Black/White, Red/Blue: The Politics of Racial Pathology
A paper delivered to conference on Inequality And American Democracy
Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, Minnesota
April 7-8, 2006
Andy Driscoll, M.A.
Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
University of Minnesota
1
Abstract
Witness to Apartheid, American Style
I, too, sing America.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the
kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Then
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed-I, too, am America.
— Langston Hughes
“The white people got out.”
This opening line from a recent New York Times article by Jason DeParle (4 Sept. 2005) is
perhaps the simplest statement describing the centuries-old contradiction between the promise of
the United States’ democratic experiment and its realities— present and historical. DeParle was
noting the stark devastation Hurricane Katrina wreaked on the widely diverse city of New
Orleans, poignantly unearthing the wrenching effect of entrenched poverty and racism on
disproportionate numbers of that city’s blacks.
The haunting reality surfacing in the wake of the long-predicted Category Five disaster that
blew through that city beginning August 30, 2005, is the nagging tenacity of this nation’s deep,
structural racial segregation and societal stratification. Katrina’s raging winds and tidal waters
plowed all too easily through the tentative levees separating the Mississippi River and Lake
Pontchartrain from that historic city’s mostly black denizens, flooding their below-sea-level
homes, killing thousands and stranding hundreds of thousands. High-ground whites either
1
dispersed in their cars and other available transport or remained comfortably ensconced in their
untouched abodes.
Katrina joins the lengthening list of natural and manmade disasters periodically pricking our
consciousness and denial over the historic shame that is what several observers have called
“American Apartheid”—de jure and de facto systems of economic and racial segregation in the
United States—among them Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton of Harvard University (1993).
Alice O’Connor points to the “endurance” of tensions over “racially other” immigrants to our
shores. The great black post-Civil War scholar, W.E.B. DuBois, she says, cited the real issue of
the twentieth century, writing presciently in 1901 that it is “the problem of the color line; the
relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of
the sea” (O’Connor 1). Still, none would face quite the same persistent impoverishment and
disempowered political fates as have African Americans in their centuries-long shared residence
in the United States.
During and following World War II, pressure for greater civil rights began to build in
earnest. Several tomes have since dissected court rulings, state and federal laws, and actual
practices running consistently with and contrary to such laws and precedents. For about twentyfive years progress seemed possible, but, as our data will show, since the 1980s the effort has
been sliding into complacency, neglect, and outright resegregation.
What conditions have led us backward in the quest for an integrated culture? This project
explores several facets of today’s political and cultural reality—the failed attempt at
desegregating US public school systems and the forces that have come into play to cement the
serious racial and political divide plaguing our cities and our conscience. It examines the
comparative dynamics and outcomes of three such efforts—of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Boston and
2
Detroit—during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and their reflection of and influence on long-evolved
housing patterns, public resource allocation, and political power distribution.
This project shows how enclaves of color and class remain starkly separate from those of
whites, insidiously persisting in a deepening segregation many still believe no longer exists after
decades of desegregation efforts—in the courts, in the schools, in our legislatures and in
Congress. This study examines well over a century of evidence describing how whites and
private sector industries spawned and still maintain the racial ghettos inside our core cities while
encouraging and financing development of our suburbs and exurbs.
Today, rank poverty remains concentrated in most urban core cities and near-ring suburbs
north and south, documented in yet another recent study by Myron Orfield and his colleagues of
the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race and Poverty, among others. That
study also reveals a pattern of segregated economics, resource distribution, and opportunity
reflected in distinct shades of red and blue political power as expressed through wide divisions of
policymaking processes at all levels of governance, that is, deepening conservatism in white
areas and reliable liberalism in central cities (Orfield and Luce 2-6).
Scholars disagree on where the remedial emphasis should have been placed—on adequate
and equal financing of schools, no matter their make-up, or on forcing equality through student
desegregation, that is, intra-district or cross-district redistribution of student populations (Brown
and Bell).
The Twin Cities Area is an ideal laboratory for our examination. Unlike many Northern
urban centers, communities here tried, if weakly, to address educational and economic inequities
voluntarily. They did so, however, only under the hammer of pending court rulings demanding
redress if voluntary efforts did little more than delay implementation of desegregation orders
3
such as those imposed on unwilling whites in Detroit and Boston. Those two cities became
battlegrounds where busing orders met with violent resistance for nearly two decades.
We also examine how the issues of segregation and disparities by color, class, and space
have driven much of the country’s politics and governance, public policy, business and
economics, land use and the environment, education and opportunity, and cultural development
from our founding to the present; and, finally, we present some ideas for regional remedies
developed by scholars and advocates in recent years.
The challenge in a larger paper was to explore historical perspectives on this nation’s
apparent preoccupation with race and class, and describe the majority’s adverse reaction to
dispersing concentrations of poverty and racial and ethnic inequality by legal and legislative fiat.
We touch on how the issues of segregation and disparities by color, class, and space have driven
much of the country’s politics and governance, public policy, business and economics, land use
and the environment, education and opportunity, and cultural development from our founding to
the present; and, finally, we will present some ideas for regional remedies developed by scholars
and advocates in recent years. Respecting time, this paper will focus on more recent
developments in the Twin Cities addressing the issues outlined.
Race and US History
…But black segregation is not comparable to the limited and transient
segregation by other racial and ethnic minority groups, now or in the
past…
— Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
The African-American Experience—(1500)1776-1860
Something deeply embedded in the American psyche and the culture it created has set
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African-Americans apart from all other immigrant populations from the earliest hours of this
nation’s founding. Cultural commentators like the late anthropologist, John Ogbu, believe it was
the involuntary nature of African importation versus the choices exercised by European, Asian,
even Caribbean blacks, Latinos and twenty-first century African immigrants and refugees that
distinguishes this culture’s seemingly immutable distaste for descendants of black slaves and
servants (Waters, “Ethnic and nationracial groups in the USA”).
This apartness, as it were, challenges the very notion of a democracy
even as laid down by those white, landed framers who drafted documents Americans hold dear—
the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. All men are created equal, said they.
Freedom from oppression they promised.
A color-based pecking order could well arise from the imperialist mindset of our European
forebears whose global exploits led to the conquering and enslavement of indigenous peoples,
cultures, and religious sects centuries before the 1776 severing of our colonial ties to mother
England. At its core, segregation is a presumption of superiority based on skin color and
“sophistication,” which represented a belief that became an operating dictum: these are savages,
little better than animals.
Such tenets drove the economics and, in turn, justification for enslavement of African men
and women in what was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries called the slave triangle; its
apexes were African labor sources, American raw material production and European markets for
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finished products.1
No other racial or ethnic group did or would suffer such callous disregard and domination as
this particular brand of “new Americans,” packed as they were like sardines in the holds of slave
ships, hundreds dying en route from their tribal homes to the cotton field of America’s southern
plantations. There the survivors were bought and sold like so much cattle.
Political representation was a nasty source of contention between Northern and Southern
politicians, bankers and others throughout the early stages of colonial and republican
development. Southerners, especially slaveowners, insisted during deliberations over the
Constitutional Convention that each slave be counted as a full person and part of the represented
population. Northerners, crying foul over slaves’ inability to vote, countered with the obvious:
slaves were property, not citizens, rendering them inadmissible for inclusion in the census.2
Thus did the so-called “Three-Fifths Compromise”3 come into the original 1787 draft,
designating slaves, for all intents and purposes, as three-fifths human. Slave-owners could claim
1 1
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The Triangle Slave
Trade
The Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in world history. Over
400 years—from the mid-15th century through the better part of the 19th, the
peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas transformed the Atlantic world into an
economic dynamo based on ships, slaves, plantation crops, and manufactured goods.
By the 19th century, even New York City had combined all these elements to
become one of the most prosperous ports and financial centers in the world. Twelve
million Africans were captured and enslaved in the Americas over those 400 years.
Eighty per day for 400 years. Over 40,000 ships brought slaves to this country
through 1850. Slaves literally built New York City when it was New Amsterdam.
Many were freed and integrated until all were freed by 1827. On this, see, for
instance www.slaveryinnewyork.org. (“Slavery in New York”).
2
Women and Native Americans, of course, were already forbidden the vote. Even after emancipation, only male exslaves were granted suffrage.
3
US Constitution Article I. Section 2 (3)
(Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this
Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free
persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all
other persons.) Parentheses indicate the ultimate excision of this paragraph from the text. Note the exclusion of
Indians here, indicating the provision’s exclusive application to Africans.
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each slave as a tax deduction, but, according to author Philip Foner, the representation issue
loomed as a power-balance issue. This early split in geopolitical interests between North and
South was a portent of the Civil War nearly 75 years later. “James Madison agreed with Rufus
King’s statement that ‘the difference in interests did not lie where it had hitherto been discussed,
between the great and small states; but between the southern and eastern’” (Wilhite). That half of
the union was prepared to secede speaks to the South’s depth of commitment to preserving such
institutionalized racism.
