Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Historical Studies of Urban America)

Book info: Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Historical Studies of Urban America) (Hardcover, 496 pages) – University of Chicago Press, 2007. Language: English.

Northern whites in the post–World War II era began to support the principle of civil rights, so why did many of them continue to oppose racial integration in their communities? Challenging conventional wisdom about the growth, prosperity, and racial exclusivity of American suburbs, David M. P. Freund argues that previous attempts to answer this question have overlooked a change in the racial thinking of whites and the role of suburban politics in effecting this change. In Colored Property, he shows how federal intervention spurred a dramatic shift in the language and logic of residential exclusion—away from invocations of a mythical racial hierarchy and toward talk of markets, property, and citizenship. Freund begins his exploration by tracing the emergence of a powerful public-private alliance that facilitated postwar suburban growth across the nation with federal programs that significantly favored whites. Then, showing how this national story played out in metropolitan Detroit, he visits zoning board and city council meetings, details the efforts of neighborhood “property improvement” associations, and reconstructs battles over race and housing to demonstrate how whites learned to view discrimination not as an act of racism but as a legitimate response to the needs of the market. Illuminating government’s powerful yet still-hidden role in the segregation of U.S. cities, Colored Property presents a dramatic new vision of metropolitan growth, segregation, and white identity in modern America.  Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Colored PropertyState Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban AmericaBy DAVID M. P. FREUNDThe University of Chicago PressCopyright © 2007 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-26275-8
ContentsAcknowledgments.......................................................................................................................ixTWO / Local Control and the Rights of Property: The Politics of Incorporation, Zoning, and Race before 1940...........................45THREE / Financing Suburban Growth: Federal Policy and the Birth of a Racialized Market for Homes, 1930–1940.....................99FOUR / Putting Private Capital Back to Work: The Logic of Federal Intervention, 1930–1940.......................................140FIVE / A Free Market for Housing: Policy, Growth, and Exclusion in Suburbia, 1940–1970..........................................176SIX / Defending and Defining the New Neighborhood: The Politics of Exclusion in Royal Oak, 1940–1955............................243SEVEN / Saying Race Out Loud: The Politics of Exclusion in Dearborn, 1940–1955..................................................284EIGHT / The National Is Local: Race and Development in an Era of Civil Rights Protest, 1955–1964................................328NINE / Colored Property and White Backlash............................................................................................382Abbreviations.........................................................................................................................401Notes.................................................................................................................................405Index.................................................................................................................................489
Chapter OneThe New Politics of Race and Property

On September 9, 1925, one day after Ossian and Gladys Sweet moved into their new house on the east side of Detroit, their neighbors ran them out. Gladys had grown up in the city, from the age of seven, and studied at City College. She was twenty years old in 1922 when she met Ossian, a twenty-six-year-old, Florida-raised, Howard-educated physician who had relocated to Detroit to begin his medical practice. They married that winter, spent a year in France and Austria while Ossian completed additional training, returned to Detroit in the summer of 1924, and began searching for a home to buy. The young African American couple found their choices limited by the city's unofficial but firm residential color line, which restricted the fast-growing black population to a handful of neighborhoods, most of them downtown on the east side, centered along Hastings Street. Overcrowding in the so-called Hastings Street corridor encouraged many blacks, especially middle-class families like the Sweets, to look for property in nearby neighborhoods that were exclusively white. It was in one such neighborhood, three miles east of the city's all-black enclave, that the couple purchased a two-story bungalow at 2905 Garland Street in June 1925.

It was no secret that the Sweets would not be welcomed. There had already been five mob attacks that summer against blacks who settled in nearby all-white east-side neighborhoods, and at least one black homeowner had been forced to sell his property to members of the local "improvement association." Soon after purchasing the Garland Street house, the Sweets heard talk that residents were organizing to force them out, even that some had made threats against their lives. Naturally the couple approached moving day with caution. Accompanying them on the morning of September 8 were Ossian's brothers Henry and Otis, two family employees, Joseph Mack and Norris Murray, and two family friends, William Davis and John Latting. The Sweets left their fifteen-month-old daughter Iva with Gladys's parents, notified the police of their plans, and, fearing the worst, armed themselves for protection. Their fears were confirmed within hours of their arrival, when dozens of whites gathered on the street in front of 2905 Garland, spurred on, it was later learned, by the newly formed Waterworks Improvement Association. As many as eight hundred people assembled by midnight. The crowd dispersed at daybreak but returned in greater force on the evening of the ninth, eventually filling nearby streets, alleys, and porches—even surrounding rooftops.

