Example keywords and search terms
- segregation
- racial housing covenants
- minorities
- discriminatory home lending practice
- federal housing programs
- homeownership
- racial disparities
- housing deeds
- mortgage financing
- housing inequality
- Residential stratification
- gentrification
- ethnic segregation
- economic segregation
Find sources -- for background, history and framing the issues
- America: History and LifeAmerica: history and life provides historical coverage of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present with over 2,000 journals including all key English-language historical journals. Limited to 6 simultaneous users.
- Race Relations AbstractsDiscover articles covering essential areas related to race relations, including ethnic studies, discrimination, immigration studies, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline.
- Ethnic NewsWatchEthnic NewsWatch is a current resource of full-text newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic and minority press from 1990, providing researchers access to essential, often overlooked perspectives.
- Black Studies Periodicals DatabaseFind articles from scholarly journals in the field of Black Studies from the United States, Africa and the Caribbean. Coverage is international in scope and multidisciplinary; spanning cultural, economic, historical, religious, social, and political issues of importance to the Black Studies discipline.
Mapping Prejudice Project
"This research is showing what communities of color have known for decades. Structural barriers stopped many people who were not white from buying property and building wealth for most of the last century.
In Minneapolis, these restrictions served as powerful obstacles for people of color seeking safe and affordable housing. They also limited access to community resources like parks and schools. Racial covenants dovetailed with redlining and predatory lending practices to depress homeownership rates for African Americans. Contemporary white residents of Minneapolis like to think their city never had formal segregation. But racial covenants did the work of Jim Crow in northern cities like Minneapolis.
This history has been willfully forgotten. So we created Mapping Prejudice to shed new light on these historic practices. We cannot address the inequities of the present without an understanding of the past."
- Mapping PrejudiceVisualizing the hidden histories of race and privilege in Minneapolis. This map shows how racial restrictions were embedded in the physical landscape of our community. Using racial covenants in Hennepin County property deeds, this site illuminates how much land was reserved for the exclusive use of white people for most of the twentieth century.
Mapping inequality: Redlining in New Deal America
- Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal AmericaFederal housing maps created between 1935 and 1940, ostensibly to help mortgage lenders avoid risky loans, served to deepen the segregation process that housing covenants began. They relied on local developers and realtors to identify “hazardous” neighborhoods—a determination frequently based on race. As a result, people in minority neighborhoods found it difficult, if not impossible, to get a mortgage. The federal programs codified and standardized local knowledge, Connolly said: “Covenants were the critical foundation.”
Mapping Inequality brings one of the country's most important archives to the public. It bring together thousands of area descriptions created by agents of the federal government's Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) between 1935 and 1940. HOLC's documents contain a wealth of information about how government officials, lenders, and real estate interests surveyed and ensured the economic health of American cities. And with the help of ongoing research, we continue to learn at what cost such measures were realized.
As you explore the materials Mapping Inequality, you will quickly encounter exactly that kind of language, descriptions of the "infiltration" of what were quite often described as "subversive," "undesirable," "inharmonious," or "lower grade" populations, for they are everywhere in the HOLC archive.
These grades were a tool for redlining: making it difficult or impossible for people in certain areas to access mortgage financing and thus become homeowners. Redlining directed both public and private capital to native-born white families and away from African American and immigrant families. As homeownership was arguably the most significant means of intergenerational wealth building in the United States in the twentieth century, these redlining practices from eight decades ago had long-term effects in creating wealth inequalities that we still see today. Mapping Inequality, we hope, will allow and encourage you to grapple with this history of government policies contributing to inequality.
- Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal AmericaFederal housing maps created between 1935 and 1940, ostensibly to help mortgage lenders avoid risky loans, served to deepen the segregation process that housing covenants began. They relied on local developers and realtors to identify “hazardous” neighborhoods—a determination frequently based on race. As a result, people in minority neighborhoods found it difficult, if not impossible, to get a mortgage. The federal programs codified and standardized local knowledge, Connolly said: “Covenants were the critical foundation.”
Mapping Segregation in Washington DC
Mapping Segregation in Washington DC reveals the profound role of race in shaping the nation's capital during the first half of the 20th century. Racially restrictive covenants—which barred the conveyance of property to African Americans—were used by real estate developers and white citizens associations to create and maintain racial barriers. Upheld by the courts, covenants assigned value to housing and to entire neighborhoods based on the race of their occupants, and made residential segregation the norm. Federal policy and local zoning codes served to institutionalize segregation and the displacement of black residents. Segregated housing projects, schools, and playgrounds helped solidify racial boundaries. Although eventually outlawed, covenants had a lasting imprint on the city. Their legacy was central to shaping DC's mid-century racial transformation; led to decades of disinvestment in areas where African Americans lived; and influenced residential patterns that persist today.
- Mapping Segregation in Washington DC"Mapping Segregation is a resource for historians, activists, educators, students, and journalists, and provides essential context for conversations around race and gentrification in DC. The project's maps unveil historical patterns that would otherwise remain invisible and largely unknown. The ongoing, lot-by-lot documentation of racial deed covenants is set in the context of DC's demographic transformation over the course of several decades. Primary documents, archival news clippings, photographs, and oral testimony also contribute to the stories these maps tell."
Sample of online books
Below are a selection of online books and readings on the broad topic. We have more online books, journal articles, and sources in our Libraries Search and article databases.
Hate Thy Neighbor: Move-In Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing by ISBN: 9780814791448Publication Date: 2013-06-08Despite increasing racial tolerance and national diversity, neighborhood segregation remains a very real problem in cities across America. Scholars, government officials, and the general public have long attempted to understand why segregation persists despite efforts to combat it, traditionally focusing on the issue of "white flight," or the idea that white residents will move to other areas if their neighborhood becomes integrated. In Hate Thy Neighbor, Jeannine Bell expands upon these understandings by investigating a little-examined but surprisingly prevalent problem of "move-in violence:" the anti-integration violence directed by white residents at minorities who move into their neighborhoods. Apprehensive about their new neighbors and worried about declining property values, these residents resort to extra-legal violence and intimidation tactics, often using vandalism and verbal harassment to combat what they view as a violation of their territory.
