrictive covenants.
So, restrictive covenants were
what you might think of them
as today's like neighborhood.
You know how some
neighborhoods you move into,
there's a neighborhood agreement,
you can't paint your
house a certain color,
you can't do this, you can't do that.
Well, restrictive covenants, early on,
like this one in 1925,
set about to make
agreements amongst residents
in a particular neighborhood,
not to sell their homes to certain people.
And you can here that it says that,
"No person other than one of
the white or Caucasian racial
"are permitted to occupy any property
"in said addition or
portion thereof building
"or a building thereon,
except a domestic servant
"actually employed by a person
of white or Caucasian race."
So you couldn't buy a
home in this neighborhood
if you were a black family,
but if you lived in the
house with a white family
and worked as their maid
or nanny, you are all set.
Wow, that's awfully small,
I apologize for that.
(laughs)
So, these covenants were confirmed
by the Supreme Court in 1926,
that reasoned that these
private individuals could
make these particular
agreements with one another,
because again, this was the
protection of property rights
that we saw earlier in the Buckley case.
And then in 1948, confirmed
again in the Shively case,
where the covenants were deemed
not to violate the 14th Amendment,
but if states enforced to them,
that was the line that
the court wouldn't cross.
So as long as the state didn't try
to enforce these covenants,
it was okay to have them.
- [Student] Mm-mm-mm.
- [Robyn] Amazing, right?
- [Student] Yeah.
- Sometimes when people try
to push back against these covenants,
it ended up in violence.
So this is the the Wade family.
Charlotte, Rosemary and Andrew
and they were living in Louisville
and they wanted to buy their own home.
They couldn't find one
that they really liked,
and so, they kept going to this
neighborhood with a realtor,
this all white neighborhood
and no one would sell them home
'cause they were a black family.
Well, eventually they had a couple
who were friends of theirs buy a home
and then transfer the deed to them.
Well, the day after they
moved into their home,
someone burned a cross in
the lot next to their home.
After that, you can see right here,
their windows are smashed.
People threw rocks through their windows,
including some with notes
wrapped around them,
saying, "N, go home."
Someone shot a rifle
through their front door
and eventually their house was dynamited.
- [Student] Oh my gosh.
- [Robyn] Dynamited.
The cross burner and the bomber confessed,
but they were not charged.
However, the white family that
transferred the house to them
was brought up on charges.
They were indicted by a grand jury
for inciting racial violence.
- [Student] Oh, Jesus.
- And in 1973, the
Commission on Civil Rights,
it gave a nod to the fact
that both the housing
industry and the government
came together to create
this situation, right?
The segregated housing.
All right, so, there's this implicit fear
of white homeowners that
when black Americans
moved into homes in these
white neighborhoods,
that their property values would drop.
And all evidence to the contrary,
because when black homeowners would buy
into sort of borderline neighborhoods,
they ended up having to
pay more for their homes
because they couldn't get
these special mortgages and insurance,
and so, consequently
the home values went up.
But unscrupulous real estate agents
took advantage of white fear
and they would created this
system called blockbusting.
So, what they would do
is they might buy a house
in a white neighborhood
and rent it to a black family.
They might pay a black woman
to walk through the neighborhood
with a baby carriage.
They would pay young black men
to drive through these neighborhoods
with their windows open in their car
and their music on really loud.
They'd take a black man with them
and go ringing doorbells asking people
if their homes were for sale.
And this created so much fear
within these white neighborhoods
that their property
values were going to drop,
that they started to sell their homes
to these land speculators
at a much reduced rate.
So they would sell them to
the land speculators for cheap
because they wanted to
get the heck out of there,
they would panic.
And then the speculators would turn around
and sell them to black
families at inflated prices.
And then they'd move on to
the next community over,
the next community over,
the next community over.
Often when these
speculators would sell homes
to these black families,
they would do so on a contract basis.
So, the white land speculators
could get mortgages
and federal insurance on these homes.
So they would purchase them
and then they would make a contract
with black families to live in the home
and pay off their home
on an installment plan.
Now the thing about the installment plan
was you never built up any
equity in your home, number one.
And, number two, they were so stringent
that if you were late
for at least one payment,
just late on one payment, you
could eventually be evicted.
And because you had no
equity built up in this home,
you are out on the streets with nothing.
