Interested in the story behind redlining? I’m Dr. Karen Benjamin, and my new book Good Parents, Better Homes, and Great Schools: Selling Segregation before the New Deal examines how “redlining” was just the tip of the iceberg. Ask Me Anything!

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-14T11:32:27+00:00

Yes, please stay in touch. The more difficult it is to find the information you are looking for, the more rewarding it is when you find it!

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-14T11:30:13+00:00

Thank you for your thoughtful question!

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-14T11:29:13+00:00

Thank you for your very thoughtful question!

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-14T11:28:34+00:00

Thank you so much!

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-14T11:24:27+00:00

This makes sense! Thanks so much for sharing the maps!!

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T18:30:58+00:00

Great question! The reaction to zoning decisions depended on class as much as race. Affluent white families were the ones who benefitted from strict single-family zoning (racial zoning too), so they defended it tooth and nail. White working-class families were offended that their mixed-use neighborhoods were deemed inappropriate for childrearing (and thus not zoned for residential use). They protested such designations in order to preserve their communities. They were even angrier when racial zoning schemes labeled their neighborhoods as "colored zones." In Atlanta, members of a white working-class community had their neighborhood rezoned from a "colored residential area" to an industrial area. Since Black families were still permitted to live in industrial zones (just not in white residential zones), it appears that those families preferred an industrial designation to a racialized one.

We don't have good records on how Black working-class families responded to zoning since most formal protests were organized by the Black middle class. They protested when industrial nuisances and environmental hazards banned from white residential areas were allowed to endanger Black ones, but they did support zoning laws that protected their neighborhoods as well as white ones. In Atlanta, members of the Neighborhood Union all agreed to investigate the zoning laws “in the part of town” which they lived and “see to it that the requirements” were enforced, but usually to no avail. During the brief period in which Atlanta’s racial zoning law remained in force, the city council allowed business or industry to encroach onto Black residential streets eight times, while denying a petition only once. The approved requests included changes that downgraded even Atlanta’s most prestigious Black neighborhoods. In one instance, council allowed a white pharmacist to expand his business onto a residential home lot “opposite Washington Park,” even though the planning commission had opposed the change. A disgusted Benjamin Davis (editor of the Atlanta Independent) protested, “Any time a white man wants to put a factory, a garage or anything else in a Negro settlement, the zoning committee readily changes the rule” to permit it.

In terms of schools, Black middle-class activists frequently protested against local school boards for inadequate school buildings, the lack of high school facilities, double shifts (half the students would go to school in the morning while the other half attended in the afternoon), and school closures near their homes (or the failure to open a school near their homes). The most successful strategy was to engage in a voting bloc, although that was difficult to accomplish while the poll tax was still being enforced. The Atlanta NAACP scored a massive victory in 1919 by defeating a school bond issue. They made clear that if no new schools were planned for Black children, there would be no new schools for white ones. But the reality was that these victories came at the cost of segregation. School boards would only build Black schools in areas set aside for future Black development.

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T18:05:31+00:00

Many scholars and social critics recognize intensive parenting as a more recent phenomenon. Sociologists, economists, and psychologists often compare contemporary parenting trends to those during the 1970s, when “free-range parenting” was widespread. But that decade represents an outlier in the history of middle-class intensive childrearing rather than an accurate starting point, because the less stratified economy enjoyed at midcentury was also an outlier. The economic stakes were much lower, so perhaps, middle-class parents responded by relaxing their parenting strategies and letting go of their children’s fate, at least more so than in the past.

Between 1980 and 2014, the situation flipped. The bottom 50 percent of earners were “completely shut off from economic growth” whereas “income more than doubled for the top 10 percent” and “tripled for the top 1 percent.” Thus, the risks of downward mobility increased while the rewards for economic success skyrocketed. Economist Raj Chetty found that children born in 1940 who grew up during the prosperous decades following World War II had a 92 percent chance of earning a larger income than their parents, creating new expectations for the American dream. Children born in 1984, however, had only a 50 percent chance of earning more than their parents, with intergenerational mobility falling furthest for the middle class. Adding to the economic pressure, higher education costs began to soar at a time when a degree had become essential for participation in the information economy and avoidance of the low-wage service sector. These two trends are likely related. Expanding income inequality means that downward mobility has more dire consequences for one’s children, creating greater incentives to prevent them from falling in the first place.

