I Have a Dream

The North was segregated after Brown outlawed segregation in 1954. It didn’t happen by private individual choices but by government decisions that blocked banks from lending to African-Americans in both the suburbs and inner cities. Those now well documented decisions created many of the inner cities’ problems and the struggle to make equality real. But who cares?

Who cares because all the proposals to fix a huge injustice, not in the distant years of slavery but now, mean paying to help “them.” It’s fine if someone else pays. But not us, not the wealthy, the middle class or the poor.

So are there answers society could adopt?

We nibble: the Fresh Air Fund, scholarships for the African-American elite, the people who overcame all the potholes and roadblocks in their way.

In 1938, years before Brown, the Supreme Court understood that the inescapable sin of segregation was the barrier to networking. Missouri was prepared to send African-Americans to any law school in neighboring states so that they would get what Missouri called an “equal” education, but not to Missouri schools. Presaging Brown, the Court said it wasn’t equal to deny African-Americans the chance to get to know future colleagues, adversaries, judges and legislators. As Brown would say 16 years later, segregation is inherently unequal.

There lies the real problem of race – any real solution involves us all. Would we put the resources into “their” schools that we put into “ours”? Would we share some classrooms? Would we allow willing parents to send their kids to our schools or would a modest program be too much for us or the racist majority on the court in Washington?

I think there will be success for African-Americans too. Fresh out of slavery, their ancestors created a system of higher education,  fine colleges and universities which survive and thrive. Then they started the climb toward the middle class familiar to many of us. Many African-Americans joined the ranks of civil servants in the federal government. Government service had been a route out of poverty for many of our ancestors. But beginning in 1913, after years of progress, President Wilson excluded African-Americans from all but menial federal jobs, pushing educated and successful African-Americans out of the federal bureaucracy.

That story was repeated after World War II, after Brown v. Board, when federal officials denied that African-Americans had any rights the capitalist system need honor and instead used the federal agencies they controlled to block African-Americans from getting loans to build businesses or join the march to the suburbs. It wasn’t anything African-Americans did, but that deliberate undermining of their efforts and successes laid the seeds of contemporary inner city problems.

There are many more chapters to the story of the ways that the financial and political rugs were pulled from under potentially successful African-Americans and their businesses. The road of our African-American brothers and sisters has been longer, harder, more unjust than the ancestors of most of the rest of us because America made it so.

I was there in front of the Lincoln Memorial when Dr. Martin Luther King shared his glorious dream. That dream of equality belongs to all of us. All of us depend on the crucial American realization that all mankind is created equal. So, like most Americans, I thrilled to King’s words. And I admire the principled courage and dedication of Charlottesville’s counter-protestors. Their presence was an indication of the progress America has made, and their struggle reflects the distance still to travel.  King’s dream, our dream, is still a dream.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, August 22, 2017.

On the Effects of Brown

To make it available on the web, I am posting this commentary originally aired on Dec. 10, 2003 together with a note describing the literature:

ON THE EFFECTS OF BROWN
Steve Gottlieb

It is easy to forget how recent are the pathologies that so many of us now routinely associate with black “ghettos”.

My dad taught music in a high school in Brooklyn. Because of the way music was handled, he had almost everyone who came through the school in his classes. When the district boundaries were changed in the early 60s he reacted with relief. The black kids who now came to the school were much easier to handle than the white toughs who now went to other schools.

In my youth black leather jackets were much scarier than black skin.

I am suggesting that the pathologies we associate with poor black ghettos are a product of the past half century.

Before Brown v. Board there was an entirely separate black economy. Riots and lynchings made it a dangerous world for blacks. But you could have all your needs taken care of without ever stepping outside of the black community from hair cuts to a plot in a cemetery. There were black doctors and black hospitals, black stores and black insurance companies. Some black communities were quite successful. Jealous whites burned the black district in Tulsa among others. Slaves had been trained in all the needed skills and one looked to their descendents until poorer whites forceably ejected them after the Civil War. In that black economy, however limited, blacks were masters in their own house.