And I know this is a long quote,
but this quote I found
particularly fascinating
because it speaks to how
hard black families worked
to keep these contract homes.
They'd work two jobs,
they'd work double shifts,
they would subdivide their home
so that they could rent
out portions of the homes
and these made the
communities more crowded,
the schools became more crowded.
When the schools became crowded,
some schools went on double shifts
and this left kids going
to school half the day
and having half the day to themselves,
left them to their own devices.
Gangs, when gangs moved in,
they played on these kids
who didn't really have a lot to do
with their time after
school and the gangs then
would go after business
owners and shopkeepers
and white people just fled
these neighborhoods in droves.
But if you were black families
who purchased your house through contract,
you had no choice but to stay.
You could not sell that
home, you were stuck there.
- [Chris] Okay.
- All right, I'm gonna skip over this
'cause we're getting a
little short on time.
Let's talk about the legacy
of racial segregation,
of residential segregation.
So, I have several charts
from the center for...
I forgot the name, but I'm sorry.
C.A.P., I'm blanking.
It's okay, we don't need to know.
All right, so here's a chart showing
how the comparison
between black and Hispanic
and white homeowners from 1940 to 2017.
- [Student] Does that say that 1970
is where Hispanics started to move?
- [Robyn] There's a division right there.
Actually, it's a little bit earlier,
it starts like right here.
- [Student] Go ahead and look.
- A little bit before 1970.
Around 1970, where there's a
little bit of just, you know,
they separate a little bit.
Center for American progress,
yes, I remembered it!
Here's salaries.
Again, we started out with a clip
from "The Hate U Give" movie
where Marv is saying, you know,
there aren't any job in our neighborhood.
Black men are laid off more often
and they are out of work longer.
It takes them longer to find
employment than white men,
as a rule.
- [Nancy] Was there a
problem with that last one?
(student drowned out by buzzing)
The ages 25 to 54.
- Oh, I don't know, good question.
I didn't notice that, good eye, Nancy.
(laughs)
- [Nancy] I got my driver's license.
(laughs)
- Good job.
All right, wealth, right,
wealth is being the difference
between what you have and
what you owe, you know,
things that you own versus your debt
and you can see that the racial wealth gap
has exponentially risen
and that's only since 1990.
And don't forget that the number one way
that Americans hold their wealth is?
- Property.
- Property and homes.
Right, absolutely.
If we adjust for college
education, the top is net wealth,
the bottom is adjusting
for college education.
So even education, college
education is not a fix
for this problem.
- That's a lot!
- That's incredible.
- Isn't that amazing?
- Yeah.
- [Robyn] This was at the micro level.
So here's two St. Louis communities.
And you can see that this disparity,
that disparity and wealth
impacts other things too,
like health, like longevity.
- [Student] My goodness, and that's now?
(laughs)
- [Robyn] Yeah.
And then persistent school segregation
goes along with this as well.
This is incredible to think
that non-white school districts
get 23 billion dollars
less than white districts.
23 billion less.
- [Student] Is that what they
mean by separate but equal?
- [Robyn] Separate but equal.
That was supposed to have
gone away, wasn't it?
- [Student] Yeah.
- Right, yes.
- [Student] Well, and this is,
I mean, in "The Hate U Give,"
Starr talks about how her parents sent her
to the rich white prep school
because you only go to the
local high school to get--
- I think she says jumped, to get high--
- And pregnant.
- And pregnant,
right, exactly.
Yep, absolutely.
- [Student] So they're
sending them to another school
so they can actually get a good education,
because the public school system.
- [Kathleen] Eduction is supposed
to be the great equalizer.
- [Student] Yeah, but
persistent inequity manifests.
- Mm-hm, right.
And Kathleen, you mentioned
separate but equal,
which of course all of
you I'm sure have heard
of the Brown v. Board of
Education, Topeka, Kansas case,
which was supposed to end
segregation in schools,
but the Milliken decision
went way in the other direction, right?
So in the Milliken case,
the court decided that desegregation
in the sense of dismantling
a dual school system
did not require any
particular racial balance
in each school grade or classroom.
So the Milliken decision
has gone a long, long way
to creating those numbers
that we just saw a second ago.
So, I just wanna show you one other thing.
It's this really great
website, another website.
So this is a...