At about eight o'clock that night, Ossian Sweet later testified, "something hit the roof of the house." When he heard men outside yelling instructions to surround the property, Sweet grabbed a gun and ran upstairs, threw himself on the bed, and listened as "stones kept hitting the house intermittently." One crashed through the window and struck him. Seventeen Detroit police officers stood by in the street, refusing to intervene. Then, events forced their hand when William Davis and Otis Sweet returned to the home by taxi and were immediately set upon with bricks, chunks of coal, and shouts of "Niggers! Niggers! ... Get the Niggers!" From his second-floor vantage point, Ossian saw the mob "surge ... forward 15 or 20 feet"—to him it looked "like a human sea"—while the barrage of projectiles "kept coming faster." Then he heard gunfire. At least two shots were fired from the house by his brother Henry and at least one by Detroit police officer Frank Lee Gill, who later admitted aiming "at two Negroes he saw dimly on the upper back porch of the Sweet home." Two white men in the crowd had been shot, and one lay dead. The police immediately entered 2905 Garland and led off its occupants, charging them with conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to assault with the intent to kill.

The trial was scheduled for Oc to ber, but the court of white public opinion did not wait to pass judgment, accusing the Sweets of instigating the violence simply by buying a house on Garland Street. Detroit mayor John Smith proclaimed, "any colored person who endangers life and property, simply to gratify his personal pride, is an enemy of his race as well as an incitant of riot and murder." Clearly sharing this view were the white residents who appeared as witnesses for the prosecution. Most were circumspect about their motivations, testifying that they had supported the Waterworks Improvement Association solely to protect their property. But the Sweets' attorney, Clarence Darrow, eventually drew out admissions that homeowners' central preoccupation was excluding black people. "I don't believe in mixing people that way," acknowledged one witness finally, "colored and white."

Nearly four decades later, and about twelve miles west of the house on Garland Street, in the all-white suburb of Dearborn, hundreds of white residents descended upon the home of Giuseppe Stanzione, at 7427 Kendal Street, after learning that he had sold it to black people. It was September 2, 1963, Labor Day weekend, when word spread through northeast Dearborn that two black men, accompanied by a pregnant black woman, were unloading a moving truck on Kendal. The news drew about six hundred whites to the property by early evening. At around six o'clock, they began throwing stones and eggs at Stanzione's home and vandalizing his car, slashing the tires and pouring sugar in the fuel tank. Throughout the evening, Stanzione received anonymous phone calls threatening to bomb the house. None of the Dearborn city police officers on the scene, including the chief, deputy chief, and safety director, attempted to disperse the crowd, despite the intensifying violence and appeals from a local minister and from Stanzione himself. "I called the ... police at least 20 times Monday night," the homeowner later explained, "but all they did was cruise around the block, never interfering while the mob ... threw bottles and rocks at my window and yelled insults at me." According to some reports, the police left the scene by 10:00. And it was another hour before Stanzione's attorney subdued the crowd when he appeared on the front porch waving the property's title, documentary evidence that the house had not been sold. The neighbors soon learned that Stanzione had in fact rented the property, to a white man, who in turn hired the black men to move his belongings. One of those movers had been accompanied that day by his wife.

