Teaching Segregation and Inequality in Housing and Education
Reading by Emilye Crosby
This essay supplements the resources provided as part of Emilye Crosby’s “A Documents-Based Lesson on the Voting Rights Act: A Case Study of SNCC’s Work in Lowndes County and the Emergence of Black Power.”
In recent years, there has been an outpouring of wonderful work documenting the structural basis of housing and educational segregation and inequality. What has often been considered “de facto” segregation, or segregation by fact or choice, must be understood as segregation grounded in policies and systemic, conscious practice, rather than personal prejudice or racial preference. This important work makes it clear that racism was a national problem, not a Southern aberration. It was intentional and pervasive. It simultaneously benefitted white Americans and harmed African Americans and helps explain some of the tremendous and persistent racial wealth gap.
Although this list of materials is by no means exhaustive, understanding this history is so essential that I have tried to include a wide range of options that teachers might find helpful for their own continuing education and for using in classes. Here are concrete examples focusing on essays, documentaries, podcasts, and websites that I have used effectively in my own classes, along with a few promising new additions.
For segregated housing, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay, “The Case for Reparations,” published in The Atlantic, explores the structural basis of housing discrimination and its contemporary impact. ProPublica’s series on school segregation, which also looks at housing, remains a significant resource for exploring the historic roots of today’s segregation. Teachers can use these materials to help students understand both the importance and the limitations of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in African Americans’ pursuit of equality. Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote some of the ProPublica pieces on school and housing segregation as part of what she has called her work on “the segregation beat.” Two key pieces from her Pro-Publica work are: "Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law” and "School Segregation and the Continuing Tragedy of Ferguson." Both of these overlap her collaboration with This American Life on three podcasts that my students typically find very compelling. Clips from a community meeting near Ferguson in “The Problem We All Live With, Part One” evoke the Jim Crow era and always generate outrage and passionate discussion in my classes.
My students also respond extremely well to "House Rules" and Part Two of "The Problem We All Live With.” With her move to the New York Times, Hannah-Jones’s reporting on education, especially, has continued. Several of the many noteworthy pieces that I have used effectively in classes are: “It Was Never About Busing: Court-Ordered Desegregation Worked, But White Racism Made It Hard to Accept,” “Have We Lost Sight of the Promise of Public Schools,” and “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.”
There are many websites and audiovisual resources that effectively supplement these articles. One of the groundbreaking sites is Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America, which digitized and posted the original Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps. These maps bring to life the term “redlining” and provide a crucial documentary base for understanding how the federal government made racial segregation and discrimination its official policy at the exact moment it was helping white Americans buy homes with minimal down payments, federally backed low-interest loans, and 30-year mortgages. These policies facilitated the creation of the suburbs and the massive expansion of the white middle class, and help explain the tremendous, persistent, and damaging wealth gap between whites and African Americans. As this suggests, we continue to live with the consequences of these policies and the redlined HOLC maps of the 1930s can predict today’s gentrification, police violence, poverty, and much more.
It must be understood that this is a history of advantage for white people, as much as it is a history of disadvantage for Black people. To evoke a typical evasion: Your family may not have enslaved people, but have they benefited, in any way, from one of the many forms of white affirmative action? I know enough history that I don’t need to know the particulars of an individual family to know that the answer is, almost certainly, yes.
I will discuss a few more websites, but first: My students find the College Humor version of “The Disturbing History of the Suburbs: Redlining: The Racist Housing Policy from the Jim Crow Era that Still Affects Us Today,” by Adam Ruins Everything, a useful and accessible introduction to this history. His follow-up podcast interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones is also helpful. For years I have used the third episode in The House We Live In, “Race: The Power of an Illusion,” which provides an excellent introduction to the ways structural inequality is built into our society. The trailer provides a brief introduction.
Several more recent pieces supplement and expand on The House We Live In. One is Segregated by Design, an 18-minute film that animates the history covered in Richard Rothstein’s essential book, The Color of Law, making it even more accessible to a wide audience. The Zinn Education Project brings this short documentary together with related resources, including Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, “How Red Lines Built White Wealth: A Lesson on Housing Segregation in the 20th Century.” I’ve used The Color of Law book, a short essay by Rothstein available on the Zinn Education Project website, and other easily accessed Rothstein interviews and essays in several classes and am eager to utilize Segregated by Design.