As Jim Chen states in his 2004 Minnesota Law Review article, “Mayteenth”:
Most of the slaves (effectively) emancipated in 1865 never enjoyed some of the
simplest and most essential civil rights. Meaningful protection of the right to vote
without regard to race or color—merely one example—would wait more than a
century…passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965…To celebrate Juneteenth is
to acknowledge unfinished business. Neither Union victory in the Civil War nor
Reconstruction came close to discharging America’s debt to its black citizens.
Indeed Reconstruction effectively enabled the South to win the Civil War.
(209)(parens mine)
After Emancipation, The New Slavery: Jim Crow—1860-1870
Reconstruction, the attempt to begin the redistribution of land and resources as a way of
launching full citizenship for black citizens, ultimately failed to bring white America into full
compliance with its Constitution. Outrage over the Emancipation Proclamation, the deep wounds
of the Civil War and the imposition of Reconstruction on their defeated numbers and lands
impelled Southerners to unleash another era of African American dehumanization. As the
institution of slavery lost its luster among economic powers here and abroad, segregationists
North and South clung to notions of white superiority, resisting every effort to integrate former
slaves into the larger society.
Red/Blue As Blue/Grey
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Just before war’s end and his April 1865 assassination, Lincoln had issued pardons for nearly
all rebel officials and their constituents, provided that they swear allegiance to the union. He
failed, however, to impose upon states a requirement for enfranchising free blacks, thus allowing
the rise of new home-ruled states and local governments. The latter wasted little time sowing the
seeds of Jim Crow and enacting their infamous Black Codes. The Codes invoked a nasty series
of restrictions and requirements that all but re-enslaved blacks: no black could testify against a
white, serve on a jury, bear arms or hold large meetings. Blacks who quit their jobs were
imprisoned for breach of contract. Unemployed blacks were arrested and fined $50. Those who
failed to pay the fine were hired out to anyone willing to pay the bill, all but indenturing them to
their “benefactors.” And there was more: Blacks were fined for breaking curfew and bearing
arms (Coombs Ch. 6).
Blacks had once again became pawns in a political war—one that has never ended—despite
passage in 1866 of the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude, and
the subsequent Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 granting full citizenship rights to blacks and
requiring the federal government to ensure that all citizens receive equal treatment under the law.
Not surprisingly, the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee, joined by several similar groups across the
South, rose up from resentment born of the forced dismantling of ingrained traditions and
beloved belief systems. That vicious secret society did all in its considerable power (many wellheeled lawmen and politicians were members and leaders) to subvert the federal application of
Constitutional tenets on a stubborn Southern culture. Many died, almost all of them blacks.
Usually by lynching, either by hanging, shooting, or burning.4
4
According to Tuskegee Institute figures, between the years 1882 and 1951, 4,730 people were lynched in the
United States: 3,437 Negro and 1,293 white. The largest number of lynchings occurred in 1892. Of the 230 persons
lynched that year, 161 were Negroes and sixty-nine whites. Images of lynchings are almost always of hanging
blacks. Most lynchings were by hanging or shooting, or both. However, many were of a more hideous nature—
8
Pawns in Power Politics
President Andrew Johnson had accelerated federal leniency toward the former Confederacy.
In so doing, he became no friend to Congressional Republican Party colleagues, who were hellbent on force-feeding reforms on what they believed was an unrepentant South.5 Overriding
Johnson’s veto, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and established the Freedmen’s
Bureau6 to enforce a real reconstruction on a recalcitrant southern culture, rescinding home rule
and putting the military in charge of monitoring reforms and enforcing adherence to newly
imposed loyalty oaths.
For a time, things looked hopeful. For several decades—through 1901—blacks comprised
the majority of some elected Southern bodies, including, for a time, a majority of the Georgia
legislature. Newly voting blacks sent some significant representation to Washington—including
two US Senators from Mississippi—and one served in the Louisiana state house for a brief
period. Still, plagued by Northern Carpetbaggers,7 and under the thumb of Congressionally
burning at the stake, maiming, dismemberment, castration, and other brutal methods of physical torture—a cruel
combination of racism and sadism— used primarily to sustain the caste system in the South. Many whites believed
that Negroes could only be controlled by fear. Lynching was seen as the most effective means of control.
Contrary to present-day popular conception, lynching was not a crime committed exclusively against black people.
During the nineteenth century a significant minority of the lynching victims was white. Between the 1830s and the
1850s the majority of those lynched in the United States were whites. The vast majority of those lynched by the
1890s and after the turn of the century were blacks. The pattern of almost exclusive lynching of Negroes was set
during the Reconstruction period. See Gibson.
5
Andrew Johnson’s presidency survived by one vote a Senate trial to convict after his 1868 impeachment by the
House calling itself the Impeachment Crisis Congress. He was succeeded that November by Ulysses S. Grant. See
Pinzler and Coombs.
6
Freedmen – Official name for freed slaves.
7
So named because of travelers’ common use of carpetbags during the mid-1860s—luggage cobbled quickly and
cheaply from old, worn-out rugs and carpeting. Some Northern imports were sincere in assisting the Reconstruction
while other interlopers moved south to exploit the post-war turmoil and pick up seized and tax-forfeited Confederate
lands at about $25 an acre. The term, carpetbagger, thus became an epithet descriptive of politicians and other
outsiders who enter “foreign” territory to exploit resources and acquire power (American Heritage Dictionary and
Wikipedia).
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mandated, but short-lived Military Districts,8 resentful Southern white conservatives once again
seized the slender thread of power blacks held as minority representatives. Among other tactics,
they depicted freedmen as incompetent and corrupt and quickly reasserted home rule so to
distance themselves from the feds.
With Ulysses S. Grant in office, the last of the so-called Reconstruction Amendments, the
Fifteenth, prohibiting states from denying any citizen the right to vote “based on race, color, or
previous condition of servitude,” was passed by Congress in 1868, and ratified in 1870. Paired
with the Force Acts allowing use of federal troops to rein in the KKK and enforce the Fifteenth
Amendment, black suffrage finally seemed on its way to reality. Once again the social and
political see-saw tilted in favor of freedmen—for a time. Chaos continued, however, as whites
increased pressure—openly and through secret societies—on black-dominated political and
economic structures. The entire nation plunged into economic darkness with the Panic of 1873,
which almost certainly increased competition among workers and widened the growing chasm in
class among racial groups. This translated into fear and loathing in most sectors of civic life—in
the North, increasingly segregated housing and employment; in the South, segregated everything.
Soon, the political—and legal—disenfranchisement of Negroes from any role in governance
was complete. With no political power, even in the abstract, and lacking sufficient education and
socialization, blacks, with some exceptions in skilled jobs, were mainly relegated to serving the
white establishment as dependent sharecroppers. Now, in debt from day one through a deadly
combination of usurious interest rates charged on tools and seed, sky-high land rents and an
obligation to pay plantation landlords a share of their meager crop revenues, blacks became a
“permanent peasant class” once more (Coombs 6).
8
Five Military Districts temporarily replaced states as governing entities until, one by one, states signing loyalty
oaths were readmitted. The districts were dismantled by compromise in 1877.
10
Literacy tests were created to thwart black voting as were laws requiring qualified voters to
have descended from a qualified voter, eliminating blacks whose ancestors were, of course, noncitizen slaves. Such illegal and unconstitutional disenfranchisement should have raised hackles
among one of the major parties, primarily Republicans prepared to punish the South for
secession and the war, but neither protested. All looked away.
Southern blacks were soon reintroduced to Mr. Jim Crow,9 whose minstrel personage would
help launch a new era of de jure segregation throughout the South. States and local governments
defied federal law, buttressed by contradictory executive branch policies and a series of Supreme
Court rulings—starting with its striking down of the Civil Rights of 1875 which stated that no
citizen could be denied equal use of public facilities, such as inns, restaurants, on the basis of
color. Apartheid had been fully implemented through separate facilities, institutions, businesses,
churches and schools (Coombs 7).
Plessy v. Ferguson: Codifying Apartheid—1870-1900
An extraordinary chapter in American jurisprudence emerged with the political retrenchment
of the South beginning in 1873, the establishment of Jim Crow, and a far more insidious
entrenching of residential and cultural segregation in the Northern cities. A significant series of
9
The term Jim Crow is believed to have originated around 1830 when a white, minstrel show performer, Thomas
"Daddy" Rice, blackened his face with charcoal paste or burnt cork and danced a ridiculous jig while singing the
lyrics to the song, "Jump Jim Crow." Rice created this character after seeing (while traveling in the South) a
crippled, elderly black man (or some say a young black boy) dancing and singing a song ending with these chorus
words:
"Weel about and turn about and do jis so,
Eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow."