In the weeks that followed, local political leaders and whites from throughout the Detroit region applauded the mob action, the police department's response, and the suburb's commitment to racial exclusion. Dearborn's mayor, Orville Hubbard, told reporters that "there [had been] no need for [municipal] action," adding, curiously, that "Dearborn is one of the safest and cleanest places in the world to live." Meanwhile, whites from city and suburbs alike registered their support for the racial status quo, in hundreds of letters, telegrams, and phone calls to the mayor's office. "We have all seen what can happen to a good, well kept neighborhood when taken over by Negroes," wrote one Dearborn woman in a letter of September 17. "Their treatment of property and their behavior," she explained, "is like a slow disease killing off a once healthy neighborhood." Hubbard's suburban supporters celebrated the homeowners' associations that were maintaining the residential color line and assured the mayor that "property owners back you all the way." A Detroiter joined many others in declaring that he, too, would "love to be a home owner in Dearborn."

* * *

This book asks if northern whites' views about racial integration had changed in the four decades separating the attacks on Garland Street in 1925 and Kendal Street in 1963. Throughout the intervening years, urban and suburban whites consistently mobilized to exclude minorities from their neighborhoods. They pressured real estate agents, wrote race- restrictive covenants into their deeds, blocked construction of low income and rental housing projects, and, when these strategies failed, resorted to intimidation and assault. The Kendal Street episode was hardly an anomaly in the post-World War II metropolis. So common was white vigilantism that Arnold Hirsch has described these years, quite appropriately, as an "era of hidden violence." Meanwhile the politics of exclusion was so prominent a fixture of white neighborhood life that housing and development issues became a key site for local battles over race and rights, in cities and suburbs nationwide.

But was there anything new or different during the postwar era about whites' response to the threat of racial integration? Had the years of Depression, war, and suburban expansion changed anything about white neighborhood politics? To be sure the suburban revolution itself had transformed both metropolitan geography and tenancy patterns. During the 1920s blacks and whites in the Detroit region lived in separate neighborhoods, but the vast majority lived within the city itself. Nationwide, both people and commercial activity were firmly centered in fast-growing municipalities like Detroit. And the majority of urban residents, be they black or white, immigrant or "native," rented their place of residence. Neither trend would be long-lasting. Postwar development rapidly drew millions of urban whites and much of the nation's commercial and industrial base out of major cities and into the suburban fringe, and most suburbanites bought their homes. By the 1960s, most of the nation's suburbs were almost exclusively white domains and dominated by a homeowning class. Largely excluded from both the exodus and the new, robust market for real estate were racial minorities, most of whom were restricted to overcrowded and often deteriorating center-city neighborhoods.

The expansion and resegregation of the metropolis after World War II coincided, paradoxically, with an equally dramatic transformation in the national politics of race. In the 1920s, most white public officials and private leaders did not apologize for the nation's stark racial inequalities. Whites openly embraced a racial science that described blacks and other racial minorities as biologically inferior. And most whites openly endorsed the segregation of residential neighborhoods by race and national origin; indeed, even immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were viewed as racial threats and, thus, systematically excluded from neighborhoods occupied by native-born whites. The contrast with the postwar era could not be more striking. The United States' new world-power status, achieved in part through war against totalitarian regimes seen as antidemocratic and intolerant, helped civil rights activists highlight the hypocrisy of the nation's racial caste system, forcing most northern whites to disavow racism and embrace, at least rhetorically, the principle of racial equality. By the time of the Kendal Street incident, racial science had long been discredited, a domestic war was being waged over civil rights, and the federal government had been forced to reassert its role as a protector of racial fairness, in no small part by outlawing practices that had long promoted residential discrimination. By the 1960s, few whites openly endorsed race-based discrimination or justified race-based inequality. And the European immigrants once considered a threat to native-born whites had joined the exodus to the prosperous, all-white suburbs.

In short, we know that between the 1920s and 1960s both the geographical and intellectual settings for white homeowner vigilantism had clearly changed. The mob that descended upon Kendal Street represented a new generation of white resistance to racial integration—ethnically more inclusive, predominantly home-owning and suburban. And postwar whites organized to maintain the color line at a time when it was impolitic, at best, to announce one's racism out loud. Nonetheless, the similarities between the Garland and Kendal Street episodes, and the apparent continuity of white hostility to integrated neighborhoods, raise a fundamental question that this study seeks to answer: If most northern whites had disavowed racism and supported the principle of racial equality, why did so many continue to oppose residential integration? What motivated postwar whites to exclude black people from their neighborhoods?

