Quotes About Segregation

My grandmother was born in 1900, and she would regale me with tales I call 'Little House on the Prairie' tales, but they were tales of segregated and racist America growing up in Alabama and Mississippi, where she came from.

I just want to be really clear about this: Anyone who has read Colin Powell's biography - there's an entire section where he talks about experiencing segregation. Colin Powell did not appear when he became head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's not how it happened.

Public washrooms and water fountains were rigidly demarcated to prevent contaminating contact with the same people who cooked the white South's meals, cleaned its houses, and tended its children.

The federal government practiced redlining—disqualifying Black neighborhoods for mortgages backed by the government. It would only ensure property covered by restrictive covenants. It cut off Black areas by building highways around them, which made it easier for white people to run away to the suburbs. The neighborhoods left behind have a fraction of white wealth and an oversupply of substandard housing, ill health, infant mortality, and lousy schools.

Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.

Just like Supreme Court justices, we as a nation have avoided contemplating remedies because we've indulged in the comfortable delusion that our segregation has not resulted primarily from state action and so, we conclude, there is not much we are required to do about it. Because once entrenched, segregation is difficult to reverse, the easiest course is to ignore it.

The core argument of this book is that African Americans were unconstitutionally denied the means and the right to integration in middle-class neighborhoods, and because this denial was state-sponsored, the nation is obligated to remedy it.

We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies. Although most of these policies are now off the books, they have never been remedied and their effects endure.

The challenge is more difficult because low-income African Americans today confront not only segregation but also the income stagnation and blocked mobility faced by all Americans in families with low or moderate incomes.

At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present.

Because the Buchanan decision had made it "impossible to find an appropriate legal formula" for segregation, Freund said that zoning masquerading as an economic measure was the most reasonable means of accomplishing the same end.

When we consider problems that arise when African Americans are absent in significant numbers from schools that whites attend, we say we seek diversity, not racial integration. When we wish to pretend that the nation did not single out African Americans in a system of segregation specifically aimed at them, we diffuse them as just another people of color.

As in Rollingwood ten years earlier, one of the federal government's specifications for mortgages insured in Milpitas was an openly stated prohibition on sales to African Americans.

State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators.

The FHA favored mortgages in areas where boulevards or highways served to separate African American families from whites, stating that "[n]atural or artificially established barriers will prove effective in protecting a neighborhood and the locations within it from adverse influences, . . . includ[ing] prevention of the infiltration of . . . lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups." The FHA was particularly concerned with preventing school desegregation.

The Veterans Administration subsidized the "Sunkist Gardens" development in Southeast Los Angeles in 1950, for white veterans only.

The University of Chicago organized and guided property owners' associations that were devoted to preventing black families from moving nearby. The university not only subsidized the associations but from 1933 to 1947 spent $100,000 on legal services to defend covenants and evict African Americans who had arrived in its neighborhood.

understanding de jure segregation,

To ensure that no African Americans migrated to Richmond unless they were essential to the war effort, the city's police stopped African American men on the street and then arrested and jailed

In the 1930s, the Ford plant had a sign in front, "No Mexican or Black Workers Wanted,

In 1926, Indianapolis adopted a regulation permitting African Americans to move to a white area only if a majority of its white residents gave their written consent, although the city's legal staff had advised that the ordinance was unconstitutional.

State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance.

Not only were these neighborhoods zoned to permit industry, even polluting industry, but the plan commission permitted taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution to open in African American neighborhoods but prohibited these as zoning violations in neighborhoods where whites lived.

African Americans were unconstitutionally denied the means and the right to integration in middle-class neighborhoods, and because this denial was state-sponsored, the nation is obligated to remedy it.