Welcome. This is the virtual tour of the Undesign the Redline exhibit.
We're going to start here. There are five parts.
The first part is a little bit of the history of redlining.
The second part is more of a local look at how Redlining affected Omaha, Lincoln, and Council Bluffs.
The third part is a timeline of American history from about 1800 to the present day.
The fourth part is a living archive,
so some more local stories. And the fifth part is “How Do We Undesign the Redline?”
So now that we’ve learned about it how we go forward.
And as the Director here says “Once you see Redlining you can't unsee it.”
So it's going to probably change the way that you look at the city that you live in.
So we’re going to start here with this placard here Undesign the Redline.
I just want to read it out loud to kind of set the scene for what we're going to get into.
“Gone unanswered are fundamental questions about our communities.
How did we get here? And what does that mean for where we are going?
Systemic challenges today like inequalities housing, education, income, criminal justice,
and health are far from separate issues.
These challenges are rooted in a deep
and entangled history of policies, practices,
and processes that remains unrevealed
and misunderstood. As new forces begin to transform cities
and towns decisions about interconnected challenges are therefore often made in the dark.
Undesign the Redline explores the these re-framed opportunities
from a shared-value perspective,
and grounds discussions about race, wealth, opportunity,
and power in an honest context that is not about guilt and blame.
This allows everyone to contribute their value to the design
and development of projects, partnerships,
and decisions that seek to transform communities
and move beyond the challenging and often clouded situation of our entangled past.”
This exhibit was put together by designing the WE; they are an organization out of the Bronx, New York
and they have created similar exhibits like this one in cities across the country.
All right. So. The backstory of Redlining.
If you were here, I would ask you “Who's heard of Redlining?”
And then I would blink at you like Dora on the old shows and wait for you to respond.
Alright, so it goes way back to the 1930s.
So picture the United States in the 1930s.
It's the Depression. We're trying to get out of that
and we have a president that has the New Deal you probably heard of that
and one of the initiatives
as part of the New Deal on how get the economy back going was
to really really promote home ownership
because a lot of industries are involved in that; it creates a lot of jobs.
It gets money flowing and it was during a time in our history
where we’re kind of in an ideological battle with Communism.
And so home ownership was like “Yes! Capitalism. This is it. Let's get everybody invested in it.”
So to do that, the country needed a way to assess risk of who was safe
and not safe to loan money to.
Because the government, the federal government was going to back these mortgages.
And because it's America and it was the 30s race was baked into the process of assessing risk.
So across the country about 239 cities,
they made these risk assessment
maps and they divided up the cities
and they got information from local like businessmen
and bankers and real estate agents about where was safe to lend to
and there was a four-part scale: Green was the best.
It was very safe. Definitely back mortgages there. Blue was, “It's okay.
It's all right. Pretty safe.” Not as good as green. Yellow was very risky,
like if anything changes in that neighborhood anytime soon,
it's not going to be safe to lend to. And red was the worst.
You don't loan anything to anyone that lives there.
And what did they base this on? Basically race and environmental hazards.
So they did these little surveys and area descriptions
of different parts of each town, of each city
and they'd want to know what kind of occupations the people that lived there had,
if they were foreign-born.
This was a time before ethnic whites like Irish
and Italian and Polish, before they were considered white.
So that was also something that they were concerned about.
It was also before like Catholicism was like widely accepted.
So if they're like Irish Catholic people there that would knock down their score.
And they were really concerned with detrimental influences,
which basically meant people of color and “negro infiltration.”
Because they believed at that time that having black people in a
neighborhood would decrease property values.
So even though we don't have these maps anymore, the way that
it was set up still affects neighborhoods
and cities today and the whole process of Redlining kind of embodies
a process that transformed explicit racism
into structural racism. These structural conditions largely remain today.
So explicit means people are saying mean words and being mean to your face
and structural racism means it doesn't matter how nice
or kind or good or bad the people within the system work,
it's still going to have racist outcomes.
So the first example here is a map of the Bronx, New York, one of the five boroughs,
and it's the original map from the 1930s, their Redlining map.
And then overlaid are the different issues that still effect these areas
even though this map is no longer in use. So to kind of situate you to the map.
So this is the Bronx it's above Manhattan.
It's the fifth borough; down here is the South Bronx.
That's where hip-hop started. That's where J. Lo is from; a lot of cool stuff happened here.
Above here we get into the suburbs, Westchester super super white right in here.
We can see like here the South Bronx: all red.
So they've decided detrimental influences, negro infiltration.
We're not going to lend money there. And those areas are still effected today.
So we have planned shrinkage.
So if you've ever seen movies from like the
70s and 80s of New York and everything looks like garbage and everything's on fire.
That's because the city ran out of money
and they just stopped providing services for certain parts of the city.
So like the Bronx was literally on fire
for years because they did not provide like fire department services.