Some historians believe that a Mr. Crow owned the slave who inspired Rice’s act--thus the reason for the Jim Crow
term in the lyrics. In any case, Rice incorporated the skit into his minstrel act, and by the 1850s the "Jim Crow"
character had become a standard part of the minstrel show scene in America. On the eve of the Civil War, the Jim
Crow idea was one of many stereotypical images of black inferiority in the popular culture of the day--along with
Sambos, Coons, and Zip Dandies (Davis 1).
11
court cases essentially put the lie to any notion of equal justice under the law—the basis of the
Constitution, yes, but more so the mandates of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth
amendments thereto (known as the Civil War or Reconstruction Amendments). In a remarkable
series of decisions using reasoning since deemed tortured at best, the US Supreme Court upheld
state and local challenges to federal enforcement of the amendments, primarily the Fourteenth.
Indeed, the rulings—stretching from 1870 to 1900—struck at their core rationale: drawing
former slaves into mainstream American life. In doing so, the court nullified federal civil rights
statutes and other laws adopted as enforcement tools over a half-century all attempting to bring
the culture into compliance with its own governing document.
In fact, the courts, not the Congress or the Executive branch, became the engines for denying
blacks their long-promised entrance into the web of democratic life for yet another century and
beyond.
Plessy v. Ferguson10 was the crushing, if not final, blow of the nineteenth century. In it, the
court denied relief to a man whose state-defined level of “Negro blood” kept him from sitting in
a rail car reserved for whites. The real reach of Plessy, however, was in its declaration that
separate facilities, if equal, comported with the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal
10
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163, US 537 (1896) – upheld a Louisiana criminal court’s conviction and a subsequent state
supreme court affirmation that a Jim Crow-style statute forbade anyone of any mixture of color other than white to
be seated in accommodation set aside for white people only, in this case a rail car. Perhaps easy for its day, the
rationale for maintaining separate, but equal, public accommodations is rather torturous, but writing for the majority
(David Brewer not participating), Justice Henry Brown states that as long as “Negroes” and “coloreds” are provided
equal facility, it is not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment (equal treatment under the law) for states to impose
restrictions on the separation of race; moreover, he quotes an earlier Chief Justice in an education case from Boston
where the School Committee insisted on separate schools and to prohibit their attendance at any other school. thusly:
“The great principle advanced by the learned and eloquent advocate for the plaintiff is that, by the constitution and
laws of Massachusetts, all person without distinction of age, sex, birth or color, origin or condition, are equal before
the law…But when this great principle comes to be applied to the actual and various conditions of persons in
society, it will not warrant the assertion men and women are legally clothed with the same civil and political
powers…but only that the rights of all…are equally entitled to the paternal consideration of the law for their
maintenance and security.” The first Justice John M. Harlan, dissenting strongly and at length, dismissed separate
but equal as an operating principle, saying “The destinies of the two races, in this country, are indissolubly linked
together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all (federal) shall not permit the seeds of
race hate to be planted under the sanction of law” (Plessy).
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treatment. Such segregation ensured the racial divide in all other aspects of American life, from
black shantytowns, whites-only fountains and entrances in the South to more subtle, but
widespread housing patterns and other insidious public and private policies in every American
city and metropolitan region (Chen 210; Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Root Politics” 552).
Segregation, Integration, Self-determination
Several scholars and authors disagree over whether the goal of school desegregation should
have been—and should still be—full integration, or truly equal education financing and facilities.
One thing is clear: separate has never encouraged equality, and most of the evidence points to the
short- and long-term benefits of true integration—not only of children in education systems, but
of mixed housing and employment arrangements (M. Orfield, Examining the Relationship 2). To
understand this in contemporary terms not only requires an examination of contemporary legal
and political efforts to reverse the effects of Plessy, but also how such attempts failed when
court-ordered desegregation fell flat in implementation, and ideological shifts in court
membership affected political outcomes. The first major effort would be the post-World War II
civil rights era and the Earl Warren court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
Yet, for several generations—from 1898 through World War II to Brown—African
Americans everywhere would endure continued legal—and illegal—segregation and
dehumanization, even death. For all of those sixty years, blacks would find their way through the
humiliation and degradation to establish a flourishing subculture, creating dozens of their own
institutions, schools, churches, fraternal organizations, skilled vendors and retailers, veterans’
groups, and communities of highly skilled musicians, among others. What would remain unique
in the annals of this constitutional democracy is a nation’s willingness to herd only its black
citizens into walled ghettos of deteriorated and deteriorating housing, reeking of poverty,
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unemployment, hungry children, and substandard education as though such treatment would
yield no repercussions beyond their boundaries.
The Ghettoizing of America—1880-1940
Segregation, black poverty, and political powerlessness would become structural—a
permanent part of the landscape for yet another century, giving rise to Clark’s “dark ghetto,”
increasingly isolating Americans from each other culturally and geographically (Massey 9).
Segregation would permanently poison our democratic system.
Plessy provided the legal underpinnings for what Phyllis Moen, Henry Walker, and Donna
Dempster-McClain call the twentieth century’s “durable inequality.” This trio of sociologists
looked anew at the intent behind the framers’ insistence on using the language of freedom to
actually narrow its application to white male property owners (Moen 1-5).
For all their oppression, the vast majority of segregated peoples would have preferred to live
in integrated communities. As they looked about and saw new immigrants melding more easily
into American life, how could they, seeing the benefits of generalized assimilation, not want to
share in those rewards? The difference, of course, was their skin color and the origins of their
residence: slavery. Some, a vocal minority, were prepared to either remain segregated or
emigrate back to Africa, so disenchanted were they with any prospect of living among whites in
peace and dignity (Coombs Ch. 8).
Northerners at the turn of the century and beyond became increasingly alienated and angry
over massive and often violent black incursions into their work spaces. US industrialization
transformed a predominantly rural society into a tightly packed urban culture into which rural
Southern blacks migrated north by the thousands annually between 1880 and 1930 (Hirsch 66).
The tide of black migration north ebbed and flowed in concert with opportunity based on
economics and politics at home and abroad. European immigration peaked just before World
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War I, when the US shut it down. Unlike people of color, Europeans assimilated into American
life, their desire to blend in diminishing their need for physical proximity to work and extended
ethnic community. They would maintain ethnic and cultural ties through other means. For
blacks, “cities became a trap—yet another mechanism of oppression and alienation” (Massey 18;
Hirsch 70).
Meanwhile, the formal establishment of black ghettos was well under way. Massey and
Denton write:
The emergence of the black ghetto did not happen as a chance by-product of other
sociological processes. Rather, white Americans made a series of deliberate
decisions to deny blacks access to urban housing markets and to reinforce their
spatial segregation. Through its actions and inactions, white America built and
maintained the residential structure of the ghetto. (19)
Massey and Denton have developed indices to measure the degree of dissimilarity in the
distribution of blacks and whites among urban neighborhoods. The index numbers are
percentages of blacks needing to move to “even out” the residential population of a given city,
that is, if a city is 10% black and 90% white, every one of its neighborhoods should reflect the
same distribution. Thus, a 20% black population index for any one neighborhood means that half
that group or the 10% excess must move to a neighborhood of less than 10% black residents
(20).11
Charts and tables illustrating the index of dissimilarity for nineteen American cities, divided
by Northern and Southern, at distant points in American history reveal a remarkable and
disturbing trend toward greater separation from the Civil War through subsequent decades (21).
11
Dissimilarity indices work well for measuring residential segregation, but a caveat in using such indices for school
desegregation is that they ignore the proportion of whites in districts with whom black students are coming in
contact. An example is that if 99% of schools in a 99%-black district are also black, no dissimilarity exists because,
under that measure, all those schools are desegregated. Racial balance measures ignore the percentages of whites in
the system under scrutiny, and thus, lose any handle on the costs of desegregation in terms of white flight. (Rossell,
“Desegregation Efficiency”).
15
Pointedly, the indices shown for Northern and Southern cities highlight just how disparately
the residential patterns initially developed in the two regions. For example, the index for Boston
in 1860 was 61.3%, while Charleston’s was merely 23.2 %. By 1910, Boston’s had risen to
64.1%, compared with Charleston’s 16.8%. Thirty years later—1940, Boston’s index stood at
86.3% and Charleston’s at 60.1%. To be fair, by 1940, most cities, north and south, were scoring
in the upper eightieth percentile, Chicago’s as high as 95%. Importantly, indices of nineteenthcentury Northern cities—especially, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee—reveal
modest African American populations consisting primarily of black professionals, middle-class
merchants, and skilled tradesmen. Later, the siren song of glittery cities in the industrializing
North tugged at rural blacks anxious to disengage from Southern poverty and Jim Crow
oppression and to achieve a modicum of self sufficiency. Slowly, at first, then in floods, the
southern poor trudged North (20-21).