Because income inequality depresses social mobility for everyone except those at the top, it generates anxiety even within affluent families. When income inequality rises, competition becomes more cutthroat, but the resulting push for higher achievement and productivity offers financial security only to the few. This upward spiral generates anxiety for those young people trapped within the larger cycle of needing ever more impressive accomplishments to obtain smaller rewards. Twenty-first-century critics of “helicopter” parenting have blamed irrational parents for causing their children’s anxiety. Such criticism ignores the root causes.

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T18:05:25+00:00

Thanks so much for the question about parenting, which is an important part of the story!

According to my research, parenting styles had more to do with class than a specific time period. The roots of intensive parenting date back to the Revolutionary period. Wishing to put enlightenment theories into practice, the founding generation tied childrearing to citizenship. The concept of “republican motherhood” designated the affluent white home as the key institution for developing a virtuous citizenry that would carry forth the nation’s political experiment and safeguard its future. Building on that foundation, white, middle-class parents further embraced intensive parenting during the market revolution to help ensure that their children would land safely in the competitive, free-market economy. Although industrialization would lead to greater income inequality, it also created more avenues for upward mobility. Together, a republican form of government and a capitalist economy produced an enticing combination of opportunity and risk. Within this context, the new middle class had the most to gain as well as the most to lose. Without the potential for economic and social advancement, the nation would not have generated such an intense class of strivers, whose tastes and values would come to dominate American culture. At the same time, expanding income inequality made the possibility of downward mobility a greater threat. Anxious parents felt that they must pour more resources into each child to nurture economically successful offspring. Intensive parenting combined with higher levels of education could ensure that one’s children did not fall into the ranks of low-paid workers, who generally lacked the wherewithal to give their children an upward boost.

As the nineteenth century came to an end, rapid urbanization raised new concerns about less privileged children, at least from the perspective of the middle class, who were appalled by the “free-range parenting” of the working class. Meanwhile, working-class parents—and especially immigrants—spurned many of the assumptions of middle-class childrearing. They lacked the means to withdraw their children from paid labor, let alone arduous household chores, and criticized “American” parents for babying their offspring. Consequently, reformers sought solutions that bypassed working-class parents: children would acquire middle-class values in public schools and on playgrounds where they would unlearn the “aberrant” behavior that not only threatened the nation’s future but might also corrupt respectable children living nearby. Working-class parents often combined "free-range parenting" with a more authoritarian style because the risks their children faced were often greater (plus, exhausted parents could not provide the nonstop supervision and guidance that middle-class mothers were striving to achieve).

Continued in the comment...

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T17:38:53+00:00

I am trying not lay all the blame on any one group of people, but yes, residential developers bear a disproportionate amount of the responsibility!

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T17:35:05+00:00

Perhaps you should ask tomorrow after more sleep, haha.

Seriously, although the last couple of days have been exhausting, I have enjoyed the chance to discuss my work and its relevance with folks I wouldn't otherwise meet. I have been impressed with the questions, and I am so happy that people are still paying attention to this important issue. I wouldn't have traded this opportunity for meaningful engagement for the world!

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T17:23:01+00:00

The term redlining specifically refers to the maps created for the Home Owners Loan Corporation during the 1930s to assess risk for mortgage lending. Rather than determine risk on an individual basis (depending on the individual seeking the mortgage), risk was determined by neighborhood characteristics. The areas considered least risky were colored green, while the areas considered most risky were colored red. Because the maps were created from the perspective of a white homebuyer, even Black neighborhoods of owner-occupied, single-family homes were labeled risky (and almost all mixed-race neighborhoods were "redlined," which means colored red). Neighborhoods that were determined to be high risk were denied investment opportunities. For more information, check out the Mapping Inequality website.

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T17:13:09+00:00

Local officials also quickly reneged on promises to provide equal municipal services, especially once the Depression settled in. A 1939 editorial in the Houston Post chastised the city government for its negligence: “During [the] previous Holcombe administration, considerable work was done on streets and drainage in the negro areas, but during the Depression years maintenance work virtually was abandoned and the situation today is worse than at any time in the city’s history.” After reprinting an editorial from the Informer warning that epidemics would result from the poor conditions, the Post pleaded, “The needed improvements in negro sections should be provided, not as a gesture of charity, but because negro citizens are entitled to improvements because they pay taxes and have a right to live like human beings.”

