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Op-Ed: How Los Angeles pioneered the residential segregation that helped divide America
No place has played a more central role in the creation of residential segregation than Los Angeles. With its fast-growing subdivisions and enormous real estate industry, the city shaped the divided neighborhoods and political arguments that drive America today.
The reason has much to do with California. Residential segregation is not natural, normal or historic. It was an early 20th century marketing invention of Realtors, a way to sell homes. Like many American innovations, it flourished first in California.
At the beginning of the 1900s, racially segregated neighborhoods did not exist in American cities. J.B. Loving, a Black real estate agent in Los Angeles, proudly reported in 1904: “The Negroes of this city” have not segregated themselves “into any locality but have scattered and purchased homes” across the best sections. Japanese and Mexican American residents were dispersed in many areas as well.
Where you could live, in L.A. and cities nationally, depended on where you could afford to live — not your ancestry.
By 1917, an African American resident described a very different Los Angeles due to race-restrictive covenants: “We were encircled by invisible walls of steel. The whites surrounded us and made it impossible for us to go beyond these walls.”
Power was at the heart of this change. Newly established all-white real estate boards, including the Los Angeles Realty Board, the largest in the country, organized the industry and came to control the vast majority of home sales. It took a cartel, its members trademarked as “Realtors,” to control whose money could buy a home — to limit America’s free market.
In 1905, pioneering real estate agents in Berkeley and Kansas City, Mo., began recording racial covenants to sell house lots in high-end subdivisions, but L.A. soon became the national leader in using such deed restrictions. Covenants were immediately marketed on luxury developments: The Beverly Crest subdivision was advertised as “permanently restricted … for particular people”; similar language was used for Beverly Hills, Hillhurst Park and Bel-Air.
Middle-class subdivisions quickly followed. Harry Culver, who would become the Realtors’ national president, carved Culver City out of a 200-acre barley field. Twenty blocks south of Exposition Park, a Los Angeles Realty Board vice president established permanent “iron-clad race restrictions.”
Racial restrictions soon filtered down to working-class subdivisions in the region. Eastmont, City Terrace, the St. Francis tract in Highland Park and the new city of Torrance advertised “permanent race restrictions” to benefit “the working man.”
By 1913, racial restrictions were so widespread, the Los Angeles Housing Commission lamented, that Mexican Americans would be able to secure housing only if restrictions “were not placed upon every new tract of land where lots are sold.” Here was a strange new kind of American city.
To ensure such covenants could be enforced, the L.A. Realty Board financed the case that set a national precedent in 1919 when the California Supreme Court ruled that an African American could buy a covenanted home but not live in it.
This decision opened the floodgates. By the early 1920s, when the city’s greatest building boom took off —1,400 subdivisions were added in two years — race restrictions were the norm.
As the country’s fastest growing market, L.A. became the model — not just for restricting individual tracts but whole new suburbs. Realtors conspired with local officials to require covenants on all subdivisions in Glendale so that only one African American owned property there. Ads in the Los Angeles Times in 1925 boasted “the residents of Eagle Rock are all of the white race.”
Equally devastating for minorities, Realtors began recording covenants on existing homes, too. In Pasadena, where African Americans had lived for generations, real estate agents circulated petitions for race restrictions that went into effect once 75% of owners had signed. This “Covenant Plan” became standard in existing neighborhoods nationwide.
People of color, effectively excluded from 95% of housing, had to pay 20% more for the same quality unit in cities nationally. By the 1920s, the “invisible walls” of America’s racial ghettoes had been firmly established.
California
Behind the new show ‘Them’ is the ugly and true history of L.A.’s racist housing covenants
April 27, 2021
Thus, in the Depression, when Realtor officials designed the racial policies of the Federal Housing Administration — and helped run the FHA and draw up its then-secret red-lining maps — they institutionalized the racial divisions Realtors had already created.
So in 1948, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Shelley vs. Kraemer that court enforcement of racial covenants violated the 14th Amendment, Realtors were threatened as never before. The L.A. Realty Board immediately proposed a constitutional amendment that would overturn the 14th Amendment. It would “assure Negroes of the enjoyment of areas restricted to the occupancy of their race.” This was the same year that South Africa imposed apartheid.
