Racial Rejection from
1950s Suburbia
The Levittowns
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The GI Bill guaranteed loans for veterans,
and over 1million received loans by the
end of 1947.
Builders learned to erect conventional
housing on an enormous scale at
reasonable prices.
Levitt workers were not unionised,
eliminating restrictive work rules.
Between 1946 and 1955 alone nearly 15
million units were built. Home
construction was one of the great success
stories of the post war era.
Marriage rate was underestimated – many
assumed that women would continue to
marry later as in the 30s, but instead they
began marrying earlier and having babies
in unprecedented numbers.
Cost
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In 1950, Levitt’s 2 bedroom
house cost $7,900;
refrigerator, stove, washer,
fireplace and built in TV
included.
The average family earned
$3,319 a year, putting Levitt
within the reach of more than
half of the population.
The down-payment for
federally guaranteed home
mortgages to non-veterans
was 5%, and zero for veterans.
It was easier to buy a home
than to buy a car.
July 1945, the American Gas
Association induced
manufacturers to standardize
the sizes of kitchen cabinets
and appliances .
The Insular Haven
• ‘In the 1930s and early 40s the
people had been great, voting
for Franklin Roosevelt, smashing
Germany and Japan. Now they
had elected Eisenhower, who
embodied all that was tiresome
and mediocre. And, where once
radicals had roamed free, the
prairies swarmed with
McCarthyites avidly destroying
the last fragments of
independent thought.’
John Cheever
“The suburbs encircled the city’s boundaries like an enemy, and
we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of
conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some splitlevel village where the place name appeared in the New York
Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with
a shotgun.”
The Situation for Blacks
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During the 1950s, as white Americans moved from cities to suburbs, black
Americans largely from southern rural areas, took their places. From 19501960 the nation’s twelve largest central cities lost 3.6 million whites but gained
4.5 million nonwhites. By 1960 more than half of the black population,
compared with only one third of the white population, resided in central
cities. Yet in the suburbs whites outnumbered blacks by a ratio of more than
35:1... Negroes accounted for somewhat under 5% of all suburban residents.
Crowding and deteriorated living conditions for blacks. Landlords subdivided
older homes, over-taxing local facilities. In Bennington Park: “many of the
homes in that area are absolutely lacking in sanitary facilities, and some do
not have running water. The tenants have to get their supply from outdoor
pumps... as a result of the living conditions in the area, moral conditions are
bad and to be brief, the whole mess needs cleaning up.”
Poverty and substandard housing became synonyms for the black community.
Forbidden Neighbours
• At the neighbourhood level,
whites formed home-owners’
associations whose chief goal was
to prevent African American
“infiltration” or “invasion”. These
groups were instrumental in
organizing white neighbourhoods
to enact race-restrictive
covenants which prohibited the
sale or rental of poverty to “other
than Caucasians”. As the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights
concluded, housing
discrimination involved the
“deliberate exclusion” of blacks
and other minorities “at all levels
of the housing and home finance
industries.”
• To live in a neighbourhood with
blacks, by contrast, was to lose
hard-won gains, to be associated
with “blackness”, and potentially
to be trapped at the bottom rung
of the American social ladder. In
this context, African Americans
were “forbidden neighbours” in
almost every white
neighbourhood in post war
America.’
Suburbanite Outrage
White suburbanites routinely engaged in acts of terrorism to prevent the settlement of
African Americans in their neighbourhoods. In the late 1940s and 1950s, African American
attempts to move out of “arbitrarily restricted areas” produced what historian Arnold Hirsch
called, “an era of hidden violence”, as whites in city and suburban neighbourhoods met
breaches in the colour line with a guerrilla war of death threats, property destruction, and
physical violence. When it came to race, arson was as suburban as the backyard barbecue
grill.’
Prejudiced Suburbia
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Negro buyers, regardless of affluence,
education or credit rating, would be
refused and discouraged if they should
attempt to purchase a home in the new
developments which cater to the white
market.’...during the 1950s many
suburban communities adopted zoning
regulations which, if not so effective as
moats around medieval castles, offered
some protection against a feared incursion
by unwanted groups.
Although ordinances served a number of
useful purposes, their actual effect,
however euphemistically phrased, was to
encourage racial exclusivity.