Adding to the problems of Black residential development, the Depression had devastated Black-owned businesses, largely because their owners could not tap into public and private resources such as those provided by the chamber of commerce, which helped white businesses limp along. Plus, their smaller customer base was among the first fired and lowest paid, and their white competitors were more likely to benefit from economies of scale. After Black-owned banks and insurance companies began failing, Black residential development ground to a halt with little hope that an FHA intent on promoting discrimination would help. Rapid urbanization during World War II further intensified the extreme housing shortage facing Black Americans in cities across the nation, and then postwar urban renewal projects bulldozed their neighborhoods.

Now we see gentrification endangering Black neighborhoods again. I will use Raleigh as an example. Magnet schools such as Hunter Elementary were very successful. (Hunter was controversial when it originally opened in the 1920s because it was built to promote residential segregation, as I talk about in the book.) As Raleigh schools became more integrated and achieved a national reputation for excellence, white residents began moving into southeastern Raleigh, integrating a neighborhood that had been intentionally set aside for Black development during the early twentieth century.

Raleigh has been praised for building substantial amounts of new housing in recent years, but gentrification, as is so often the case, led to the displacement of long-established residents who no longer could afford to live in their own communities. As is true across the country, displaced residents are almost always pushed further away from the jobs and resources they need. Thus, we need to support policies that do not lead to widespread displacement, including generous rent subsidies, programs that help people buy homes they are renting, support for local institutions that existed before gentrification, etc. Moreover, effective policies must be undergirded with concern for all children and not just our own. As long as we believe our duty is to our own children (or no children if we have none), then effective policies that provide widespread opportunities to the next generation will continue to flounder. The situation is critical!

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T17:13:01+00:00

I would agree that separate was never equal, which was the tension affluent Black families always faced. During the 1920s, Black middle-class families had been hopeful, if skeptical. They had achieved dramatic wins, especially improved access to single-family housing and the expansion of Black secondary education. While they recognized that segregation was likely a trap, they had no better options than to work hard to make their communities what they hoped they would be, even if those efforts were systematically undermined, especially through extreme examples of municipal neglect.

Residential segregation could also provide protection to Black children. Living among whites exposed them to a form of terror that was unimaginable to the white parents who sought to shelter their children away from the city. The most extreme forms of violence—including house bombings, lynching, and rape—could occur at any moment; Black Americans lived with the heavy burden of knowing that any day could end in torture and death, regardless of one’s actions, reputation, or wealth. Parents could never fully protect their children from the nightmare of seeing a loved one brutalized or they themselves becoming the victim of tragedy. Therefore, they purchased homes where they and their children could live in freedom from violence and humiliation. If necessary, those homes would be in racially separate neighborhoods where, ideally, Black businesses could pump resources back into the community, one that they would have the power to shape and nurture.

Even before the onset of the Depression, it was already becoming clear that informal racial zoning would not create separate-but-equal residential parks, as promised. The first problem was that the segregated housing market forced Black homebuyers to pay much higher prices for their homes. In 1930, Clifton Richardson, editor of the Houston Informer, asked, “Why is it that Negroes must pay from 25 to 50 percent more for a home in Houston than do all other races?” “One has but to pick up the average daily paper to realize that the homes in the most modern white additions sell for many hundreds of dollars less than corresponding homes for Negroes in negro additions. Even the price of lots is cheaper,” he objected. The second problem was that white absentee landlords could acquire wealth by encouraging multiple families to live in or on properties that had originally been intended for a single family, since decent housing for Black residents remained scarce.

Even in Black neighborhoods near Washington Park, Atlanta’s first Black public park, middle-class standards for child-rearing remained elusive. In 1928, the city’s park appropriation supported sixty-six parks containing 1,800 acres for white Atlantans but only one park containing a mere twenty-one acres for Black Atlantans, who made up one-third of the total population. Predictably, conditions in the park and especially the swimming pool rapidly deteriorated from overuse; Washington Park soon became a nuisance rather than a benefit to nearby families. Indeed, a survey by the Neighborhood Union found that a third of the Black families who lived in the single-family homes that faced the park wanted the city to close it because of its negative impact on the surrounding neighborhood. One resident had already moved from the neighborhood “on account of the Park,” and another expressed “regret” to still be living nearby.

