DC real estate classified ads segregated by race from an August 1950 issue of The Washington Times Herald. Everyone knows that much of America, Washington included, was formally segregated not so long ago, but artifacts like these are still incredibly striking.
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Blast from the Past
27 Apr 2008 08:39 am
Comments (17)
Republicans know Clintons have ailenated African-Americans so they are now actively courting their support while trying to elevate Hillary and deflate Barack. They MSM are not asking Hillary any of the pertinent questions, not on Iran, not on Mark Penn, although he is still on conference calls to this day, not on a pending lawsuit in California or anything elese that might damage her candidacy in the eyes of the people. They don't ask why, if Rev. Wright would have not been her pastor, why during Bill's Impeachment trial, they turned to Rev. Wright for prayer and strength? The Republicans have an "arsenal" of ammunition they Plan and have Planned for years to use against the Clintons if Hillary somehow becomes the Democratic nominee!
Find a copy of _Crabgrass Frontier_ on Bibliofind and read about "Mortgage Quality Maps". What I find more stunning than the fact that the United States Government actively participated in this segregation process (which is not utterly surprising since the government after all is an expression of our culture), but that when the civil rights era hit the involved federal agencies initiated a program to /track down and destroy/ every one of those maps - and that they came very close to succeeding without anyone outside the banking industry ever knowing about it.
Cranky
PS Your site's HTML is totally hosed from about 10 PM Saturday.
I live in Richmond, Virgina, and took a walk a few weeks ago through Byrd Park, a downtownish park that's full of fields, tennis courts, a lake, and a memorial to fallen soldiers. I remember how weird it felt to see two sides of the memorial: one side wasn't labeled in any particular way, the other side was labled "Colored". Made me stop and think.
Help Wanted ads were routinely segregated by gender into at least the late '70s. There's a lot of stuff like that that people choose not to remember.
Jimbo, thanks, let's not let Matt or other bloggers on Race in America steal any shelf-space from the women's movement agenda and HRC. Way to pay attention and steer the conversation back around to the HRC campaign!
Jimbo, thanks, let's not let Matt or other bloggers on Race in America steal any shelf-space from the women's movement agenda and HRC. Way to pay attention and steer the conversation back around to the HRC campaign!
6-character phone numbers, too.
My point was that this country has collective amnesia concerning a lot of crazy awful shit that used to go on with hardly a peep from the vast majority of people. HRC has nothing to do with it.
I remember in the early 80's the Controller of my company relating how, when he had bought his most recent house (northern suburbs of Detroit), he had found a clause in the deed that was blacked out. When he held it up to the light, he saw it basically said, "no non-whites and no non-Christians". So I suspect housing classifieds in any major city from that time would have shown the same thing.
Also, the town (mostly middle- to upper-middle class) in South Jersey I grew up in had two small African-American areas. Everyone knew which houses were in which section of town, although there were no physical landmarks (train tracks, creeks, etc.) to separate them. By the time I was aware of what was going on the civil rights acts of the 60's had made housing discrimination illegal, but the separation persisted. Because our house was only a few blocks from one of the African-American areas (and because the town was only large enough for one junior high and one high school), I went to integrated schools my whole life, and I think that helped most of us kids to grow up with reasonably healthy racial attitudes (not saying we're perfect or anything), because we were able to find out the black kids were just kids.
My first house was built in Fresno, Ca., in 1942. In the homeowners association agreement, there is still a clause that you will not sell your house to black people, Armenians, and others. Nobody bothered to take the clause out when it became illegal.
this country has collective amnesia concerning a lot of crazy awful shit that used to go on
The opening line of my favorite Dylan song, Desolation Row, is: "They're selling postcards of the hanging." For years I thought that was just another nonsensical Dylan line. One day I learned that participants in lynch mobs routinely had their pictures taken with their handiwork, and that these photos were indeed turned into postcards.
"Crazy awful shit" pretty well sums it up. Doesn't do it justice, but it sums it up...
RE the federal government practicing segregation concurrent with society at large: during the Kennedy administration, Kennedy was always talking (in his Massachusetts accent) about "moving forward with great viggah" on this or that program. One of his initiatives was a focused and deliberate program to add qualified black people to the still largely white ranks of the federal civil service (the folks who provide white-collar clerical, administrative, and supervisory support in all those federal agencies downtown). I remember one of my [white] friends' dads (a mid-level civil service jobholder) commenting bitterly, "Work with great viggah, or be replaced by a niggah." At the time, custodial civil service jobs were largely black, mid-level supervisory positions largely white--and male, at that. I doubt that contemporary civil service regs were sexist or segregationist ON PAPER, but clearly until affirmative action came along, the federal civil service reflected Washington's culture at the time: a sleepy Southern town that happened to be the national capital.
...a sleepy Southern town that happened to be the national capital.
Plus ça change... Except for the institutional racism, the South in facr won the Civil War.
Its model of low-wage, low-tax, low-social investment, no-union, low-regulation, boom-or-bust capitalism at home, and constant filibustering abroad, is now American Gospel.
A national experience than runs in a line from Mother Jones through Eugene Debs and Joe Hill and the Reuther Brothers through Michael Harrington, gone.
We're all Southerners now.
Pardon me for interrupting this hour's self-flaggelation session, but do a find for January 20, 2007 here.
Well, I'll let you get back to it.
Matt, have you read James Loewen's book "Sundown Towns"? I would very highly recommend it.
Almost all of America lived under racial covenants until the middle of the twentieth century, and true enforcement of integration wasn't final in some cities up until the 1980's. Even cities without official segregation covenants or statutes usually maintained an unspoken division, usually backed with the threat of violence. Loewen argues that the amount of money and political capital we spend maintaining our current urban/suburban racial distribution continues to reflect that history of racial separation.
For me, it's one of those books that brought a lot of elements of our history and politics into very sharp focus.
This is in reference to, um, another thread, but I just want to say that, the more I think about it, the more funny-as-hell I find that comment about jazz and Katrina. That's all, bye bye.
Comments closed May 11, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Dude, have you actually been to the South? I think that we need to scedule Matt a remedial trip to this part of the country, preferably with a native Southerner to show him around. We could even call it a book tour or something!
Posted by Zeke | April 27, 2008 9:17 AM