Needless to say, this laid down the permanent foundation for resentment and hatred among
Northern white workers, especially new Americans. Despite that, union leadership eventually, if
reluctantly, absorbed most of those blacks into the rank and file, if only to undermine the unionbusting of their employers. Nevertheless, in Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and other industrial
centers, white union members’ racism seethed underneath and made life difficult, if not
impossible, for their black brethren, segregating their locals by race and distributing mostly
menial jobs to them (Massey 28-29; Sugrue Origins; 155-70).
To this day, blacks remain a cipher among union rank and filers, especially in the crafts, or
building trades unions. Most white workers have long since departed the core cities for suburbia
and exurbia, further segregating themselves from the epidemic of urban poverty and, especially
since 1968, turning politically from their traditional Democratic Party devotion to a deepening
16
conservative Republican base (Sugrue, Origins 153-77; Orfield and Luce 5; Pettigrew 7; Massey
29).
The Ghettos Grow
From 1900 on, residential bigotry reigned throughout major city neighborhoods by wellorganized clans of homeowners who turned fear and racial resentment into crusades, followed by
commercial real estate, lending, and insurance enterprises, and later by a series of federal
government housing and welfare policies that cemented the link between poverty and geography
(M. Orfield 15). Moreover, the media fanned white fears and hatred, turning their daily assaults
on black constituents, employing with impunity such racist terms as “nigger” and “darkey,” as
they conjured stories about black crime and vice (Massey 29-30).
This data reinforces the premise set out by Moen, et al, that “in systems characterized by
durable inequalities based on race or ethnic differences, social location is isomorphic with
geographical isolation” (9). The work of Moen contributor William Julius Wilson, especially,
points up the importance of spatial segregation to the creation and maintenance of durable
inequality. As Thomas Sugrue, in his focus on Detroit, also notes, the white prophecy that the
presence of blacks somehow meant deteriorating housing, streets, services and lowered real
estate values became inevitably self-fulfilling as those same whites denied employment, equal
opportunity, public services, and integrated spaces to black residents.
Ghettoizing began at the hands of Northern white homeowners, most of whom formed tight,
very politically savvy associations preventing blacks both from moving out of their strictly
defined, increasingly cramped and underserved areas and into surrounding white neighborhoods.
They promulgated covenants that fearlessly excluded by group identity all who would dare
become part of their community and they put their voting clout behind city and state policies
17
legitimizing such exclusionary practices. The covenants were designed to prohibit white
neighbors from selling or renting their houses to blacks and “undesirables” (Hirsch 73-74).
Under great pressure from such groups, realtors and their allies in the mortgage banking and
insurance industries fell into line, as did local officials responsible for zoning and land use
policy.
Real estate agents developed the insidious practice of steering home-buyers away from and
into racially homogeneous areas, often with little regard to economics. However, given the
economics of house values and concomitant income, many of those location decisions became
self-selecting based on affordability. Once a ghettoized area became so packed it needed to
expand into surrounding neighborhoods, savvy agents would spawn fears and quick, low-balled
sales among whites in those areas by warning them of the coming tide of black homeowners and
tenants and offering to take their houses off their hands if they moved quickly. Sometimes, to
panic white homeowners into selling, agents used tactics like sending a black woman with a baby
buggy walking down their streets. White speculators would jump in before the color line was
actually broken, pick up houses for a song, then rent them out at high rates to blacks desperate
for clean and well-maintained spaces (Hirsch 74-75).
This so-called blockbusting also enraged white owners who wanted to keep the color line
intact without themselves being exploited in the process. Blockbusting not only violated their
covenants, but also lowered their property values in light of the below-market prices paid to
those wanting to get out of the way. Real estate boards and public officials in various cities and
states also recoiled over the blockbusting even while conspiring to keep these spaces racialized
and segregated through specific board rules (Massey 35-39; Hirsch 75; Sugrue, Origins 33-37).
World War II brought unprecedented prosperity and near full employment, but nothing by
18
way of changing white America’s fear and revulsion for living and working near AfricanAmerican citizens. Once the post-war baby boom was under way, huge demand for new housing
brought new financing options for returning veterans and other potential home owners—except
blacks, of course. With ghettos still operating like living sardine tins, whites could now segregate
themselves, with government’s help, from urban legends of crime and degradation by moving to
quickly rising suburban communities. Suburban white flight replaced urban white intransigence.
Americans living and buying houses right through the present day take for granted such
organizations as the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Federal National Mortgage
Association (Fannie Mae), and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac).
The FHA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac all assist homeowners in affordably mortgaging their
homesteads and other properties, often with programs that appear to lighten the load on those
less able to finance their house purchases by conventional means.12 In fact, all of these
organizations have been descended from and been implicated in the legal perpetuation of
metropolitan scale segregation since 1933, when FHA’s predecessor agency, the Home Owners’
Loan Corporation (HOLC) was formed to help refinance and/or purchase properties foreclosed
or soon to be.
Created in the burgeoning years of the Great Depression and early in the first term of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, it was HOLC that introduced the infamous system of
“redlining” to real estate, mortgage, banking, and insurance enterprises. The commercial sector
had engaged in the practice of steering and blockbusting for several years, but HOLC gave the
process federal legitimacy when, as part of its mandate to establish uniform standards and
procedures for lending institutions appraising properties before financing their purchase, it
12
The debate continues on the advisability of some of these programs, but many low and middle-income workingclass buyers have been placed in their own homes with help from FHA and the Veterans Administration.
19
systematically set aside racially and ethnically populated city neighborhoods as undervalued. The
agency did this by mapping cities by neighborhood and drawing red lines around communities of
color as undesirable for investment. Likewise, green lines represented more viable investment
targets, and, of course, these were invariably white. Lending institutions, then, were left with
little choice but to deny mortgages or steer financing away from predominantly black
neighborhoods. In fact, this was fine excuse for commercial lenders and their cohorts in real
estate and appraisals to maintain local covenants and devalue black neighborhoods (M. Orfield,
Examining the Relationship 13; Massey 42-43).
HOLC’s policies fed directly into its sister federal agencies, FHA and the VA, where the
rules for financing mortgages of workers and returning veterans included incentives for steering
mortgages away from central cities to white suburbs. Myron Orfield reports that, “the FHA’s
(1939) Underwriting Manual explicitly required that loans were guaranteed only in racially
homogenous neighborhoods (‘…if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that
properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.’). Thus, the federal
government paid whites to leave the central cities and barred people of color from doing the
same.” The fragmentation of metro regions was under way (Examining the Relationship 13;
Massey 54).
With the post-war population boom, municipal zoning and land use regulations became
common practice in planning, but another tool in the public tray for excluding low-income city
folk, especially those in the black community, from equality of housing opportunity. They bear
the marks of covenants without the covenants and have been often passed by planning
commissions and city councils at the behest of homeowners associations attempting to use
economic means for keeping out undesirables of the urban core. De jure becomes de facto.
20
“Affordable” housing is a category of land use to be avoided throughout most metropolitan
areas. Affordable means less square footage than zoned for, multiple units where only singlefamily dwellings are allowed, single versus two-car garages, fewer fancy accoutrements, and
lower development and service connection fees (M. Orfield, Examining the Relationship 14).
“Affordable” thus became and remains code for residents of color and lower economic classes.
Post-war Rebellion: Brown & the Warren Court—1940-1965
Arnold Hirsch reminds us in “With or Without Jim Crow” that, from 1940 on, rural black
migration to the cities had escalated once again, filling a new demand for wartime workers.
Later, massive post-war suburbanization changed the US residential climate in several ways.
With returning veterans and a baby boom under way, previous housing shortages evaporated,
spurred primarily by FHA and VA financing of suburban development to the blatant benefit of
whites. Urban ghettos immediately expanded into adjacent, formerly white-occupied,
neighborhoods—thanks in part to exploitive real estate and mortgage practices. Blacks itching to
leave cramped conditions created by the migration influx also encountered a concomitant
upsurge in housing prices, if not values, resulting in what Hirsch calls “the Second Ghetto” (77).
Political, economic and social hay was made by keeping the community locked in. For both
black and white politicians, this was a solid bloc of homogeneous constituents (despite not
voting in very substantial numbers). Black businesses thrived, and black churches burgeoned.
Many of those interests were best able to function by cooperating with the outside (white) forces
that had created the ghetto in the first place. Politicians, pastors and merchants became vested
interests in keeping it all intact.
