Color Us Connected: Housing in America's shameful discrimination
This column appears every other week in Foster’s Daily Democrat and the Tuskegee News. This week, in recognition of the season, Guy Trammell, an African American man from Tuskegee, Alabama, and Amy Miller, a white woman from South Berwick, Maine, write about housing in America.
By Amy Miller
Typically Guy is our historian, but today I also am going to offer up a bit of history. You may have heard about the Black couple whose recent home appraisal in California was so far below what they thought their house was worth that they sought a second appraisal. This time they had a white friend pose as the homeowner. Lo and behold, the appraisal came in about 50% higher.
That this kind of housing inequity exists today is shameful, but it has roots that grew in large part from government redlining policies of nearly a century ago. Although redlining came to mean a variety of practices involving discrimination in housing, the term grew from maps created by the government in the 1930s that have created financial, environmental and health inequities that became magnified over time.
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These inequities were researched by two professors at the University of Richmond and Virginia Tech who compared maps made in the '30s with maps made today to show how government-backed housing policy of 100 years ago closely correlates to issues today.
The historic maps were created as part of a New Deal program to help Americans - or some Americans - get government-insured mortgages and for the country to avoid a wave of post-Depression foreclosures. They indicated how desirable or risky for investment neighborhoods were on a scale of 1 to 4, designations that fed into policies with devastating effects. Areas with large communities of color were by and large marked with Cs, which meant “definitely declining” or Ds, meaning “ “hazardous.” The Ds were outlined with red, which led to the term “redlining.” These grades made it harder to get mortgages and to buy homes.
The researchers in Virginia, in their Mapping Inequality project, compared those maps to newer “social vulnerability” maps created by the CDC using 15 U.S. census variables to identify “socially vulnerable” communities. These variables include language, economic well-being, housing infrastructure and transportation.
It is remarkably clear that those areas considered not so great for investment became the places where, for instance, more gas tanks and interstate highways were located, leading to more pollution, less green space and generally less healthy environments.
The old redlining maps compared to today’s satellite maps also show how heat islands - areas that are hotter than nearby neighborhoods because of lack of green space and shade and the presence of more concrete - were created in the so-called “undesirable” areas. Heat islands raise the risk of death in summer and particularly hurt people with asthma or other health problems.
Although the designations and its effects were obvious to Black buyers of the 20th Century who were not getting the loans available to white people, the maps themselves were never publicized and were not discovered until 1976, an indication that policy-makers understood their sins.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed this kind of discrimination. But as the California couple understands and as the correlation between the 1930s maps and today’s conditions clearly show, as is so often the case, our past had led the way to our present.
By Guy Trammell Jr.
The Mvskoke Creek Nation located their villages along waterways. The men built and protected the homes and buildings, but the Mvskoke women ran the villages and decorated the homes and buildings. Appreciation goes to William Bartram of Tuskegee’s Bartram Trail, an English naturalist, botanist and artist who sketched the Mvskoke villages, showing not just art designs but colors created by the women artists.
When the enslaved Black laborers left the Southern plantations, some settled in the South and built homes or stayed in plantation shanties, one-room wooden shelters where gaps between the boards let in winter cold and summer heat. Other Blacks moved North, where they would stay with relatives while they worked to get their own homes. They had to learn what part of town Blacks were allowed to make home.
This migration to the North continued for decades, and by the 1900s many Blacks found shelter in northern YMCAs where they could sleep and wash up while holding a job. Eventually white property owners set up low-rent apartments with separate areas for whites and Blacks. Some owners became slum lords, not keeping the property in decent living condition. City inspectors were paid to skip inspections, causing Black babies to get rat bites in their sleep.
As the inner city Black population grew, white families left cities to form the suburbs. The value of Black life became evident as police were ordered to protect the white suburban families but shoot inner city looters to protect property.
By the 1950s and 1960s, Black families earned enough to purchase suburban homes. However, suburbs were for white families only, and Blacks moving in meant white families would vacate. Dr. Tom Skinner described integration as the period of time between the first Black family moving into a neighborhood and the last white family moving out. In Detroit, an entire community of Black homeowners on Tireman Avenue was destroyed when the government weaponized the building of the Jeffries Freeway right through the community.
Alabama wasn’t so subtle. The town of Benson had the first Black owned and operated U.S. railroad and Carnegie-funded Kowaliga Academic and Industrial Institute. It was a bustling Black community until it was flooded in 1926 to form Lake Martin, one of two Black “drowned towns" erased to create a recreation area popular for boating and fishing.
In 1890, in the midst of Jim Crow, Booker T. Washington, with assistance from Hampton Institute, formed the Village of Greenwood to the west of Tuskegee University’s campus. Tuskegee graduates, campus faculty and staff purchased lots, funded by Black owned and operated Tuskegee Savings and Loan bank. The Black community of 2,000 was completely self-sustaining, with its own school system, businesses, industry, health care, electric power plant and food system. Like the Mvskoke Nation, the men protected the community from the Knights of the White Camellia. Greenwood’s Camp Atkins was the only Black Boy Scout/Girl Scout Camp in the U.S. Ok, ok, go on and get your ingredients for some marshmallow s’mores!
Amy and Guy can be reached at colorusconnected@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Fosters Daily Democrat: Color Us Connected: Housing in America's shameful discrimination