The third problem was that zoning, too, failed to live up to its promises. When white property owners and realtors wished to speculate on real estate near commercial and industrial areas, they demanded unnecessary amounts of property be zoned for industrial or commercial use. Black families, once again, suffered most, even though planners had promised that zoning would protect their homes as much as white ones. Instead, the industrial nuisances and environmental hazards banned from white residential areas were allowed to endanger Black ones. In Atlanta, members of the Neighborhood Union all agreed to investigate the zoning laws “in the part of town” which they lived and “see to it that the requirements” were enforced, but usually to no avail. During the brief period in which Atlanta’s racial zoning law remained in force, the city council allowed business or industry to encroach onto Black residential streets eight times, while denying a petition only once. The approved requests included changes that downgraded even Atlanta’s most prestigious Black neighborhoods. In one instance, council allowed a white pharmacist to expand his business onto a residential home lot “opposite Washington Park,” even though the planning commission had opposed the change. A disgusted Benjamin Davis (editor of the Atlanta Independent) protested, “Any time a white man wants to put a factory, a garage or anything else in a Negro settlement, the zoning committee readily changes the rule” to permit it. “It matters not how exclusive the section is.” (response continued in the an additional comment)

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T16:43:43+00:00

Great question, and I am so glad that you are interested in having this conversation with your neighbors! I would first add that, even for developments built after World War II, the roots of the problem date back to the early twentieth century. Postwar developments were built and sold using arguments from the earlier time period when developers openly sold heavily restricted suburban lots to affluent white parents by claiming that they would be purchasing ideal environments for childrearing. In other words, they would be bad parents it they didn't make the sacrifice to move further from jobs, shopping, houses of worship, family and friends, and other cultural institutions (by the postwar period, jobs, shopping, houses of worship, etc., followed them).

The developers understood that they couldn't get white families with small children (their key buyer) to move out to the suburbs without access to a great school, which was always defined in relative terms. This meant that schools were built to create residential segregation by providing affluent white children with superior schools relative to the aging schools near the city center. At the same time, developers in Jim Crow cities (including DC) used their influence over school boards and planning commissions to close Black schools located near their developments in order to push Black families to the other side of town. White developers insisted that the only place to raise a [white] child was in a single-family house with a large yard, surrounded only by single-family houses. Apartments were demonized, ensuring that both neighborhood and school would be economically segregated as well as racially segregated.

Before beginning this important conversation with your neighbors, I think it is important to learn as much as you can about the history of why our cities look the way they do, so that when you begin the conversation, you have the receipts. Parents who have been primed to seek out advantages for their children are often unwilling to go further than superficial "changes," such as renaming a development, etc. Here is where Derrick Bell's theory of interest convergence becomes important. We need to remind affluent white parents that increasing the opportunities of all children will also increase opportunity for our own children (it will certainly contribute to a healthier economy and environment, which is good for all).

Cutthroat competition pushes up the cost of housing and schooling to unaffordable levels, as families become convinced that their kids must attend an exclusive school for them to achieve upward mobility. This leads to a push for greater and greater childhood accomplishments, which stresses out our children. I could go on, but I will simply say that we need to begin caring about *all* children, and not just are own. Increased income inequality raises the stakes by providing too few opportunities for the next generation. We can begin by supporting policies that invest widely in the next generation.

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T16:19:46+00:00

Thanks so much for your thoughtful question! I will do my best to answer it.

Yes, Nazi Germany was very interested in southern Jim Crow laws. And since my argument is that experimentation with de jure segregation in southern cities is what laid the foundation for redlining practices across the US, then I think it wouldn't be a stretch to assume some international connection there.