Another issue is that so if you can't get a home a regular home loan
because this is all about getting people home loans,
then you can only get like a contract loan which is kind of like rent-to-own but for a house,
but the downside is that you don't build equity in your home
and you can lose your house if you miss a payment,
so it's a very precarious position.
And so because people are kind of locked out of the regular banking
and the regular mortgages they can fall prey to predatory banking.
So that means like if like pawnshops, check-cashing,
all of those kinds of businesses move into these areas
because they are cut off from the other services that other areas enjoy.
Deindustrialization. So back in like the 30s and 40s and 50s,
we were still making and Manufacturing a lot of things in the United States
and the plant or the factories would usually be located in Redlined areas
because nobody wants to live near those so that's where they put people they didn't care about.
But after all of those jobs left, they lost the tax base
and that's why a lot of cities started to kind of crumble in the 60s, 70s, and 80s
because they didn't have all that money coming in from the different factories and stuff.
The structural situation ceated by these programs remains the same.
So the thing is in the United States the American dream got linked up with home ownership,
and If people are cut out from that,
even though it was the 30s and 40s and 50s,
they will not be able to build generational wealth
because you can get a lot of wealth out of owning your home.
And if you're not . . . if your grandparents, your parents,
your great-grandparents were cut out from that, then you wouldn't be
able to build that wealth over generations
and no amount of like current income
or education can bridge that gap; they’ve kind of gotten a head start.
So the Second Part: So here we are at local maps of our area.
We have Omaha, Lincoln, and Council Bluffs.
And if you could take a moment, you want to look closely at this map of Omaha
and see if you were here we would ask you to indicate like where you live
or where you've lived in the past
and to kind of think about if that area has changed since this map was made in 1938.
We are located here, and it used to be called the Near North Side. North Omaha as you can see it is red.
The other red areas are down here by like we're meat packing,
or not meat packing, where the stockyards used to be
because it was another industry that is an environmental hazard.
And that's when a lot of African-Americans were allowed to like work in the stockyard.
So they designate that area as not good. Also up in here,
we have some like lead smelting.
So we did a lot of things with lead in the past
and that kind of got into the air, into the soil, and that can lead to later environmental consequences
to the people that live in those areas like lead poisoning
that affects children's cognition for the rest of their lives.
So, each town, each city, they had a survey, they had area descriptions,
like what kind of people live there? Is it desirable?
And like I said, they would ask local people, local businessmen
and stuff what they thought of the area.
Between 1934 and 1962 the federal government backed a hundred and twenty billion dollars of home loans
and more than 98% of them went to white homebuyers.
And this also includes, if you think about the GI bill.
So when soldiers were coming back from World War Two
and they were given subsidies and help getting home loans
and help getting college tuition paid for, those services and resources were not offered to
African-American soldiers coming back,
so they were cut out from that opportunity.
And the way that this still impacts us today is like I talked about generational wealth.
So, I'm going to read from this from The Washington Post “It is, however, a reality
that historic Redlining makes homeownership beyond reach
for many families in these communities today regardless of how big banks
behave now. If your family was denied a mortgage in the 1930s
or the 1950s or the 1970s,
then you may not have the family weath
or down payment help to become a homeowner today.
In that way, the consequences of past Redlining transcend time even as new forms of it continue.”
So it's still impacting us today.
This is a little blow-up picture of the underwriting manual.
So even if they didn't have the Redlining map,
people that were selling real estate at that time – 30s and 40s and 50s –
they have to refer to this manual
because this is how they decided who to give loans to and who the federal government would back in those loans.
And part of the property value, they believed at that time was based on if Black people lived there.
And they were tested on that before they got like their real estate license.
And I'm going to read to you something about race
and property value from a book from 1910.
And it says that “The colored people certainly have a right to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness,
but they must recognize the economic disturbance which their presence in white neighborhoods causes
and forego their desire to split off from the established district
where the rest of their race lives.”
So we get that you want the American dream,
but you impact property values.
It was a myth. It's still a myth, but if enough people believe in it,
then it becomes true.
So we're gonna go to the Third part: The Timeline.
The bottom is literally grassroots,
so bottom-up responses to the things that are happening at the top.
You will see that at the top it says Separate and Unequal
and it kind of stays that way through each era.
It starts in between 1800 and 1930.
So this is the time between . . . we still had slavery, we go through the Civil War,
we get emancipation, we get up to the Great Depression
and there's a lot of how America is going to define race
and how that's going to impact its citizens.
A lot of that framework is happening like right in here.
So we are . . . there's the Native American genocide, we’re removing people from their land.
We're forcing them . . . like we're forcing them to leave or putting them on reservations.
We are defining what the white race is.
So there's a court case from 1922 about a Japanese immigrant applying
for citizenship and that's when they declare that white has to be Caucasian.
So it's not even just skin color. It's an idea of Europe.