Once again, black leaders were divided over the best way to secure adequate resources for
their people—by dispersing and assimilating into other sectors of majority white populations and
control, or by using their buying power and unique political base to demand recompense and
21
resource allotment. The fight would not end anytime soon. Competing forces inside the
community also created confusion among blacks as to their relationship to outside communities.
This, Hirsch suggests, clearly weakened their resistance to forces out to maintain metropolitanwide segregation, because poverty and high dissimilarity indexes—85%-93%—persisted in
fourteen central cities and their metropolitan areas (SMSAs13) over the next thirty years (77-79).
Switching to Education
We’ve seen how Plessy’s separate-but-equal doctrine drove most of American jurisprudence,
politics, and governance for sixty years. Separating facilities by race made equality impossible
because resources flow to power, and blacks were powerless in that climate. Nevertheless, cases
prior to and following Plessy challenged segregated facilities in schools and public
accommodations from Boston to Kansas—with mixed results and little national consequence
(Wisneski; Chen 219). Until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, et al.
World War II ended, and thousands of black veterans returned to find they had fought for a
country whose culture and power elite still denied them equal footing required by law. Demands
for full participation grew louder, and the NAACP responded with a full-blown strategy to
integrate education where housing efforts had failed. Between 1947 and 1951, the organization
filed lawsuits engaging individual plaintiffs and suing segregated school systems in five cities.
Four of the suits were based on the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal treatment and a
fifth used the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment because the issue involved the
Washington, DC, school district (Wisneski; Ransom).
The Supreme Court consolidated all five on their constitutional similarities and heard
13
SMSA - Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, clusters of cities and/or counties used for many public and private
agency measurements from population to demographics and media reading, listening, or viewing patterns.
22
arguments in all of them on December 9, 1952. The case was reargued December 8, 1953, and
decided May 17, 1954. The lead case became Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
KS, et al. The other Fourteenth Amendment cases included Briggs et al. v. Elliott et al.
(Clarendon County, SC), Davis et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County,
Virginia, et al., and Gebhart et al. v. Belton et al (Wilmington, DE) (347 US 483). The Fifth
Amendment case was Bolling v. Sharpe (347 US 497 [1954]) (District of Columbia). Known
collectively as Brown I, the cases were filed and considered as class actions involving over two
hundred individuals and families (Ransom; Wisneski).
The cases within the Brown cluster brought into sharp relief the degrading conditions of
public schools set aside in several states for blacks only. Briefly stated, each case described the
patently discriminatory effect of segregated schools on black and white students alike. The
Brown case itself—the twelfth in a series of challenges to Kansas law allowing cities of the first
class to establish separate schools for blacks and whites—featured thirteen parents and twenty
children as plaintiffs, with Oliver Brown as the lead (Wisneski). After five years of litigation, the
consolidated cases yielded a unanimous decision that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments
forbade segregated school systems anywhere, and that separate is inherently unequal and
psychologically devastating to students and families alike. Indeed, Chief Justice Earl Warren,14
wrote succinctly:
Our decision, therefore, cannot turn on merely a comparison of these tangible
14
The decisions in these cases were far from assured during early deliberations. Until he died in 1953, then-Chief
Justice Fred Vinson was dead set against reversing Plessy. And he held sway over several other votes on the court,
worrying the more liberal members that this important opportunity to put teeth into the Fourteenth Amendment
would be frittered away. Vinson’s death was sudden, and President Dwight Eisenhower immediately replaced him
with Earl Warren (some say too quickly, and that he mumbled more than once his regret over the appointment).
Most believed that only a unanimous court could send the required message and reverse such longstanding
precedent. For this reason, the cases, originally argued before the Vinson court in 1952, were reargued in 1953 and
decided in 1954. See Pfander 4-5. Among those arguing these cases for the NAACP was the future Supreme Court
justice, Thurgood Marshall.
23
factors (such as buildings, books and teachers compensation) in the Negro and
white schools involved in each of the cases. We must look instead to the effect of
segregation itself on public education… Today, education is perhaps the most
important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance
laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of
the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the
performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed
forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal
instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later
professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In
these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in
life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where
the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to
all on equal terms. (Brown I) (parenthetical content added for context)
The massive reversal of Plessy and the dismantling of Jim Crow lay at the heart of Brown I’s
great accomplishment. However, the next years would yield profound disappointment as seen by
the court’s tepid order in Brown II (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al, 349, US 294
[1955]): that schools must desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” In Brown I, the court
telegraphed the likely difficulties facing the “wide applicability” of its ruling, citing “the great
variety of local conditions” as overwhelming the “formulation of decrees” with “problems of
considerable complexity” (Chen 220; United States, Brown I). By using the phrase “with all
deliberate speed” and backing away from specific remedies and timetables, the court left wide
open opportunities for local school officials and lower courts to move at their own pace—often
refusing to comply with the order (Chen 220).
Several black leaders and scholars differed and remain divided over the legitimate focus of
remedies for unequal education in American cities. That segregated communities meant
transporting students across town to achieve racial “balance” was a given. However, critics like
Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell, once an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund
(LDF), took the position espoused by W.E.B. DuBois a half-century earlier that equal and quality
education supercedes integration, especially if integration diminishes the resources sent to
24
predominantly black schools. In fact, Bell in 2004 averred that rigorous enforcement of Plessy’s
“separate but equal” standard might well have yielded better schools for blacks, thus producing
better-equipped citizens and equalizing America far more than forced desegregation (Liu 18).
Now fifty years after Brown I & II, the data is clear: generations of future workers and
leaders are being lost in a stubbornly segregated educational climate for black students, while
resources continue to flow easily to predominantly white schools, mostly in the suburbs.
Desegregation and the “Southern Strategy”—1955-1975
The record of subsequent Supreme Court cases is replete with what may be seen as
extraordinary efforts by nearly every school district in the United States to thwart the spirit as
well as the political and social mandate behind Brown I and II. Many cases exploded on
television screens; others worked in the background.
One of the most notorious cases of the era grew out of the melee that put Little Rock,
Arkansas, on the national news, first for days, then weeks, then months and years, beginning
with the 1957-58 school year. Images of Little Rock police escorting nine black high school
students through screaming, red-faced, white parents and politicians past one thousand resentful
federal paratroopers into the previously all-white Little Rock Central High School filled
television screens and movie newsreels, shocking the nation with this open display of hatred and
hostility toward black students.15 Note again that here, as in most districts, desegregation was
accomplished by moving blacks students to white schools. This would be particularly notable in
15
The photograph shows that Elizabeth Eckford attempting to enter Little Rock Central High School was taken by
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Will Counts. The girl shouting is Hazel Massery.
25
three Northern urban complexes: Boston, Detroit and Minneapolis-St. Paul.
1968 was the year Richard Milhous Nixon was elected president, playing off black urban
uprisings in Watts, Newark and Detroit and using the latest GOP “Southern Strategy”—direct
support of Southern opposition to desegregation—to court Dixiecrats for 1972. Dixiecrats, who
had remained a regional bulwark of Democratic Party coalitions since Republican Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation one hundred years earlier, now began migrating away. Led by rabid
segregationist Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond, Alabama Governor George Wallace
(“Segregation now, segregation forever”) forced an even split in the South’s 1968 presidential
vote among his American Independence Party and the two major party candidates, Nixon and
Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota. Nixon edged out Humphrey, then spent four years
trying to capture the Wallace bloc (Pearson; Chapin).
Four years later, back in the Democratic Party, Wallace again demonstrated the power of
bigotry, taking primaries in five Southern states—and Michigan—in 1972. This writer was living
in Detroit at the time and active in the politics of the day, watching as that state’s rank and file
union members—especially those in the crafts and United Auto Workers—went strongly for
Wallace. Once again it became clear that white workers could be swayed by fears raised over
“forced” busing of their children under court orders. Those same predominantly white Wallace
precincts in Metro Detroit and outstate Michigan would, after George McGovern’s Democratic
nomination, vote for, thus help reelect, the Nixon/Spiro Agnew ticket (Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots
Politics” 577, Origins 265; Chapin; Pearson).
Thomas Sugrue chides 1960s critics Thomas and Mary Edsall, Jonathan Rieder (Silent
Majority), and Allen Matusow for overreaching in attributing those losses to white working class
reaction to a Democratic Party whose platform and candidates supported racial justice, black
26
power and the War on Poverty. For example, Sugrue quotes the Edsalls as stating that Wallace
“captured the central political dilemma of racial liberalism and the Democratic Party: the
inability of Democrats to provide a political home for those whites who felt there were paying—
unwillingly—the largest ‘costs’ in the struggle to achieve an integrated society” (Sugrue, “
Crabgrass-Roots Politics” 577-8).