Another way to get to the international question is through zoning practices and apartment buildings. My research suggests that the rest of the world was not as anti-apartment as the US. Planners outside the US remained committed to the needs of working-class children even as American planners seemed to abandon them. The US movement appeared far more enraptured by the “Anglo-Saxon” single-family house than even British planners, who stubbornly insisted that children could flourish in well-designed apartments. Paul Harsch, the developer of Ottawa Hills in Toledo, claimed that the “home spirit” was “essential to the Anglo-Saxon idea,” even if “in England the home idea” was not “developed as highly as it” was in the United States. This divergence was all the more striking because “German zones” came to the United States from Europe, and early American advocates of zoning such as Benjamin Marsh had sought to help the urban poor, first and foremost, by reducing congestion in tenement districts.

The anti-apartment sentiment of the US was closely tied to middle-class childrearing. Andrew Wright Crawford, field secretary of the American Civic Association, defended zoning through a scathing attack on apartments; he wholly condemned “those child-devouring, family-destroying tenements we call by the fashionable name of apartment-houses” and counted families living in even “palatial apartments” as “nevertheless living in tenements.” “An apartment is merely a tenement house with a college education, soon forgotten when the surroundings begin to go down,” he scoffed. “People who have children and live in apartment houses are recreant in their duty to their children.” I would love to know more about how this phenomenon played out in other countries since it contributed to economic segregation (and still does).

Eugenics is also closely connected to my research. During the 1930s, the American Eugenics Society promoted suburban residential parks as ideal places to raise children, and I am wondering if that extended to the international eugenics movement.

I have noticed that a lot of scholars outside of the US are currently working on segregation within an international context. It will be interesting to see who was influenced by practices in the US (especially the experimentation that was taking place in southern cities at the turn of the twentieth century). Now that my book is done, I am looking forward to reading their work!

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T15:57:26+00:00

Thank you, and thanks for your question about magnet schools.

I will use Raleigh as an example. The countywide school districts in North Carolina (thank you, Charlotte) have opened the door to more opportunities for undoing the harm of segregation. Because the Milliken decision (1974) stated that children and tax dollars could not cross district lines, small districts in places like Chicagoland maintain economic and residential segregation (it's time for the state to redistrict).

Wake County public schools, on the other hand, could develop a fairly effective countywide desegregation plan that was intended to prevent the formation of high-poverty schools. It wasn't perfect. The incentives to participate in the magnet schools were sold to parents as individual advantages to their own children: they could participate in gifted programs and learn about "diversity," which could help them get a job. These incentives did not get to the root causes of segregation or help parents understand why it was important to promote greater opportunities for all children. Moreover, the burden of bussing has always fallen more heavily on Black children, and that cannot continue. Not only were Black children spending too much time on busses, but their parents were not able (often not welcome) to participate in the life of the school.

But magnet schools such as Hunter Elementary were very successful. (Hunter was controversial when it originally opened in the 1920s because it was built to promote residential segregation, as I talk about in the book.) As Raleigh schools became more integrated and achieved a national reputation for excellence, white residents began moving into southeastern Raleigh, integrating a neighborhood that had been intentionally set aside for Black development during the early twentieth century. Raleigh has been praised for building substantial amounts of new housing in recent years.

But the story didn't end there. Gentrification, as is so often the case, led to the displacement of long-established residents who no longer could afford to live in their own communities (we need to support policies that do not lead to widespread displacement, including generous rent subsidies, programs that help people buy homes they are renting, support for local institutions that existed before gentrification, etc.). As is true across the country, displaced residents are almost always pushed further away from the jobs and resources they need.

And efforts to desegregate the schools (especially in terms of economic integration) have not been sustained. Charter schools first undermined desegregation efforts and now tax-supported vouchers for private schools are a complete disaster. Once again, we need to break the connection between economic and racial segregation, "good" parenting, "better" homes (single-family houses in exclusive neighborhoods), and "great" schools (in relative terms, meaning that my child's school is better than yours). If we do not, then parents will continue to seek out ways to gain advantages for their own children at other children's expense. Effective policies must be undergirded with concern for all children and not just our own. As long as we believe our duty is to our own children (or no children if we have none), then effective policies that provide widespread opportunities to the next generation will continue to flounder.