Unjust Deeds by ISBN: 1469625466Publication Date: 2015-08-26In 1945, six African American families from St. Louis, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., began a desperate fight to keep their homes. Each of them had purchased a property that prohibited the occupancy of African Americans and other minority groups through the use of legal instruments called racial restrictive covenants--one of the most pervasive tools of residential segregation in the aftermath of World War II. Over the next three years, local activists and lawyers at the NAACP fought through the nation's courts to end the enforcement of these discriminatory contracts. Unjust Deeds explores the origins and complex legacies of their dramatic campaign, culminating in a landmark Supreme Court victory in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). Restoring this story to its proper place in the history of the black freedom struggle, Jeffrey D. Gonda's groundbreaking study provides a critical vantage point to the simultaneously personal, local, and national dimensions of legal activism in the twentieth century and offers a new understanding of the evolving legal fight against Jim Crow in neighborhoods and courtrooms across America.- Handbook of urban segregation byISBN: 9781788115605Publication Date: 2020"The Handbook of Urban Segregation scrutinises key debates on spatial inequality in cities across the globe. It engages with multiple domains, including residential places, public spaces and the field of education. In addition, this comprehensive Handbook tackles crucial group-dimensions across race, class and culture as well as age groups, the urban rich, middle class, and gentrified households. In a 'world tour' of urban contexts, the reader is guided through six continents confronting pressing segregation issues. Leading international scholars offer valuable insights across regional, ethnic, socioeconomic and welfare regime contexts.
How the suburbs were segregated : developers and the business of exclusionary housing, 1890-1960 by ISBN: 0231542496Publication Date: 2020"The story of the rise of the segregated suburb often begins during the New Deal and the Second World War, when sweeping federal policies hollowed out cities, pushed rapid suburbanization, and created a white homeowner class intent on defending racial barriers. Paige Glotzer offers a new understanding of the deeper roots of suburban segregation. The mid-twentieth-century policies that favored exclusionary housing were not simply the inevitable result of popular and elite prejudice, she reveals, but the culmination of a long-term effort by developers to use racism to structure suburban real estate markets."- Racial Segregation in Housing Markets and the Erosion of Black Wealth byPublication Date: 2019"Housing is the most important asset for the vast majority of American households and a key driver of racial disparities in wealth. This paper studies how residential segregation by race eroded black wealth in prewar urban areas. Using a novel sample of matched addresses from prewar American cities, we find that over a single decade rental prices soared by roughly 50 percent on city blocks that transitioned from all white to majority black. Meanwhile, pioneering black families paid a 28 percent premium to buy a home on a majority white block. These homes then lost 10 percent of their original value as the block became majority black. These findings strongly suggest that segregated housing markets cost black families much of the gains associated with migrating to the North."
Threatening Property: race, class, and campaigns to legislate Jim Crow neighborhoods by ISBN: 0231548478Publication Date: 2019-04-15Elizabeth Herbin-Triant investigates early-twentieth-century campaigns for residential segregation laws in North Carolina to show how the version of white supremacy supported by middle-class white people differed from that supported by the elites. Class divides halted Jim Crow from mandating separate neighborhoods for black and white southerners.
Systemic racism in the United States : scaffolding as social construction by ISBN: 9783319722337Publication Date: 2018This important volume provides a powerful overview of racism in the United States: what it is, how it works, and the social, cultural, and institutional structures that have evolved to keep it in place. It dissects the rise of legalized discrimination against four major racial groups (First Nations, Africans, Mexicans, and Chinese) and its perpetuation as it affects these groups and new immigrants today. The book's scaffolding framework--which takes in institutions from the government to our educational systems--explains why racism remains in place despite waves of social change. At the same time, contributors describe social justice responses being used to erode racism in its most familiar forms, and at its roots.
Strategies of Segregation by ISBN: 9780520969179Publication Date: 2018-01-05Strategies of Segregation unearths the ideological and structural architecture of enduring racial inequality within and beyond schools in Oxnard, California. In this meticulously researched narrative spanning 1903 to 1974, David G. García excavates an extensive array of archival sources to expose a separate and unequal school system and its purposeful links with racially restrictive housing covenants. He recovers powerful oral accounts of Mexican Americans and African Americans who endured disparate treatment and protested discrimination. His analysis is skillfully woven into a compelling narrative that culminates in an examination of one of the nation's first desegregation cases filed jointly by Mexican American and Black plaintiffs. This transdisciplinary history advances our understanding of racism and community resistance across time and place.
Bourgeois Nightmares by ISBN: 0300108761Publication Date: 2005-10-10The quintessential American suburbs, with their gracious single-family homes, large green lawns, and leaf-shaded streets, reflected not only residents dreams but nightmares, not only hopes but fears: fear of others, of racial minorities and low income groups, fear of themselves, fear of the market, and, above all, fear of change. These fears, and the restrictive covenants that embodied them, are the subject of Robert M. Fogelson’s fascinating new book.As Fogelson reveals, suburban subdividers attempted to cope with the deep-seated fears of unwanted change, especially the encroachment of "undesirable" people and activities, by imposing a wide range of restrictions on the lots. These restrictions ranged from mandating minimum costs and architectural styles for the houses to forbidding the owners to sell or lease their property to any member of a host of racial, ethnic, and religious groups. These restrictions, many of which are still commonly employed, tell us as much about the complexities of American society today as about its complexities a century ago.