Sugrue reminds us:
The “silent majority” did not emerge de novo from the alleged failures of
liberalism in the 1960s; it was not the unique product of the white rejection of the
Great Society. Instead it was the culmination of more than two decades of
simmering white discontent and extensive antiliberal political organization. The
problem of white backlash in the urban North is longer-lived and far more
intractable than recent analyses would suggest.
Court Politics and the Brown Pullback
Shifts in presidential administrations and in the Supreme Court’s membership played
important, but often overlooked roles in dampening the court’s enthusiasm for rapid and broadbased metropolitan school desegregation in the years following Brown. As much as the legal
system is touted as the objective branch of federal government, interpreting the law in light of
precedent and common sense, politics inevitably worms its way into decisions. Just as the death
of Chief Justice Fred Vinson in 1953 resulted in a court far more friendly to the constitutional
issues raised by the NAACP in Brown I and II, the 1968 election of Richard Nixon and the shift
from the Earl Warren court to the Warren Burger court in 1969 represented a gradual retreat
from active desegregation efforts.
For example, almost immediately after his inauguration in January, 1969, Nixon issued
orders delaying court rulings forcing thirty-three Mississippi school districts to submit
desegregation plans. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) appealed. Finally, the case of
Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (396 US 19) became the point at which the “all
27
deliberate speed” standard was set aside for the stricter “obligation of every school district…to
terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools…in
which no person is to be effectively excluded from any school because of race or color”
(Ransom).
By 1973, Burger had replaced Warren, and Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist had
replaced justices Hugo Black and William Brennan. The newly configured court then ruled
against Demetrio Rodriguez in his suit (411 US 1) challenging San Antonio’s school funding
disparities. Later that same year, in Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1 (413 US 921), this
same court, even while ordering citywide busing to begin, stated that de facto segregation was
insufficient grounds for judicial intervention if a school board could show it had not intended to
segregate and that segregation had arisen from other, more private means, like housing (Keyes;
Ransom; Wisneski).
The decades between 1965 and 1995 saw astonishing levels of legal and political attempts at
implementing Brown with concomitant resistance among white residents and parents, school
officials and other state and local politicians. But the courts prevailed and, despite years of
pushback, it appeared education segregation was coming to an end by 1995. It did not.
Resegregation of Boston schools returned in the 90s, as it did in so many urban areas (Massey
71; Kozol, “Still Separate” 5) .
Detroit: Metropolitan Remedies Tested
The story of Detroit following World War II through the 1980s and 1990s is unique.
Considered the birthplace of mass production under Henry Ford, the city’s booming
manufacturing base had served as the “Arsenal of Democracy” for its war production capacity,
thanks to the auto industry’s infrastructure. (Sugrue, Origins 12-13). Rapidly expanding car
28
manufacturers imported workers by the thousands to the great angst of settled whites, especially
auto union workers fearing replacement. This massive in-migration of new workers, mostly rural
Southerners—black and white—further crowded an already inflamed city as housing shortages
increased and demand for city services skyrocketed. Neighborhood associations formed to keep
burgeoning black populations contained within existing ghettos many blacks wanted to avoid. In
1943, in Detroit (and several other cities experiencing similar boom years), race riots broke out,
often in conjunction with white strikes over the influx of about 140,000 blacks.16 Northern
chapters of the Ku Klux Klan struck more than once, beating on blacks, including black women,
working in wartime factory jobs (Sugrue, Origins 28-30, 42-43).
On July 23, 1967, the pot boiled over again in the steamy night hours and the worst rebellion
in the city’s history broke after neighbors and store patrons witnessed the arrest of eighty-five
hot and inebriated patrons of an after-hours drinking joint (known there as “blind pigs”). An
angry crowd became a huge mob of three thousand by morning and turned a major portion of the
inner city into burning buildings and cars, and looted stores, while tanks patrolled residential
neighborhoods and gunfire exchanges broke out between police and black citizens, national
guardsmen and city residents. Five days later, forty-three people were dead, more than seven
thousand had been arrested, and twenty-five hundred buildings had been looted and destroyed.
Soon, whites began another exodus from the city proper. But, as Heather Thompson notes, “The
riot itself was largely an incoherent and ineffective, albeit dramatic, attack on the power
inequities and on the behavior of the DPD (police) in a racially polarized city” (184-85; Sugrue
259-60).
16
Early on, Henry Ford, the main industrial importer of workers from outside Michigan, thought of himself as a
father figure to them all, but mostly to blacks. The company’s headquarters were in the strictly all-white city of
Dearborn (note the name), and many blacks were shuffled into a Ford-financed city west of Dearborn, Inkster,
deliberately planned to contain its citizens in modest houses within residential cul-de-sacs from which only a few
outlets allowed traffic to flow. It was a black city from its birth onward.
29
Against this deeply divided backdrop came the 1970 federal class action case, Bradley v.
Detroit Board of Education, et al, which included Governor William Milliken, Attorney General
Frank Kelley, the State Board of Education and other officials. The NAACP-directed suit
charged that Detroit’s schools were intentionally segregated by race and that, along with those
named officials. The lower court then found not only the Detroit Board, but also (because the
board is a state entity) the state of Michigan itself, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The judge first ordered plans implemented for immediately desegregating Detroit’s schools, but
because of the system’s high percentage of black enrollment—about 75%—also ordered state
officials to submit plans for desegregating the entire tri-county metropolitan area comprising
some eighty-five suburban school districts (Milliken v. Bradley 418 US 717, 718). This would be
the first metropolitan remedy approved for desegregating public education.
Governor Milliken and the now-included school districts appealed to the US Supreme Court,
and in July, 1974, the court ruled 5-4, with Chief Justice Warren Burger writing, that the District
Court never actually found that the suburban districts had contributed to Detroit’s segregated
school system, nor that metro school district boundaries had been established specifically to keep
blacks out of their schools (Milliken 1-23). Milliken v. Bradley had slammed the door on
metropolitan desegregation for the foreseeable future. As of the 2003-2004 school year, 96% of
Detroit students were black. Overall, Detroit’s population has dropped from more than two
million in 1980 to just over one million today, almost entirely black (Kozol, “Still Separate” 1).
Minneapolis-St. Paul: Magnets Blossom
Plans and lawsuits for desegregating Minnesota’s public schools came relatively late, several
years after the Minneapolis and St. Paul independent districts tried a series of board-adopted
policies to respond affirmatively to Brown II’s mandate. Not until 1971 did the NAACP
Minneapolis Chapter file the first of its two desegregation cases in federal court, Jeanette
30
Booker, et al v. Special School District No. 1 (Booker v. Minneapolis 351 F. Supp. 799, 802 [D.
Minn 1972]). In that case, Judge Earl Larson, ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, ordered
Minneapolis to desegregate its schools and implement a desegregation/integration plan. It would
also require integration of faculty and court approval of any new school construction. The
following year, the Minnesota Board of Education adopted rules for desegregating any building
where minority enrollment exceeded the percentage of minorities district-wide (Lis Jones 11).
Those rules spawned the drafting of yet another voluntary desegregation plan for St. Paul as
well. Until then, St. Paul had spent ten years trying different approaches to desegregation.
Beginning in 1964, a group of black and white citizens calling themselves Parents for Integrated
Education (PIE) sought, among other things, to relieve racial imbalance in elementary schools
and demonstrate to the community that the value of integrated education district enjoyed a
critical mass of citizen support (my mother was a member of this organization). PIE saw to it that
a voluntary transportation plan, privately financed, would show just that, and in its first year
transferred seventy-five students to several Highland Park schools. By 1968, PIE had transferred
233 minority children to previously all-white schools. Once again, integration was being
achieved by transferring black students to white school, not the reverse.
An important factor mostly missing from the Boston and Detroit experiences is the degree to
which Minnesota and its two largest school districts came to rely on the concept of magnet
schools to achieve both voluntary and mandatory desegregation based on pupil percentages in
specific schools. Magnet schools are an attempt to use market incentives to attract parents with
children from outside neighborhood attendance areas to participate in racial desegregation efforts
using special curricula or instructional methods such as math/science, performing arts, or open
classrooms (Rossell, “Desegregation Efficiency”). While Minneapolis employed the magnet
31
system in some of its schools, St. Paul became the major Minnesota player in this arena. Nearly
all of its schools are magnets or have a magnet within. Magnets still operate in both urban
systems, but their success as desegregation tools is still seriously questioned by school advocates
and education professionals, especially when magnets like the International Baccalaureate
program are designed essentially to pull in white students to mostly black settings. Except for
involuntary school desegregation—usually busing blacks to predominantly white areas of the
city—blacks are largely non-participants in most magnet programs (Shulman 9).