This website was created based on research
by this Ed build group
and this particular part of the website
shows how neighborhoods,
side-by-side neighborhoods,
have incredibly ridiculous separation
in how schools are funded.
So, let's see if I can
actually get this to work.
If I can get this to work,
we will try to zoom in
on one of these things.
Let's see, let me go down.
(laughs)
Click on the state, okay, I tried to.
Okay, there's Kentucky.
Let's not look at Kentucky.
Oh no, come back.
There you are, okay.
I wanted to go to
Massachusetts if we can get it.
Let's try to make it smaller,
maybe we can get over to
Massachusetts, here we go.
Cooperate please, there we are.
- [Rebecca] I think you need
to scroll down and then you--
- You think so, Rebecca?
- [Rebecca] I do, yes.
- Oh, and then put in--
- [Rebecca] You need to click on a state.
- Click on a state, oh,
you're the best, thank you.
All right, so, here we are, Massachusetts.
So let's click on, oh, I don't know.
Here.
So there's the Worcester School District
next to the Millbury School District.
I don't know how well you can see that.
So the student poverty rate in
the Worcester school district
is 22%, 7% in Millbury.
And the revenue per
pupil, looks not so great,
but look at how many students.
- [Student] And then the
percentage saying nonwhite versus.
- [Robyn] Yep.
So let's look at a different one.
This is Brockton and Abington.
I was thinking of you, Kathleen,
with some of these websites
because you're so interested
in this mapping kind of thing,
but this is such an incredible
resource for anybody
that's doing any teaching to
show this type of inequality.
- [Student] It's Fall River.
- [Robyn] All right, do
they have Fall River?
I don't...
Is that what you said, Ron,
do they have Fall River?
- [Student] Is it not on the thing?
- [Robyn] I don't think
so, but let's look.
- [Student] How 'bout maybe--
- [Robyn] I mean, you could zoom out.
- [Student] I mean, I don't know,
and honestly, it's something that's--
- [Robyn] I know, you
could spend all day, right?
- [Student] Yeah.
- [Robyn] I'm not doing a very good job
of navigating this, I'm sorry.
(students chattering)
- Well, I don't wanna
hold you up any longer.
I just wanna, before I hand
this back over to Chris,
I was wondering if you had any questions?
I can send you the website
if you're interested
in looking, you could.
- [Student] Yes, thank you.
- I can send you my list of sources.
- I heard a report today on
the content of history books
that are used in public schools,
and the public schools in
Maine have history books
that don't mention slavery
and they don't mention Civil Rights.
- [Student] Oh my goodness.
- I mean, you'd think that that would,
if you said Texas, I would
have been oh, yeah, yeah,
we can say that, right?
But Maine?
Yikes, very white.
Yes, it's very white.
- [Student] Well, apparently
they can't transfer 'em in
from high schools into a college system.
- They come in unprepared.
- Well, yeah.
That's what I'm saying.
- A lot of my students
are really very unaware
of racial, you know, the
history of race in this country.
They really don't know about of slavery,
they don't know, you know?
- Teach your class on that probably.
- [Student] What?
- African American history.
- Yeah.
- So--
(students chattering)
No questions, comments?
- [Student] Where are we going, you know?
- Good question.
- Yeah.
Such a missed opportunity.
- I don't have that answer, I wish I did.
Some of the readings I did in suggesting
how this problem can be
solved is researchers say
that it's going to take
government intervention
and some very purposeful, purposeful work.
Some of those school districts
have even been sharing.
- [Chris] But that's a
whole other problem, truly.
- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- And I think too, I mean,
stuff like this, awareness, right?
'Cause I think, especially
if you're a white American
and you think it'd be easy,
like I saw Robyn begin to feel like,
Oh, slavery ended 200 years
ago, what's the problem, right?
But when you're not aware
of the continued suppression
of black people--
- As I put it, it's a legacy, a legacy.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Like you know, the disparity that exists
is because all that wealth
accumulation was denied, right?
It's wealth accumulation,
it's generational.
- Exactly, exactly.
- And all these opportunities were denied,
so there is no wealth
in certain parts of it.
- Right.
- [Student] I heard this idea
like about six months ago
and I was wondering your opinion on it.
Part of a way that helps solve this
is to lower the average price of homes.
And a way to sort of pull
back on zoning restrictions
when building homes,
so you don't need to be as...
Not as specific, but if you
have a zoning district where...