For decades writers have addressed this question, in a multidisciplinary investigation of residential segregation, suburban growth, and urban decline that has revealed how public policy and private practices encouraged white people to view racial integration as a threat. We know that New Deal-era and postwar housing programs—most famously the programs of the Public Housing Administration (PHA), the Urban Renewal Administration (URA), and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)—accepted and codified white racial prejudices, in turn facilitating urban and suburban development patterns that systematically segregated populations by race while denying most racial minorities access to homeownership and better quality accommodations. During and after World War II, as employment opportunities drew more and more blacks to northern cities, public policy simultaneously fueled white flight and underdeveloped the black center city. Meanwhile employment discrimination denied most urban blacks the secure, well-paying jobs that were lifting millions of whites into the middle class, and the decentralization of manufacturing and retail drew even more opportunities away from urban centers. The result was a spatial separation of jobs and wealth, with suburban growth and affluence creating a striking, very visible contrast to the physical deterioration, overcrowding, and relative poverty of black, central-city neighborhoods. Many whites concluded that integration would threaten their status, their pocketbooks, and ultimately their way of life. And they felt threatened by the continual expansion of urban black communities and by black people's willingness to challenge their second-class status publicly by moving into white neighborhoods, protesting against discrimination, and using public spaces once the exclusive preserve of white people. If scholars agree on nothing else, there is some consensus that the early postwar era saw the emergence of a new kind of white racial conservatism, a precursor to the better-known backlash politics of the 1960s and the rise of the New Right, fueled by whites' preoccupation with protecting their neighborhoods, status, and privileges from minorities.

There is, nonetheless, considerable disagreement about the role that race per se played in fueling white vigilance. Many argue that while black people were clearly the targets of exclusionary practices, racism played little or no part in whites' decision-making. After 1940, according to this argument, battles over neighborhoods were fueled primarily by whites' economic and class concerns, their desire to protect property values, and their preoccupation with defending local turf. Others, by contrast, insist that racial prejudice continued to shape whites' actions, with recent work exploring how the category of "white" itself grew more inclusive after the war, allowing more ethnic groups to reap its benefits. Finally much of this same work shows that this expanding white population defended segregation in the postwar era by invoking the amorphous language of "rights," which enabled them to cast racial exclusion as a defense of hard-earned, and presumably nonracial, privileges, be it as homeowners, working people, consumers, citizens, or loyal supporters of the New Deal state.

The disagreement about postwar whites' motivations is rooted, I argue here, in a conceptual assumption that informs most studies of racial conflict in the modern United States. Most commentators treat white racism as something unchanging and as conceptually separable from other variables that fuel conflict between groups (including racial groups). Scholars generally portray white racism as a static, though ill-defined, sentiment, an irrational and misguided antipathy toward nonwhites. They depict white people as either having racist views or not and describe those views as being expressed or acted upon in different degrees; some racist thoughts or behaviors are thus more "intense" or "extreme" than others. White racism after World War II, at least in the North, is usually portrayed as a less potent and less prominent force than its early twentieth-century predecessor. The postwar variant is cast alternatively as atavism or ideological relic: either as a vestige of an intellectual tradition that (wrongly) described black people as biologically inferior or, at best, as a remnant of a political order that openly accepted and enforced racial hierarchy. As a result, racism is usually factored in as complementary to, and often secondary to, other points of contention in postwar America. In most discussions of northern racial conflict, a latent or lingering white racism resurfaces or is intensified when other, discrete preoccupations create conflict between racial groups. Some of these preoccupations are also described as purely ideological, such as ideas about the family, citizenship, or the more indistinct category of rights. Other preoccupations are assumed to have a strictly material basis, such as jobs, or housing, or neighborhood turf. But all of these variables are treated as conceptually discrete from racism, both in the minds of white people and for the purpose of historical analysis.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Colored Propertyby DAVID M. P. FREUND Copyright © 2007 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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