So all this is happening mostly in the South.
So we have the Great Migration.
So we have a lot of African Americans moving from the South up to the North.
And so now that the North has to kind of figure out what they're going to do about race
at how they're going to codify that.
Some of the ways that that happens is Sundown Towns.
There are towns, like if you've ever gone on a road trip . . .  this surprises some people, I guess,
when I talk about it in tours,
but if I'm ever on like a long road trip,
If I have to stop for gas, I will not stop in a small, dinky, town.
They scare me. And I didn't know exactly why
but there were Sundown Towns.
So basically places, if you were Black you should not be there after the sun goes down
and we have them . . .
What were, we had them in Nebraska they’re all over
but they are just places that you knew you can't go there.
And later on they would have the Green Book which was a book . . .
It's kind of like Yelp or like customer reviews
of different hotels, motels, gas stations, restaurants, places across the United States that
African-Americans could utilize on their like family road trips
because they weren't welcomed everywhere.
So while this is going on we do have people trying to you know,
achieve that American dream. So we have Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
So Black people got together,
they had their own part of town. They had their own shops,
like businesses, churches, schools, everything. There was a lot of wealth built up,
and that really upset people in the area and so through mob violence,
they destroyed and set on fire Black Wall Street.
So it's not there anymore.
So there'll be several times where Black people are trying to rise up
and do their own thing and they'll be shot down.
Racial Covenants: So in 1917, there is a
Supreme Court ruling that we can't like have restrictive zoning based on race
because what if a white family wants to actually sell their home to a Black family.
We can't stop that from happening. So to get around that we have Racial Covenants,
which is basically in the deed to your home. It says that you will not sell
your home to a person not of the Caucasian race.
So that cut out . . . even though there wasn't a big sign that says
“No Black people welcome” . . . Just each family,
each deed said that you couldn't sell it to a Black person. The New Deal
in order to get it passed, to create the social safety net for American citizens
concessions were made in the Senate and the Congress
to exclude certain parts of the population.
And they figured out a way that to get Southern Representatives to vote for the measures
if they didn't have Social Security applied to agricultural
and domestic workers because those were the fields of work
that Black people in the South were usually in.
So it did not apply to like sharecroppers in didn’t apply to maids.
Anything that Black people usually did, they didn’t get a part of the social safety net.
The term is coined in the 1960s by community activist named John McKnight.
So it refers to the practice of denying loans like we've talked about in the beginning
but even after that part it limits who can build wealth through home ownership
and it continues to affect that area over time.
So for example,
like even if it's not on a map now, like your insurance for your car or for your home will be higher
if you're in one of the areas that was originally Redlined.
You might not get certain services. Like the first time I've heard of it,
I heard from a teenager that gave talks on racial reconciliation
and oppression and the way that he described it was . . . he lived in the projects in New Orleans
and he couldn't get pizza delivered
and I was in college at that time
so that completely blew my mind that that's . . . that was really real to me.
So pizza will not get delivered. You won't get the newspaper delivered.
People like if . . . back when they were like more taxis,
and not Ubers, they wouldn't take you there.
So it affects your day-to-day life.
Even if you're not an adult and trying to get a mortgage and it's also interesting,
if you look at current maps like
for COVID-19, for the coronavirus, if you want to look
check what areas of each city of your city are most impacted by the disease and its aftermath
and kind of overlay that with the old-time maps.
It's kind of eerie. So we've got . . . Panic. So people we figured out we're getting our homes.
It's the 50s and 60s. We're living in these all white neighborhoods
because we put it into our restrictive covenants,
but it's kind of you know, like as West Omaha,
if you think about Omaha how it keeps going west; people keep moving away, farther and farther away from the city centers.
Speculative, a lot of our history is built on people speculating like
what can make money fast, what's going to work. One of the ways to do that was through Blockbusting.
So I'm going to read you this thing from the Saturday Evening Post.
It says “Would you panic if a negro moved next door?
I'm broad-minded said one homeowner when Negroes moved into his block, but a short time later
he panicked and sold his house at a loss
in this week's post you’ll read how speculators decide which blocks are ripe
for racial change, how they use vicious tactics to force out the whites,
and how one speculator brags that he could bust your block in no time at all.”
So they played on the fear that people had of decreasing home values
and sometimes they would pay people to like drive up and down the street in cars blasting music.
They paid Black women to push like buggies with their kids in them.
They would have people call the house
and ask for stereotypical Black names at which at that time was like Johnnie Mae
“Is Johnnie Mae there?” like “(Gasp) They think Black people live here.
Oh no, let’s sell our house.” So they undersold the homes
and then they flipped, and then they were overcharging the Black people that would live there next.
You can see this in Chicago suburbs my family, extended family lives there
and they can remember when the suburb that they lived in
as it got Blacker and then rememeber when there was like one white family left.
So it's definitely a flip.