Following their lawyers’ advice, Realtors stopped pursuing the amendment and turned to quieter means to continue segregation. The Supreme Court hadn’t ruled covenants illegal, only that courts would not enforce them. Developers therefore recorded hundreds of thousands of new covenants to threaten any minority buyers, including in the new suburb of Lakewood, which by 1960 had a population of 67,000 — and only seven Black residents.
The most common way Realtors kept neighborhoods all-white was through “racial steering” — lying to minority buyers that a home had just been sold and expelling or freezing out of the business any broker selling to a minority. This was so successful that the San Fernando Valley Fair Housing Council knew of only one Black family able to find a home between 1950 and 1960 in the white neighborhoods that dominated the Valley.
In the mid-20th century, half the Realtors worked in California, and these methods were national norms.
It was thus hardly surprising when civil rights activists — frustrated that segregation had only intensified after the 1948 Supreme Court ruling — pushed for state and local fair housing laws to end such organized discrimination. When California passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act in 1963, banning housing discrimination based on race or ethnicity, Realtors found themselves on the defensive.
The argument the Realtors then devised to perpetuate segregation has driven American politics ever since.
In 1964, at the height of the civil rights movement, Realtors were politically isolated when they asked voters to approve a California constitutional amendment, Proposition 14, to permanently protect residential discrimination. No prominent politician, not even conservatives Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan, would support them for fear of seeming racist. To perpetuate discrimination, Realtors designed a new idea of American freedom.
By calling an owner’s right to discriminate “freedom of choice,” and linking it to freedom of conscience and religion, Realtors elevated this single narrow right to an absolute, without regard to the rights of buyers or tenants. Supporting Proposition 14, they assured voters, did not mean you were biased, but that you believed in individual freedom. Realtors had invented color-blind freedom.
White Californians overwhelmingly voted for the Realtors’ proposition in November 1964, on the same ballot that Lyndon Johnson crushed Goldwater in the presidential race. The victory was so sweeping that even after Proposition 14 was ruled unconstitutional, Reagan adopted the Realtors’ message as his own. The Realtors’ use of the libertarian language of individual freedom to maintain social conformity has unified conservatives ever since.
This idea of freedom still shapes America today. When the federal Fair Housing Act finally passed in 1968, it was dramatically weakened by Proposition 14’s shadow. Racial segregation has continued informally but almost as powerfully. Only strong government action could have overcome the Realtors’ legacy of racially exclusive suburbs and organized prejudice. But the popularity of their redefinition of freedom has long prevented such action.
The Realtors’ idea of freedom as a personal right without regard to those of others helped polarize debates over guns and, during the pandemic, has fueled arguments over face masks and vaccinations.
“Freedom of choice,” blazoned by Realtors on L.A. freeway billboards half a century ago, divides America today.
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Bootstraps Are For Black Kids: Race, Wealth, and the Impact of Intergenerational Transfers on Adult Outcomes
A new study released today shows that—despite a close to 19 to 1 racial difference in median wealth—black parents demonstrate an outsized commitment to using their limited resources to invest in their children’s education. And that investment pays off; bringing their children to near parity in terms of educational achievement with their white counterparts.
The new study shows black families contribute to higher education with a median net worth of only 24K while white families provide support with a much higher median net worth of more than 168K.
“Bootstraps Are For Black Kids: Race, Wealth, and the Impact of Intergenerational Transfers on Adult Outcomes,” is co-authored by William Darity, Duke University; Darrick Hamilton, The New School; Yunju Nam, University at Buffalo, State University of New York; and Anne Price, of The Insight Center for Community Economic Development.
“Data on intergenerational transfers of economic resources for higher education is limited,” said Darity, co-author and director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke. “However, this type of parental financial support might ultimately prove to be a decisive factor determining the racial wealth gap in the next generation.”
The study is based on the 2013 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) that found that the racial wealth gap might be one of the main mechanisms for perpetuating economic inequality. Using PSID data collected between 1982 and 2013, “Bootstraps Are For Black Kids” researchers began to investigate the relationships between parental income and wealth, parental financial support, and their child’s economic achievement. The study distinguished three types of parental financial support – support for higher education, support for homeownership, and support for “other purposes.”