By the time of Brown, large changes were affecting the black community. Blacks came north for jobs that had been opened by World War II. They moved into cities near those jobs.

Meanwhile, the Federal Highway Administration built the roads that opened up the suburbs. That led to an exodus. We burned a lot of gas in our old 1937 Chevy getting to old friends who’d moved out.

But the Federal Housing Administration red-lined the suburbs. That is, if you were white, you could have your mortgage guaranteed. If you were black, you were not welcome. The suburbs from their origins were lily white not because of white flight from blacks but because a house in the country had been an American dream which whites, but not blacks, were now able to realize.

They couldn’t move to the suburbs, and going all the way back to the time of Brown, what was variously called urban renewal or slum clearance tore down blacks’ homes in the cities. Blacks just called it “Negro clearance.” What happened to all those black businesses? When the government seizes property it has to pay just compensation. But only to the property owners. It assumes that lessees, i.e. most businesses, can get equivalent value elsewhere, that nothing is destroyed. But of course if the business is dependent on the neighborhood trade, it loses what we lawyers call good will and businesses call it loyal customers. As businesses were forced out, they had to start over, on the ground floor.

Minority-owned “mom-and-pop” businesses declined by half from 1960 to 1980.

Storied neighborhoods, live with business and social networks, are simply gone. Torn down to make way for offices and white owned stores. And then deserted even by the whites because there was no neighborhood left to support them – people had gone to the suburbs or been pushed out for “renewal.”

Now add Brown into the mix. all those blacks who had been shopping inside the black community could shop at Woolworth’s and other national businesses. So another economic prop was pulled out from under the black community.

Integration was not an unmixed blessing. Whole industries in the black economy disappeared and, with them, much of the capital that had been amassed. Working in the white economy meant starting the ladder at the bottom, playing by white rules and customs, and insisting on white good faith in hiring, training, educating and promoting blacks.

Ten years after Brown, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 including provisions relating to equal employment, housing, public accommodations and government programs. Then the battle started in earnest with some defendants fighting decade long legal battles to avoid having to do anything. That was when courts started to employ the same remedies that they had for schools, telling defendants that they had talked the talk long enough and now they were going to have to do the behavior. Those orders are the origins of affirmative action.

I don’t want to make the claim that everything was better before Brown. I have lived through that transition and I know better. But I get very depressed when people claim that the black community has not shown the pluck and ingenuity and savvy and dedication to self-help that other immigrant groups have. On the contrary, they followed precisely that pattern until the fruits were systematically pulled out from under them.
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For a brief biliography on resegregation after Brown v. Board, see Stephen E. Gottlieb, Robin L. West, Brian Bix and Timothy D. Lytton, JURISPRUDENCE, CASES AND MATERIALS: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAW AND ITS APPLICATIONS, 3rd. ed., 940n (LexisNexis, 2015):

Melvin L. Oliver & Thomas M. Shapiro, BLACKWEALTH/WHITEWEALTH: A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON RACIAL INEQUALITY 17-18, 51-52, 150, 174 (1995) (tracing the continued impact of FHA’s racial preference in enhanced white wealth today); Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A. Denton, AMERICAN APARTHEID: SEGREGATION AND THE MAKING OF THE UNDERCLASS 54-55 (1993) (summarizing FHA’s role in imposing residential segregation); Kenneth T. Jackson, CRABGRASS FRONTIER: THE SUBURBANIZATION OF THE UNITED STATES 203-15 (1985) (describing how “FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy”); FlorenceWagman Roisman, The Lessons of American Apartheid: The Necessity and Means of Promoting Residential Racial Integration, 81 IOWA L. REV. 479, 486 (1995) (review of Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A. Denton, AMERICAN APARTHEID (“the massive new housing production fueled by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) financing of suburban areas was a major cause of increased segregation”) (citing Charles Abrams, FORBIDDEN NEIGHBORS: A STUDY OF PREJUDICE IN HOUSING 229-37 (1955)) (“FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg Laws”). See also National Comm’n on Urban Problems, BUILDING THE AMERICAN CITY 101 (1969) (concluding that “There was evidence of a tacit agreement among all groups—lending institutions, fire insurance companies, and FHA — to block off certain areas of cities within ‘red lines,’ and not to loan or insure within them” but later studies cited above found considerable and explicit documentation).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Steve Gottlieb is Professor at Albany Law School. His most recent book is Morality Imposed: The Rehnquist Court and Liberty in America. This commentary was broadcast December 10, 2003.