In 1995, the NAACP returned to court, this time in Hennepin County District Judge Gary
Larson’s court; its black plaintiffs claimed that the schools “have been in the past and currently
are segregated on the basis of both race and socioeconomic status.” As a result of concentrated
poverty and racial disparity, it said, students as fully capable of learning as any others in
Minnesota were being denied educational adequacy given the disparities (Minneapolis Branch of
the NAACP, et al. v. State of Minnesota, et al. File No. MC 95-014800, Hennepin County
District Court, Fourth Judicial District of Minnesota). An identical class action suit, Xiong, et al
v. State of Minnesota, et al (195 F.3d 424, 426 [CA8 1999]) was filed in 1998, naming as its
plaintiffs students and parents from Minneapolis’ Asian and Latino communities (Lis Jones 14).
Those two suits, consolidated for trial, ended in June, 2000, with a very complex and detailed
settlement based on several promises by all parties to participate in the West Metro Education
Program (WMEP), an interdistrict desegregation program already created by state education
department rules. The WMEP is a strictly voluntary program allowing all Minneapolis students
receiving free or reduced-price lunches to apply for open enrollment in nearby suburban schools,
except those with more than 50% of their resident students eligible for free or reduced-price
lunch. (Settlement Agreement 11; M. Orfield, Minneapolis Desegregation Settlement 5-6).
32
Plaintiffs’ lawyer Dan Shulman states something of the obvious in his recent presentation as
to why the parties should have settled rather than take it to trial: the unreliability of ordering the
State Legislature to provide “adequate” education, not to mention the need for urgency in terms
of consequences for children in a system that deprives them of educational adequacy while
debate rages among legislators and education interest groups (Shulman 5). The specific program
directed at convincing Minneapolis students to participate is called “The Choice is Yours (CIY),”
and settlement parties expected the state Department of Education to do far more than they have
to promote it. The settlement period is ending, the CIY program is fully enrolled, and, despite the
lax promotion, suburban districts and the state are prepared to extend CIY. Both Shulman and
Myron Orfield report that some two thousand children in the program are doing very well
academically and socially (Shulman 11; M. Orfield, Minneapolis Desegregation Settlement 5-6).
Orfield’s report on the settlement’s outcomes is spiced with cautious optimism about CIY’s
success and Twin Cities desegregation overall. But, as has been seen in every case, segregation is
not just about educational choices; it’s also about concentrations of race and poverty and their
effects on children, the powerless victims of such concentrations, economically, socially, and
psychologically. Segregation, including deep segregation of opportunity in all areas of life,
remains starkly dominant throughout the Twin Cities Metro, and it will take a far more concerted
effort than anecdotal reports to bring the state and the two urban districts themselves to ensure
more, not less, integration. For all its success, CIY is creating problems for the Minneapolis
District by draining many of its motivated students from inner city schools.
At last count in 2003-2004, total Minneapolis public school enrollment held steady at 43,429
students, 73% of them minority, 42% black, and 68% of them qualifying for free or reduced
lunch, a prime measure of poverty. The figures for St. Paul in 2004-2005 are similar: all but 28%
33
of the district’s enrollment are students of color, in this case, African Americans17 and Asians
evenly divided at 29%, plus 12% Latino and 2% Native American. Tellingly, 69%—well over
two-thirds of St. Paul students—who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches (“Facts You
Should Know;” “About Us”). These are far from the kinds of statistics that give much hope to
those seeking educational and social equity for children trapped in poverty and the squalor that
accompanies it.
Meanwhile, as the State Board of Education responded to the likelihood of an adverse ruling
from the court by developing rules for a metropolitan-wide desegregation plan, the conservative
Center of the American Experiment issued a scathing denunciation of the approach in March of
1995. In Good Intentions Are Not Enough: The Peril Posed by Minnesota’s New Desegregation
Plan, author Katherine A. Kersten cites failures of “costly programs” in several cities where
“racial gaps remain very wide, despite…immense amounts (spent) on special compensatory
programs” (Kersten 1). The report employs particularly loaded rhetoric, almost all of it having to
do with expenditures and the threat of more with lawsuits pending and anticipated. Terms like
“numbers juggling,” “race-based busing,” and “perverse incentives” punctuate a narrative that
shows contempt for such widely accepted terms as desegregation, desegregate, adequacy,
consultants, and learning gap by placing them between quotation marks as though they have no
real meaning (Kersten 4-6).
Fifty-plus years after Brown, school desegregation efforts remain at the forefront of
America’s failure to address the twin threats of poverty and institutional and cultural racism.
What is often missing from the simmering debate over school desegregation is its
appropriateness as the remedy for broader disparities in society and the generations-old effects
17
In St. Paul, African American figures include 1,502 new African immigrants, or 4% of the total.
34
on African Americans of opportunities denied, their centuries-long ghettoization, and the
entrenched white privilege that drove economic and political deprivation from enslavement to
the present day. The out-migration of whites into the more than three hundred surrounding
communities of the now-thirteen-county Twin Cities SMSA has left core city school districts
bereft of the hoped-for integration that came with Brown. As sprawl spreads, spurred by white
flight, poverty replaces stability and the cycle repeats itself with poverty driving whites to the
metro fringes (M. Orfield, American Metropolitics 9-15).
Regional Inequalities and Solutions—1980-2005
Volumes have been written on the deleterious effects of suburban sprawl on land use,
ecology/environment, infrastructure demands and pressure on public services. Less discussed,
thus likely less-known, is how regional sprawl has increased isolation and its effects on racial
groups and socioeconomic classes, on the mutual sensibilities of urban and suburban residents
and, finally, on their political perspectives and voting behavior as illustrated by the media-driven
red-blue divide. But mounting evidence reveals that regional issues are playing a greater role in
the formation of public policy positions and in the nature of policy bodies at every level of
governance. Regional solutions, not just those directed at pockets within metropolitan areas, are
now at the core of resolving racial and economic disparities everywhere. The Minneapolis-St.
Paul Metro provides fertile ground for probing the potential for regional remedies and reform in
a variety of issue areas.
Metropolitan Politics and Policy
While some regional outlook is present in distinct areas of policy, especially in the Twin
Cities Metro region, the persistence of localism and its resulting durable inequalities has
prevented strong regional approaches to social and other intangible issues, let alone consensus on
35
stated development and infrastructure policies. Minnesota’s approach to regional governance
comes closer than most in the US to gaining a foothold on rational regional planning and land
use, and the most prominent of its regions is the Twin Cities Metro. That region’s planning and
management body is the Metropolitan Council, comprised of fourteen sub-regional members and
a full time chair, all appointed by the governor. The question that plagues the planners is this:
with population growth and sprawl, should the official region remain at its original seven-county
configuration, or more realistically expand to twelve or thirteen counties embracing its
burgeoning exurbs and rapidly developing rural communities? What effect do in-place
desegregation plans have on the communities and institutions when new ones are added to the
spatial mix of the Metro?
The Met Council, as it is called, has had its hands full with mandates to plan and direct
regional development while managing the water, waste management, public transit and open
spaces of the present boundaries. But, depending on the governor, the unelected Met Council,
nationally revered in the 1970s for the very concept of regional governance, has been either quite
active or much less so as membership, thus its policy character, has shifted with each election.
The major political battles are, and likely always will be, over more centralized regional planning
and control versus the tenacious entrenchment of local officials in the 190-plus communities
comprising the seven-county area.18 The Met Council projects that between 2002 and 2025, the
seven-county Metro will have felt the social and economic burden of a 600,000-person
population increase. The Council’s Blueprint for regional growth struggles with its mandate in
18
Twin Cities Metro governance officially covers seven counties, but the SMSA embraces a more expansive
thirteen. For more on the issue of regional fragmentation and its impacts versus the benefits of regional
consolidation and annexation, see the works of David Rusk and other advocates for annexing and consolidating
metropolitan areas. Turning existing and unwieldy clusters of hundreds of small communities—which most
Northern regions currently are—into unitary systems of regional governance would require a critical mass of support
of nearly impossible proportions.
36
light of such growth.
With a the rapid growth of metropolitan sprawl have come several laws creating carrots and
hammers for those nearly 200 Metro municipalities to address the burgeoning need for
affordable housing, not just for purposes of integration or desegregation, but for bringing
thousands of entry level workers to where the jobs are and are likely to be for the next two dozen
years. The latest of those laws, authored and promoted by Myron Orfield when he was a states
senator and considered a lone wolf crying out in the wilderness of localism and strong resistance
to any massive infusion of “those people” into the mainstream suburban world of large lots and
low density. Orfield’s creation, the Livable Communities Act (LCA) began as a real hammer on
equalizing the disparities in housing outside the core cities, but became sufficiently watered
down as passed—and more so as implemented by the Met Council—that the Council’s
affordable housing goals and benchmarks, first expressed in the Minnesota Land Use Planning
Act (LUPA) as a percentage of a community’s total housing stock, have failed in nearly every
case to be realized. Ed Goetz, of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the
University of Minnesota, in a scathing evaluation of LUPA’s results, has shown that all good
intentions notwithstanding, the act’s affordable housing goals have been utter failures as
projected through 2010. Updated Met Council affordable housing goals have been issued and, in
a soon-to-be-completed study, many communities are finding their targets even lower than their
unattained original figures Essentially, the hammer—leverage of state and federal infrastructure
and development dollars—has given way completely to the soggy carrot.