Researchers found that parental financial support for education has the strongest positive association with adult outcomes among the three categories. Blacks and whites who received any parental support for education experience better outcomes than their counterparts who never received such support for every outcome examined: educational attainment, home ownership, income, and wealth.
“Black parents who are able to contribute to their child’s education are better able to transfer their own socioeconomic status to the next generation,” said Price, managing director and chief asset officer for the Insight Center. “However, it’s important to remember that while parental support for education lowers black/white disparities in education and home ownership, there is little variation in racial gaps in income and wealth.”
Despite the findings that over half of the blacks who received parental help have a graduate education, stark racial differences in both income and net worth persist. Among those who received financial support from parents, the median income is $98,066 for whites and $69,306 for blacks; median net worth is $63,000 and $35,996, respectively.
Parents of both races who are able to help fund their children’s education are better off financially, yet black parents who do so have nearly half of the income of their white counterparts. For example, the median income for white parents who provide educational help to their children is $84,597; for blacks, the median income is $43,103.
Click here to download the complete study.
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Yahoo is now a part of Verizon Media
Janette Greenwood, Professor of History, Clark University
Sat, September 11, 2021, 9:54 AM·7 min read
Portrait of Betty and Willis Coles by William Bullard from about 1902. Courtesy of Frank Morrill, Clark University and the Worcester Art Museum
Unstable. Criminal. Impoverished. Absentee fathers. Neglectful mothers. “A tangle of pathology,” as the Moynihan Report, a 1965 study on Black poverty, put it.
For decades, the Black family has been denigrated as dysfunctional.
When mass media exploded in the late 19th century, degrading images of Black Americans – as inferior, clownish and dangerous – saturated nearly every aspect of popular culture, from music to advertising.
The evolution of radio, film and television in the 20th century only amplified demeaning images, providing “proof” to white Americans of Black inferiority and a justification for denying them their rights.
Today, many of these same tired images persist and continue to feed baseless perceptions. A 2017 study showed that the news media continue to “inaccurately portray Black families as more poor, criminal and unstable than white families.”
When those malicious images first started to proliferate, Black Americans found an especially effective way to resist. They seized upon the camera to represent themselves, using photographs to depict who they really were. Seemingly a “magical instrument” for “the displaced and marginalized,” as critic bell hooks writes, the camera provided “immediate intervention” to counter the injurious images used to deny them their rightful place in American society.
A record of everyday Black Americans
In 2013, a historian and collector named Frank Morrill, who lives in Charlton, a suburb of Worcester, Massachusetts, discovered over 230 portraits of people of color among the 5,300 glass negatives of photographer William Bullard that he owns.
Along with Morrill and my history students at Clark University, I researched these portraits and co-curated an exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum featuring 83 of Bullard’s portraits.
I was drawn to these portraits because they illustrate the ways that ordinary, working-class families used the camera to represent themselves in their full humanity.
Bullard, a white neighbor of most of the people he photographed in Worcester, made these portraits from 1897 to 1917. Their images defy stereotypes of dysfunction by portraying the vitality of Black family life just a few decades after emancipation.
As Bullard was making his portraits, sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois was curating a photographic exhibition for the 1900 Paris Exposition. Du Bois sought to showcase Black achievement to the rest of the world, and his images featured middle-class and elite Black Americans, often in a studio setting and without specific identification.
Bullard’s portraits, on the other hand, are extraordinary because they capture common people on their porches, backyards and parlors. Moreover, most of the families can be identified, allowing their stories to be told.
Symbols of resilience and aspiration
The existence of these family units was an achievement in its own right.
At the time Bullard made his portraits, slavery and family separations remained a traumatic memory for many of his subjects. As a result, family portraits were especially significant. They testified to the achievements and aspirations of Black Americans and the resilience of their kinship networks.
And for a people whose history had so often been obliterated, the photographs provided an opportunity to preserve their stories for future generations.
In 1900, Rose, Edward and Abraham Perkins posed for Bullard in their Worcester backyard. Born into slavery in South Carolina, the three siblings and other family members had settled on former plantation land that Edward managed to purchase only a few years after emancipation.