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Municipal governments - provide services and control
local affairs. Through authority over building codes and
permits, health and safety regulations, and zoning and
subdivision requirements, these new suburbs exercised
extensive control over land use and development
within their borders. Michael Danielson, local
government “afforded suburbanites a potential for
exclusion which exceeds that usually available to the
resident of the central city”. In contrast to the situation
in city neighbourhoods where residents represented a
small fraction of central city voters, white suburbanites
could command the prompt support of village
governments in attempts to exclude nonwhites.
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The government, too, was deeply supportive of racism
in the housing market. Through the late 1940s, the
white property holders vigorously enforced deed
covenants that restricted the sale or rental of property
to “Caucasians only” and American courts upheld the
practice. ‘
Authority
‘Federal Housing Administration &
Veterans Administration – home loans.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the FHA
alone issued mortgage insurance on
almost a third of new homes...as late
as 1950, however, both agencies
required that neighbourhoods be
racially segregated in order for homes
to qualify. FHA appraisers were
instructed to consider the “adverse
racial influences” affecting
neighbourhoods before approving
mortgage insurance or construction
loans. Charles Abrams said the FHA
had “adopted a racial policy that
could have been culled from the
Nuremberg laws.” By the late 1950s,
only 2% o the homes built with FHA
support since WWII were occupied by
African Americans or other minorities.’
To defend their neighbourhoods,
whites created a gauntlet of
discriminatory practices that
limited African Americans’ access
to the housing market. As early as
the 1910s, white real estate
agents had created Realtors
organizations and pledged to
uphold a code of ethics that
prevented them from being party
to transactions that permitted
blacks to move into white
neighbourhoods.
White financial institutions almost
uniformly refused to lend money
to African Americans to buy
property outside “established
Negro areas”... further, white
home builders took the view that
racial segregation was a “social
problem” not a “housing
problem”, staunchly defending
their right to refuse to sell or rent
homes to African Americans or
minorities.
Pragmatic Racism
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White racism continued to play a leading role
in shaping African American suburbanisation.
Many whites projected their deepest fears
about crime, disorder, health, status, and
sexuality onto African Americans.
Moreover, whites typically conflated
psychological expressions of racial fear with
more straightforward economic anxieties and
assumptions of social privilege. Among their
concerns was that “property values will
experience a severe drop” with the arrival of
black neighbours. Such was the established
opinion of white real estate agents,
appraisers, home builders and lenders. Real
estate textbooks presented the hypothesis as
fact, and for whites who had reason to
doubt, the dilapidation of city and suburban
neighbourhoods where many African
Americans lived provided apparent proof to
cement the link.
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Combined with violent fantasies about the
social consequences of racial integration –
especially images of rape and miscegenation
– economic fear led millions of whites to
view black neighbours as something like
Visigoths at the gates of Rome.
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Finally, for many working- and middle class
whites – especially immigrants and their
children, whose adaptation to American
society involved the adoption and
manipulation of its racial hierarchies – the
coming of African Americans threatened
their efforts to rise in status and stability in
white American society. As a number of
historians have pointed out, suburbanization
was closely related to the making of race and
class identities in the post war period.’
The Symbolism of a White Suburbia
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The 1940s and 1950s witnessed the
establishment of a new regime of
suburban land use, backed by the
power of the local, state, and federal
governments, rooted in a vision of
metropolitan space in which white
communities were seen as normative
and African American places were
aberrant, threatening, and negatively
valued. This vision traced its heritage
to the pre-war period, but the sheer
magnitude of white suburbanization
and the input of federal authority
made it novel, extending its reach not
only across space but deep into the
popular culture of the period. By the
mid-1950s, “suburbia” had become a
spatial metaphor for whiteness itself.
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One of the more striking features of this
racial bifurcation is that it occurred at
the very moment when, in the nation as
a whole, the legal foundation of
segregation were beginning to
dissolve... the process of
suburbanization, it turned out, was
strengthening the de facto basis for
racial segregation even as judicial
rulings, militant protest, congressional
action, and executive intervention were
weakening its de jure basis.
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Brown V Board of Education
Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Civil Rights act of 1957
And the Little Rock School
desegregation crisis.
White Preservation of the
Status Quo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrJMez9vkr
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