American Democracy and the Promise of Justice

Rationale and Objectives

I teach at Jahn School of Fine Arts, a magnet school on the North Side of Chicago. We accept students from across the city through a lottery system. Jahn is a diverse school in a deeply segregated city. Roughly a quarter of our students live locally in the predominantly white neighborhood of Roscoe Village, while the rest come from African American and Latinx neighborhoods on the city’s South and West sides. These students travel a great distance from their segregated, economically-depressed communities to attend a school that has a strong arts program and robust funding thanks to a well-connected parent association. They benefit from the diversity and resources our school provides, but each day they return to their home communities and experience the effects of segregation and lack of investment. Meanwhile, our local students benefit from ample resources both at school and in their community.

A City Divided: Housing Segregation in Chicago and Beyond will explore the history of de jure segregation in the United States, with a focus on Chicago and other Northern cities. Students will learn about redlining, the process by which banks refused to offer mortgages, or offered worse rates to customers in African American neighborhoods. We will explore exclusionary zoning laws, segregated public housing projects, discriminatory lending practices and racially restrictive housing covenants, which were contractual agreements within a home’s deed that prohibited African Americans from purchasing the home.

The uncomfortable truth about de jure segregation in Northern cities is rarely discussed in history textbooks. Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, critiques textbooks designed for middle and high school students that gloss over the federal government’s role in segregating our cities and suburbs. The popular textbook History Alive!, published by the Teachers’ Curriculum Institute, depicts segregation as a Southern problem, stating that “Even New Deal agencies practiced racial segregation, especially in the South.”⁷ President Franklin D. Roosevelt did indeed build numerous discriminatory and exclusionary policies into the New Deal to garner Southern support. African Americans were excluded from employment and housing opportunities throughout the New Deal era. What History Alive! fails to mention is that these exclusionary policies were not limited to the South. They were federal policies implemented throughout the U.S., and particularly in populous Northern cities. The New Deal’s Public Works Administration (PWA), which oversaw large-scale construction projects, enacted the “neighborhood composition rule” in public housing. Under the rule, a housing project could not alter the racial composition of a neighborhood where it was placed.⁸ This federal mandate laid the groundwork for segregated public housing projects in every major U.S. city.

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a New Deal agency established in 1933, created residential security maps that color-coded neighborhoods based on their perceived lending risk, with predominantly African American neighborhoods consistently labeled as “hazardous”, the lowest rating. Another New Deal agency, The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), established in 1934, used these redlining maps to deny federal mortgage insurance in these “hazardous” neighborhoods. Homes in nearby white neighborhoods would only receive FHA mortgage insurance if there was a physical barrier such as a river, highway or wall preventing what the 1935 FHA Underwriting Manual described as “infiltration by inharmonious racial or nationality groups.”⁹ Redlining by the FHA was instrumental in perpetuating residential segregation in every major metropolitan area in the U.S. Its legacy of segregated, under-resourced neighborhoods can be seen today in Northern and Southern cities alike.

The Americans, published by curriculum giant Houghton Mifflon Harcourt, has just one paragraph in all its nearly 1,400 pages dedicated to “Discrimination in the North.” It devotes one passive-voice sentence to residential segregation, stating that, “African Americans found themselves forced into segregated neighborhoods” as if blacks suddenly and inexplicably found themselves living in racially-isolated neighborhoods, deprived of the resources and opportunities afforded to residents of white neighborhoods.¹⁰ Richard Rothstein notes that other major textbook publishers perpetuate the myth that Northern segregation was primarily de facto. Prentice Hall’s United States History states that:

In the North, too, African Americans faced segregation and discrimination. Even where there were no explicit laws, de facto segregation, or segregation by unwritten custom or tradition, was a fact of life. African Americans in the North were denied housing in many neighborhoods.¹¹

Pearson’s By The People: A History of the United States refers to the post World War II suburban housing development Levittown, where small tract homes were rented and sold at a fraction of market prices, as “a dream come true.” The textbook’s author neglects to mention that this federally-subsidized “dream” was only accessible to whites. Levitt and other developers of affordable suburban homes received federal loans from the FHA under the explicit condition that their homes be sold exclusively to whites. As a result, all Levitt home deeds had restrictive covenants prohibiting people who “were not of the Caucasian race” from purchasing in Levittown.¹²

To bring about lasting social change, we must first raise awareness of the systemic oppression at the root of injustice. When students view historical and contemporary issues through a social justice lens, they often find that their prior knowledge is incomplete and inaccurate. Their eyes are opened to aspects of the issue that have previously been ignored.

A City Divided: Housing Segregation in Chicago and Beyond will explore redlining and other forms of de jure segregation seldom discussed in history books. Students will learn of the intentionality behind these policies. They will learn about the relationship between segregation and issues such as educational inequity, the racial wealth gap, concentrated poverty, under- resourced neighborhoods, unemployment, public health, crime rates, racial profiling, police brutality and mass incarceration. They will no doubt react strongly to the institutional racism that has long existed in their city and elsewhere in the Northern U.S., running contrary to the prevailing narrative that state-mandated segregation is a strictly Southern phenomenon. As a culminating project, students will channel their newfound knowledge and passion into public works of art that will shed light on a history that has been ignored for far too long.