One of the results of redlining and other policy decisions was the development and then decline of large-scale public housing projects associated in the minds of many with impoverished African Americans. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth links these histories and demolishes widespread stereotypes surrounding public housing and race. The trailer offers a brief introduction.
I am also eager to see how my students respond to the newly released Owned: A Tale of Two Americas that revisits the history of redlining and connects it to the 2008 housing bubble and crisis. Another effective documentary, this one centered around housing segregation and discrimination in Minneapolis, is Jim Crow of the North. This excellent film grew out of the larger Mapping Prejudice project, which is doing crucial work with crowdsourcing to map restrictive covenants and segregation in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their site includes many recorded presentations and resources, helping us understand why the history matters. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent uprising, they have added articles that draw connections between historic housing policy, contemporary police violence, and community protest, which supplement their educator materials.
As the Mapping Prejudice team points out, their work follows in the footsteps of previous digital projects illustrating segregation, while other digital projects continue to emerge, expanding our knowledge-base and our tools for teaching. There are a growing number of worthwhile online projects. An important early site is Segregated Seattle, established by the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project. For those interested in contemporary connections, Mapping Decline uses maps and documents to illustrate the intersections of white flight, zoning, race, and more for the larger story of the St. Louis metropolitan area, which provides crucial context for understanding how the suburb of Ferguson developed and evolved, leading to the killing of Michael Brown and the uprising that followed. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) founded by Bryan Stevenson combines legal advocacy with history research and education. When travel is possible, I strongly encourage a visit to the EJI’s newly opened (in 2018) National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which acknowledges and reflects on the tremendous impact of racial terror lynchings, and the EJI’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which tracks the evolution of systemic racism.
Meanwhile, I would encourage teachers and students to engage with the EJI’s full range of educational resources, including their study of lynching and their just published report on Reconstruction. Among the many rich materials is a website documenting segregation through a compelling report, profiles of segregationists, and video footage of the segregation era. This work centers the South but their map of confederate iconography, which people may be particularly interested in as confederate statues are coming down, illustrates how far the tentacles of the New South mythology spread.
Many people would like to think that housing segregation — as bad as it was — ended over 50 years ago with the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Passed after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, it was supposed to eliminate racial discrimination in housing and even called for affirmative steps to reverse the results of past action. Despite a brief, good faith effort by George Romney, the mandate for fixing past harm has never been seriously implemented and discrimination has continued in both old and new ways. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor addresses this in her book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. You can get a sense of Taylor’s research in this short Vox interview and in her New York Times piece, “When the Dream of Owning a Home Became a Nightmare.”
For those interested in the present moment, Reveal’s research highlighted in “Kept Out” and the podcast “The Redline: Racial Disparities in Lending" illustrate clearly the persistence of racial discrimination in mortgage lending, even when you control for economic status. Their findings were reinforced by a Newsday study of real estate agents on Long Island. Students will be interested in the resulting 2019 documentary Testing the Divide, which clearly illustrates steering and other forms of discrimination.
There is increasing attention to both the persistence of racism in housing and the impact of historic segregation on contemporary problems ranging from police violence to education, health, and gentrification. This work is extraordinarily important and I would encourage teachers to dig into these connections, if they can carve out the time. Some of the websites I have already discussed include useful links. Meanwhile, here are just a few of the many, many, many articles and resources available. I include them primarily to suggest the range of related topics and materials available for investigating the tremendous and wide-ranging consequences of historic and ongoing racism.
The New York Times editorial, “How Segregation Destroys Black Wealth,” points to the persistent and far-reaching economic issues associated with housing segregation and discrimination. There is considerable work on this topic as well as a long history and recent resurgence of calls for reparations. Teachers might check out From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen or some of the news coverage of this important new book.
My students learned from and were moved by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s passionate and historically grounded testimony in favor of reparations. Research by the Boston University School of Public Health suggests that police shootings are linked to racial segregation. Code Switch provides an introduction to this work in “How Segregation Shapes Fatal Police Violence.”
The UCLA Civil Rights Project tracks segregation and inequality in schools and this recent report by the Economic Policy Institute gives a sense of the impact of segregation when race and poverty are intertwined and majority-minority schools are high-poverty schools. The COVID-19 pandemic has clearly demonstrated the impact of racial inequality on health, healthcare, and the devastating impact of the virus on Black and Brown communities. There are many factors, but housing segregation is one of them. Housing segregation has also been implicated in environmental racism, higher rates of infant mortality among African Americans, and many other ills associated with health and healthcare disparities.