What’s to blame for our divided nation? The cause can also be the cure

My views of the legal contribution to American polarization and what can be done about it have now come out as

“What’s to blame for our divided nation? The cause can also be the cure” [click here] on TheHill.com. Enjoy.

Brotherhood

In the height of the Civil Rights Movement we used “brotherhood” to express our quest for more than tolerance, but for closeness as one human family. I’ve never found a gender-neutral term for that feeling, so I continue to use it but in a gender-neutral way – we are all family, cousins, a part of one community. As John Donne famously wrote in 1624, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

Given the waves of hate crimes since the election, I’ve been thinking about brotherhood. This country is built on brotherhood, on sloughing off the ethnic, religious and physical prejudices our ancestors all brought from their old countries. By now those prejudices seem irrelevant. Many of us intermarried and were welcomed in new families. A friend told me that Bahai do it intentionally to bring people into the faith, though he was truly smitten and has a loving marriage. Most of us just happen to fall in love and old prejudices seem quaint and silly.

But brotherhood matters. Many of us watched the shredding of Yugoslavia. An exchange student from Belgrade was living with us, beside herself with grief and anger at the destruction of her country. Some had predicted Yugoslavia would explode once Marshal Tito died. But many intermarried, traveled among Yugoslavia’s regions, and young people, like our visitor, thought of themselves as Yugoslavs. But it came apart, viciously, in a blood bath of what was called “ethnic cleansing.”

Americans like to think America is and will always be ingenious, hardworking, neighborly and welcoming; that’s us – we’re the best. But many of us understand that virtues have to be nurtured, not assumed.

Early in the last century, President Teddy Roosevelt predicted “the military tent, where all sleep side-by-side, will rank next to the public school among the great agents of democratization.” The draft brought people together who had lived geographically, religiously, ethnically or racially segregated lives. As men returned from war, they introduced each other to sisters and friends, integrating families and communities. But the political strains of war in Vietnam ended the draft. Ben Downing recently urged national service on this station but we have nothing that compares with the reach and impact of the draft.

Racial segregation was made much worse by federal officials who required banks to redline cities and suburbs against loans to African-Americans no matter how strong their financial status. That left segregated school districts. Many of us still try to make our schools “great agents of democratization.” But racially homogenous student bodies make integration difficult or meaningless, and courts have made it worse.

Sports and entertainment still reflect integration. I once told Jackie Robinson’s widow how much it meant to grow up rooting for her husband. Black faces have been on national television as long as I can remember. My mother screamed with joy when William Warfield came out on stage and announced he would sing Old Man River. And I’ll never forget the sound of Marion Anderson’s voice when I heard her live. I’ve only caught glimpses of Oprah Winfrey but bless her influence. Familiarity, like minority newscasters and public officials, helps to diffuse prejudice and fear.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League rely on litigation to put racist groups out of business and catalogue hate groups, warning us about their activities and sharing strategies to extend the warm pull of brotherhood.

Other groups try to bring people together, to meet and appreciate each other, like the Interfaith Alliance, individual churches, temples and Muslim Community Centers, who invite people to meetings and festivals. We’ve often broken bread in the Muslim community.

But nothing matches what the draft and schools once did for so many of us. We need better ways to advance peace, justice and brotherhood.

— Most of this commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, April 25, 2017.