Two Black men seated in chairs while their sister stands behind them.
But their dream of life as independent farmers ended with the demise of Reconstruction. A backlash of terror against the state’s Black population once again ushered in the rule of white supremacists.
Caught in the vice of declining cotton prices and an economic depression, Edward lost his land. With their hopes for new lives in the South demolished, Edward and his wife Celia made the decision to seek a more complete freedom in the North. They made their way to Worcester in 1879; soon Rose, Abraham and many other family members followed.
As refugees of terrorism and economic disaster, the siblings, in their portrait, embody triumph and perseverance, and commemorate the tenacity of family ties that stayed intact through slavery, emancipation and migration.
Conveying respectability and stability
Other photos portray flourishing young families claiming their place in American society. The subjects present themselves as ordinary, upstanding Americans who share the same values, tastes and aspirations as their contemporaries.
In 1904, Thomas, a Virginia native, and Margaret Dillon, born near Boston, posed with their three children in the parlor of their home. Legs crossed and hands in the pockets of a stylish suit, Thomas appears as a proud patriarch. Margaret, with a smile on her face and her luxuriant skirt cascading to the floor, radiates maternal love and decorum. She holds their baby as two older, well-dressed children stand between mother and father.
Flowered wallpaper, lace curtains and framed paintings signify a well-appointed home. A poster on the wall commemorates President Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to the city in 1902, suggesting the family’s engagement in politics and local affairs.
The family, proudly dressed, is photographed indoors, in front of lace curtains and framed prints.
In this tableau of respectability and stability, the Dillons defy nearly every stereotype of the dysfunctional Black family. Although they labored for white families – Thomas as a coachman and Margaret as a domestic servant – and had yet to achieve middle-class security, their portrait brims with aspiration.
Refuting stereotypes of Black men
When the Dillons and others posed for Bullard, lynchings of Black men were spiking in the U.S. The brutish “Black beast rapist” – an archetype invented in the white South during Reconstruction – often served as justification for these murders. Postcards of lynchings were widely circulated, along with “humorous” postcards and cartoons featuring Black men stealing chickens and watermelons.
In the midst of this attack on Black manhood, some families centered their portraits on fathers and children. Around 1904, Raymond Schuyler, a railroad worker originally from upstate New York, had his portrait made with his four children in a snow-covered park. Playfully sitting on a child’s sled, with his arms encircling one of his young daughters, Schuyler personifies a benevolent, gentle masculinity.
A man sits on a sled with one of his children, while another is in a baby carriage and two stand.
In another image, a father poses with his baby on his lap, his large hands securely holding his child. He wears the uniform of the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal organization that espouses the values of responsibility, community and family.
The quiet resistance of the family photograph
As Black men battled claims of their inherent criminality, Black women fought a dualistic stereotype – that of the promiscuous “Jezebel” or servile “Mammy.” Black women fought these images by presenting themselves with respectability and decorum.
A woman poses with her stylishly dressed daughters in a lush garden.
Take Jennie Bradley Johnson, who posed with her two stylishly dressed daughters, May and Jennie. Seated in a lush garden, surrounded by hydrangeas, Johnson conveys maternal warmth and modesty. Recently widowed and facing the burden of raising her family alone on a laundress’s wages, she nevertheless projects strength and endurance in the face of loss.
Historical portraits provide an invaluable means to enter the distant past. And other photographers have continued the tradition.
In 2017, photographer Zun Lee unveiled his exhibition “Fade Resistance,” made up of “orphaned” Polaroids from the 20th century that Lee discovered at yard sales and on eBay. The Black Americans in the photographs pose proudly with their cars, dress up for Easter and play with their kids.
Like Bullard’s portraits, Lee’s found family images are, as Lee wrote, a reminder that “there is a vivid history of Black visual self-representation that offers an eerily contemporary counter-narrative to mainstream distortion and erasure.”
Demonstrating the chasm between stereotype and reality, these Black family portraits reveal the ways in which ordinary hard-working Black families have long been rendered invisible in mainstream American culture. They reveal the common goals shared by all American families: the desire for stability and security, and the chance to nurture and support children so that they can have a better future.
