SURE, BUT ON THE OTHER HAND, AFTER DOING THAT WASHINGTON USED ENDING SEGREGATION AS AN EXCUSE TO GRAB MORE POWER FOR ITSELF: Washington Forced Segregation on the Nation.

In 1940, the federal government required a Detroit builder to construct a six-foot-high, half-mile-long, north-south concrete wall. The express purpose was to separate an all-white housing development he was constructing from an African-American neighborhood to its east. The builder would be approved for a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loan guarantee he needed only if he complied with the government’s demand. . . .

During the Depression, to provide lodging for lower-middle-class white families, the New Deal created America’s first civilian public housing. Some projects were built for black families as well, but these were almost always separate from the white projects. At the time, many urban areas were sites of considerable diversity, with black and white workers living within walking distance of downtown factories and other workplaces. Communities near train stations were often integrated, for example, because railroads would hire only African Americans as baggage handlers or Pullman car porters.

When Franklin Roosevelt became president, the nation was facing a desperate housing shortage. Many black and white working families lived in neighborhoods that, while integrated, could rightly be described as slums. To improve the quality of housing, as well as to provide jobs for construction workers, one of the first New Deal agencies, the Public Works Administration (PWA), demolished housing in many such integrated neighborhoods and built explicitly segregated housing instead. The policy created racial boundaries where they had not previously existed or reinforced them where they had taken root, giving segregation new government sanction. In Atlanta’s “Flats,” the government demolished a neighborhood that was about half white and half black to build a public housing project for whites only, with a separate project for African Americans farther away. In St. Louis’ DeSoto-Carr neighborhood, housing in a similarly mixed neighborhood was demolished to build a project for African Americans only, with a separate project for whites built in a different part of the city.

This, it should be emphasized, was not primarily a program for the South or border states. In Northern and Midwestern states, the federal government’s New Deal programs and local housing agencies worked together to create segregated patterns that have persisted for generations. . . .

In Boston, the federally financed Mission Hill project was for whites, while the Mission Hill Extension across the road was for African Americans. In Chicago, the Julia C. Lathrop and Trumbull Park Homes were built in white neighborhoods for whites only; the Ida B. Wells Homes were built in an African-American area for blacks only. This government housing program exacerbated existing racial patterns; had the projects been integrated, Chicago would not now be one of the most segregated cities in the nation.

During World War II, whites and African Americans flocked to jobs in war plants, sometimes in communities that had no tradition of segregated living. Yet the government built separate projects for blacks and whites, determining future residential boundaries. Richmond, California, a suburb of Berkeley, was one of the nation’s largest shipbuilding centers. It had few African Americans before the war; by its end, thousands were living in public housing along the railroad tracks, while white workers were assigned to housing in more established residential areas. Along the Pacific coast, racial segregation in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles has its roots in federal war housing.

Postwar, veterans desperately needed lodging, so President Harry Truman proposed even more housing projects. Congressional conservatives, deeming public housing socialistic, resolved to defeat Truman’s 1949 legislation. They introduced a “poison pill” amendment banning racial discrimination in public housing, which they expected Northern liberals to support, ensuring its passage. Then they planned to ally with Southern Democrats to defeat the amended legislation.

Instead, the liberals mobilized against the integration amendment. . . .

At about the same time, industry began to leave urban centers. Automakers, for example, closed many downtown assembly plants and relocated to rural and suburban areas to which African-American workers had less access. Good urban jobs became scarcer and public housing residents became poorer. A program that originally addressed a middle-class housing shortage became a way to warehouse the poor.

Why did white-designated projects develop vacancies while black-designated ones faced more demand than supply? The disparity largely resulted from an FHA program that guaranteed loans to builders of working-class suburban subdivisions—with explicit requirements that black families be excluded and that house deeds prohibit resale to them.

This was not an act of rogue bureaucrats. It was written policy, in blatant violation of the Fifth, 13th, and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Federal Housing Administration published a manual used by real estate appraisers nationwide, specifying that loans for suburban development could not be federally subsidized if an “inharmonious racial group” would be present or was already nearby. Suburbs like Levittown (east of New York City), Lakewood (south of Los Angeles), San Lorenzo (across the Bay from San Francisco), and hundreds of others were created in this way, ensuring their racial homogeneity and isolation.

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