Addressing the role of racial and class disparities within existing populations is difficult
enough, let alone trying to project their impact twenty years out. In his book, American
Metropolitics, Myron Orfield examins in detail the constructs of regions, including the Twin
37
Cities area, also taking a cue from Massey and Denton’s research on dissimilarity. Addressing
the reasons we should care about the racial and political stratification of metro regions, Orfield
says:
Since the country’s founding, the ideal of an open society, where all citizens have
the opportunities for advancement, has been part of the American dream. Implicit
in this dream is the belief, borne out by generations of social research, that social
mobility is inextricable from contact with people from a variety of social and
economic classes—social mixing…
Social separation leaves middle-class children in overcrowded, underfunded
schools, but its more powerful harms accrue to the poor people of color left
behind in communities of concentrated poverty in many American cities and
some older suburbs. Neighborhoods of concentrated poverty destroy the lives of
the people trapped in them and create a growing social and fiscal cancer in the
midst of previously healthy communities. (American Metropolitics 53-4).
Oversimplified here, Orfield details the ramifications in society of children raised in
concentrated poverty—teen pregnancies, dropouts, joblessness, crime, and even speech patterns
that further isolate them from mainstream society, making them ill-equipped for employment.
The middle-class flight, business disinvestment, and decline in basic local government services
that come from this deterioration creates a fiscal and social burden for everyone involved
(American Metropolitics 55).
Ultimately, however, Orfield concludes that it is an error to suggest that today’s metropolitan
politics is based on any kind of realistic assessment that metro areas contain but two distinct
parts: rich suburbs and poor core cities. Half the population resides in fully developed
communities, many of them suburban and experiencing urban problems, with misery spreading
outward as developers and legislative politics focus on the metropolitan fringes, and too often
ignore the rest (M. Orfield, American Metropolitics 172).
The Political Fallout
When, in the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, the media uniformly colored entire
38
states in red or blue, depending on the candidate receiving a state’s electoral votes, the colorcoding provided a convenient, if woefully inaccurate, means of describing voter sentiment and
their apparent policy divisions. Red state? Blue state? Pundits and politicians started their
“mediaspeak” and it became a given that all residents of a state were assumed Republican or
Democrat (never mind that third parties were also on the ballot), based on the color assigned in
the presidential count. But analyses coming almost immediately afterward—and generally
ignored because of their complexity—revealed a far different voting pattern than the simple red
state/blue state construct. When counted by county, the colors within a state shifted significantly,
and what emerged was a clear indication that nearly every metropolitan region of the US radiated
blue at the core (Democratic), fading toward purple the further out one went, then red
(Republican) in most exurbs and rural communities (Vanderbei).
Political representation at the state and local levels reflects similar partisan splits, growing
more divergent with each decennial census and redistricting. Mostly white suburbs—not
necessarily rich, but housing millions of white blue-collar workers as well as more affluent
residents—are voting Republican for partisan offices. Core cities are essentially safe Democratic
territory. State and federal policy, especially from 1994 to 2004, reflected agendas of the right,
cutting or altering such programs as income assistance (welfare), health care (Medicaid and
privatizing of MinnesotaCare), education (No Child Left Behind) and Minnesota local
government aids. Those changes shifted more of the burden—regressive property tax increases
that fund city, county and school governments among others—on their poorest citizens, despite
evidence showing many are unable to fend for themselves.
This will continue as long as metropolitan areas remain as segregated by race and class as
they are and regional remedies to integrate regional populations fail. But researchers have
39
gathered enough evidence to prove that integration can work to the benefit of all, especially
when racial and economic proportionality can be assured in housing and regional institutions. In
fact, statistics already show that in 1,592 census tracts where integration occurred in fifteen large
metropolitan areas, resegregation recurred over the measured twenty-year period (1980-2000)
once the black population of any one tract exceeded 29%. Conversely, for the 634 tracts where
county-wide or metro-wide busing continued over the same twenty years, the numbers for
resegregated tracts are far fewer (Orfield and Luce 9).
In Minnesota, as elsewhere, some previously solid Republican districts are beginning to
rethink their representation in response to more difficult economic conditions. Such changes may
or may not spawn new, more tolerant approaches to evening out the racial and economic
distribution of metro areas, especially as blacks begin to filter into mostly inner-ring suburbs
now participating in the cross-district West Metro Educational Program. Core city residents are
then more likely to move into to the suburbs where jobs are being created. That can and should
shift the political makeup of the constituencies and their elected officials, assuming Democrats
and other progressive party representatives are more willing than Republicans to step up to the
plate on such contentious matters. But ultimately, widespread cooperation and collaboration will
be required to bring metro areas into greater and more equitable balance (Orfield and Luce 9).
And we have said little about large influxes of new African immigrants, Asians, and Latinos, and
their impacts on all those issues involving local economies, education, housing, development and
segregation.
Healing the Cultural Core
As Hurricane Katrina so suddenly and devastatingly illustrated for the world, the shame is
that American history and its revered institutions—the Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution and its Bill of Rights and attendant amendments, the Emancipation Proclamation
40
and a dozen civil rights acts—have failed in their promise to create and preserve democracy and
defend equality and opportunity for all citizens. For too many African Americans, white paranoia
over granting blacks equal opportunity and equal treatment in all arenas of life has created
generation after generation of a distrusting and distrusted, ill-educated, ill-adapted subculture of
survivors, hemmed in by greed and hatred. Unlike so many other Americans born elsewhere and
immigrating here on the strength of a reputation for freedoms available to all, African slaves
were packed like sardines on ships and shipped as so much livestock in the service of plantation
owners and other enterprises. That fact alone seems to have set them up for a persistent
presumption of inferiority, according to researchers like Arnold Hirsch, Phyllis Moen and
Douglas Massey.
In that vein, nothing—not emancipation, not Reconstruction, not even three Constitutional
amendments passed by three-quarters of the states or the civil rights acts to enforce them—has
changed the systemic and systematic denial of inalienable rights “guaranteed” by the
Constitution to African Americans. Nor have the attitudes of men and women inexplicably
threatened by the very presence of blacks, especially black males, in their midst allowed healing
integration. Some passed laws segregating themselves from blacks, from water fountains to the
halls of justice, some lynched blacks or burned the homes of those whose offenses were conjured
up by angry, often hooded men out to set examples or cover their own criminal tracks. Too many
resisted for decade upon decade laws or rules intended to bring blacks into some proximity to
themselves and their children as if the plague would follow—more likely that their property
values would drop.
We can only assume what many scholars have thus far discovered in their extensive research:
that the strange combination of involuntary immigration, fear-mongering and rumor, along with
41
economic and political maneuvering has driven the culture to keep blacks apart from the rest.
Perhaps such a series of societal maladies could only remain unaddressed in a country this huge;
perhaps it will take another century, or more, of enlightenment to dramatically change this
culture. Such durable inequalities can only come unhinged when those in power reckon it’s time
to reverse the effects of three or four hundred years of degradation and humiliation, destruction
of self-worth, and infusion of despair among African-Americans. Harnessing a collective will to
preserve such changes will require vigilance over the powers that would thwart that progress. It
will require courage and foresight by leaders, but also by citizens who believe that stable
democracy based on justice and inclusionary policies is essential to the common good.
Many of our number believe in the principle of racial equality and support policies to
advance it. But some of the most dedicated supporters of the principle fall victim to
socioeconomic influences when the crunch comes to decide where to live and with whom, where
to school their children and whom to hire, to prosecute, to elect, and so on. We have an
obligation as a society, beyond our self-interest, and in keeping with our professed promises of
freedom and equality, our stated religious or humanitarian principles, and indeed our common
sense to ensure that no human being, and particularly no American citizen, should be deprived of
his or her basic right to participate in whatever this society has to offer by way of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.
But, most of all, we must examine ourselves at our core and get a grip on what keeps this
nation’s mindset so preoccupied, so consumed with false perceptions of African-Americans as
“The Other” after 500 years on the continent, serving and advancing the comfort and success of
white America while suffering in squalor much of the time. This is where we must begin. The
winds and waters of Katrina have pointed the way.
42
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