It's so tough to explain.
I live in Somerset, a new
housing area just got popped up
and it's all two floor homes,
like it's a pretty rich neighborhood.
But part of the reason they did that
was because the zoning laws
on it were so restricted
that they could only
build that type of home
in that type of area,
and so, it jacked up the prices
of those homes like $350,000.
So a lot of low-income
and a lot of African American communities,
if they are in that low income bracket,
they can't afford that.
- Right.
- It's like gentrification.
- Gentrification, absolutely.
And I didn't talk about
that, I ran out of time.
I didn't talk about urban
renewal and the destruction
and raising, flattening of
African American neighborhoods,
in order to make way for industry,
in order to make way for
the interstate highways,
destroyed many low-income
black neighborhoods
in urban areas.
Another solution that I heard,
actually, I think it was
on that Ed Build site,
is to change the way that
we give money to schools.
So instead of it being
so locally-based, right?
So the state gives so much
and then local communities
give what they can
and those are based on property values.
And so, one solution,
someone suggested, was to
make it stay at the state level,
funding for schools at the state level.
So that you put all into a big pot,
and then, you know, of course
people and wealthy areas
will have to swallow very hard
and probably complain very loudly.
- [Student] It was the
politicians to begin with.
- Right.
- [Student] School
scholarships can make a kill
out of public schools.
- I know, I know.
Yep, again, that's another topic.
- Yeah, I think too this brings up,
I mean, this is where like...
I mean, this is related to
the whole discussion of like revelations.
I mean, think, the whole idea behind that
is that certain wealth has been denied
and stolen from some cases
from African Americans,
so the reparations would be a
way to try in some small way,
not by any means make up
for, but to pay back--
- Kinda make balance.
- Of course,
that's a whole topic--
- That's a hot button issue too.
- But that's the logic of the things.
- Right.
- You wouldn't have to do reparations
without doing reparations,
so we'd have to do...
(Robyn laughs)
No, seriously--
- You'd have to do it without
calling it reparations.
- Yeah, you would have to do
multiple different policies
that are targeted as and
without calling it reparations.
And so, (drowned out by rustling)
- Yeah, yeah.
- [Student] I think if
this teaches us anyway,
at the very least,
it teaches us that we have to
have them on that oversight.
All the end uses of these
banks taking advantage,
although the government will certainly--
- There were government
agencies that were part of it.
- I know, but the bank,
like what I'm saying is
if we wanna go forward, I
think that we need to make sure
that these corporations
aren't just allowed to do
whatever the heck they want.
- Well, and just to make it
like sort of this circular loop
kind of thing, think
about who was in power
when all of these laws were made, right?
There were white politicians,
these were white men,
pretty much, who were in charge
and that also speaks to the
idea of like power, right?
Who has power in our society?
And it's the people who have money.
- [Student] Same as it addressed.
(laughs)
- All right, Chris, you
wanted to say something.
- Well, yeah, I think we
should give round of applause.
(audience applauds)
Yeah, thank you for this
very informative session
and it looks like we'll
have enough video later
which is great so we can share
with other people as well.
Some of you have students
who'd love to share it.
But I'm going to end by saying,
so we've got a few more
One Book related things
happening this semester.
One, especially, for you students,
there's an essay writing contest
that you'll start to see flyers
kind of going up around school about
that we're doing in coordination
with the writing center.
So if you're in any classes
where you are engaging
with "The Hate U Give,"
and you're doing a writing
assignment related to it,
submit that to the contest
and you could win a nice
little financial prize.
So that's gonna be
happening in coordination
with the writing center.
Or I mean, even if you're
not doing it in the class,
if you just wanna write an essay
related to "The Hate U Give,"
and submit it, you can do that.
And then we're also a
co-sponsoring an event
with the Versatile Sins
Against Colloquium,
it's gonna be happening
at the end of March,
it's gonna be kind of a
spoken word poetry event.
So there are actually auditions
happening for that today,
I think there's still a chance
to like maybe get in and audition.
But even if you're not auditioning,
you can certainly come.
So that's gonna be in the
art gallery on March 30th,
it's gonna be the end of March.
- Such a beautiful venue.
- Yeah, yeah.
It's a beautiful venue
and it's gonna be just about
how to be inspired for unity.
So it's gonna be some spoken
word, things like that.
