Redlining and Racial Covenants: Jim Crow of the North

and now through the use of a National Housing Act insured mortgage is brought within the reach of all citizens on a monthly payment and amidst the New Deal when the FDR administration is looking for ways to try to stabilize the housing market the Fair Housing Act has passed in 1934 and as part of that the home owners Loan Corporation is also established with the hope that if you could establish long term mortgages with fixed interest rates you could create pathways to homeownership for most Americans when they now spending for rent when the FHA starts underwriting mortgages in the 1930s this really is a game changer in a lot of ways it takes a lot of risk off the banks it places it on to the federal government and now working-class middle-class families they're able to purchase a home unfortunately as part of that which what the holc does is it establishes designations for neighborhoods based on the occupants of those neighborhoods and this is where the term redlining comes into place the FHA they made color-coded maps of all the largest cities in the United States and they broke cities down into four different areas red is considered hazardous that's the worst yellow is considered definitely declining blue is considered still desirable and green is considered the best and what's so powerful about this kind of scale of measuring investment it was about values at people the fact that matter is that there was no evidence that those people who lived in those communities predominantly black and brown people informed more people would have defaulted on loans there are no firm realities behind the close proximity to blackness in your property values going down that's just not true the FHA is being very upfront and very explicit in how they're linking spacial desirability with racial occupancy it's this racialization space idea so areas that were predominantly african-american or majority minority or really in a lot of cases even if there's a few non-white people there that's often enough to be redlined so when they built these maps they also explained why each area got the ranking it did the area around 4,000 new south which is called old South Side this was a nice area it had nice homes it's the historic african-american neighborhood on the south side of Minneapolis this one part of South Minneapolis was red lined specifically due to am quoting a gradual infiltration of Negroes in Asiatics the FHA refused to give an area a green lined designation again this is the best designation that they'll go offer unless and I'm quoting again restrictive covenants are already in place that lines from the FHA underwriting manual racial covenants aren't just about discriminating against people of color it's about enriching white people and I think that's the part that often gets lost in this narrative and I think it does speak to the ways that white supremacy have been embedded and really built structures and built environments I mean if your grandparents bought a home on Minnehaha Creek you know that homes worth what half million your grandparents rented an area that was redlined and then subsequently destroyed by a freeway project you're not inheriting anything in a lot of ways the practice of redlining which didn't start until the 1930s institutionalized and spread racial covenants all over the country because suddenly developers got sanctioned they got direction from the federal government saying this is best practices if you want to have a really high rating from us if you want to get the most favorable terms for any loans by kind of D integrating Minneapolis which in any ways is what racial covenants are doing this set the stage and enabled all these subsequent systems of inequality to really take and to really take hold this very persistent myth that northern cities never had formal segregation the South had Jim Crow and look at those signs well racial covenants did the work of Jim Crow in in the north all over the north many many whites simply were not aware that there was a segregation [Music] so many people in Minneapolis to be outraged what they thought that their friend was being discriminated against they knew something was happening but it wasn't happening to your friend that was what kind of a this next kind of a situation that we had in Minneapolis I didn't when if you could imagine at least people their parents sent me cookies and you know cakes all during the war and I was I was welcome in their house there was no question about it and then there's other people who were just absolutely Klansmen you know that was what Minneapolis was all about but that was the young that was my generation in Minneapolis we were hemmed in in that that ghetto and that was that was our life that was her that was her work the 1935 land-use planning map used to define which place would get mortgages versus others circled these areas called them slums places rather than clinical Negroes lived is there places to avoid right so they're going to give you substandard housing and I gotta contain you access to affordable housing was a challenge and you think about the reasons behind the creation of public housing we had a lot of folks forced to the low-wage sector all right and you're thinking about what jobs or opportunities that low-income folks of color even had access to at this time you know I would argue that with the creation of public housing in 1938 the Summoner filled homes became this really interesting iteration of the redesign of space you have 400 units of public housing which were segregated at the time created in 1953 the City Council of Minneapolis refused to scatter another thousand units of public housing outside of the Sumner field homes area and where do these pressures come from you've had both internal conservative politicians and outlying suburban communities coming in saying not in my neighborhood and the City Council crumbled under the pressure and then took what was 400 units of public housing to over a thousand units and less than a decade they have strategically manufactured urban poverty [Music] this history is is very personal for me I'm a third generation mini a Politan my grandparents were immigrants from Sweden who came to this country with nothing you know worked incredibly hard jobs but both sets of my grandparents in 1942 were able to buy houses in south Minneapolis these houses were in a part of the city that was blanketed by racial covenants because of those racial covenants Mike my parents grew up in neighborhoods that were entirely white and and in many ways they described them as as a paradise for children they had wonderful parks they had really solid schools that sent them to college but no one in their neighborhood ever talked about the fact that this neighborhood was only for white people and I want everyone with this map to imagine themselves in this landscape of privilege and disenfranchisement [Music]

Channel: Twin Cities PBS

Views: 139,707

Keywords: #mnexperiencetpt, History, Jim Crow, Jim Crow of the North, Minnesota history, Minnesota redlining, PBS, Racial Covenants, Redlining, Twin Cities PBS, jim crow documentary, jim crow in the north, jim crow laws, jim crow laws documentary, jim crow north, jim crow of the north tpt, racial covenants minneapolis, red lining, redlining documentary, redlining explained, redlining history, redlining real estate, restrictive covenants, what is redlining, housing segregation

Id: ymOaiWla3DU

Length: 8min 0sec (480 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 04 2019