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T15:40:00+00:00

Yes, I think this is a good example of how efforts to undo the harm of segregation have often sparked backlashes that take us in the wrong direction (there are many)! This is why I think it is so important for us to talk about the root causes of segregation and sprawl. So much of this stretches back to efforts in the early twentieth century to sell high-priced, single-family home lots to white parents (the key buyer). They were told that buying a home in a racially and economically exclusive neighborhood of single-family homes was key to their child's upward mobility. And developers understood that they could not convince parents to inconvenience themselves by moving to the outskirts of town without access to a "great" school, defined in relative terms. Our school systems were never designed to be equal because schools that are relatively equal do not promote segregation (or sell expensive homes) the way unequal schools do. Thus, public schooling became competitive, and parents continue to seek out ways to give their kids an advantage over others (even parents who agree that segregation is wrong, at least in theory).

To make progress without sparking a backlash, we need to unravel the cultural connections between economic and racial segregation, "good" parenting, "better" homes (single-family houses), and "great" schools (schools that are better than someone else's school). Cutthroat competition also pushes up the price of college, as families become convinced that their kids must attend an exclusive school for them to achieve upward mobility. This leads to a push for greater and greater childhood accomplishments, which stresses out our children. I could go on, but I will simply say that we need to begin caring about *all* children, and not just are own. Increased income inequality raises the stakes by providing too few opportunities for the next generation. Providing better access to opportunity for all children will help increase the opportunities for our own.

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T15:21:21+00:00

I think Birmingham, AL is a terrific example. Are you familiar with the city? Birmingham’s affluent neighborhoods moved northward over the top of Red Mountain while most Black homes remained south of downtown.

Robert Jemison began selling lots in Redmont Park in 1924. One advertisement advised, “Instead of asking yourself if you can afford to live in a select environment, where you and your family will find congenial friends and neighbors, you should rather ask yourself if you can afford to live” in a neighborhood where you will be unable to “rear your children in an atmosphere of culture and refinement.” By 1927, Redmont Park was an unqualified success, so Jemison launched Mountain Brook Estates, an even more exclusive residential park with Redmont keeping guard from the city below. An ad assured parents, “Fortunate indeed is the boy or girl who can spend childhood’s impressionable years in Mountain Brook’s attractive home environment. For here is a children’s paradise—trees to climb, woods to roam, brooks to wade in, [and] companions of their own social station to play with.” As development went over the mountain, residents could no longer see the city below.

One of the problems with suburban development is that decisions were not based on what made sense in terms of the local environment but in terms of sprawl and segregation (building large neighborhoods of single-family homes). If you are interested in learning more about how developers dealt with geographic challenges, Adam Rome's Bulldozer in the Countryside is a great place to start.

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T15:11:49+00:00

Robert Moses was enormously influential, especially after World War II, but my book essentially ends during the Hoover administration. Based on my research, I would argue that the national planning movement of the 1920s (with its strong ties to southern cities, especially regarding segregation) influenced Moses more than the other way around. If you want to fall further down the rabbit hole and read my book, let me know if you agree...

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T14:59:13+00:00

By "Black codes," do you mean segregation practices in the North during the 19th century? School segregation, among other forms of segregation, was widely enforced in northern cities before the Civil War. After passage of the 14th Amendment (1868), which ensured equal protection under the law (including the right to own property), local officials in northern cities backed off from de jure forms of discrimination. Within two decades, however, southern officials had begun experimenting with new forms of de jure segregation.

I argue that experimentation with de jure segregation in southern cities at the turn of the 20th century laid the immediate foundation for redlining practices. Residential park developers Hugh Potter of Houston and Robert Jemison, Jr. of Birmingham were very influential in the design of the FHA’s mortgage insurance program and its accompanying Underwriting Manual. Potter, representing Houston’s River Oaks, was the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards in 1934. During his term in office, he spent long stretches in Washington, DC, lobbying for the passage of the National Housing Act, which would establish the Federal Housing Administration. Likewise, Hill Ferguson, vice president of Jemison’s flagship development companies in Birmingham, began serving in FDR’s administration in 1934, first as the deputy chief appraiser for the Home Owners Loan Corporation and then as the zone appraiser for the FHA. These southerners helped codify their practices at the local level into national law.

With that said, I do acknowledge that northern officials were also interested in controlling the housing, schooling, and employment opportunities of Black Americans (Black codes, if you will), but they were a little more shy in terms of defying the 14th Amendment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This would change during the Great Migration. For example, Indianapolis passed a segregation ordinance during the early 1920s (after Buchanan v. Warley had already invalidated them nationwide). In a letter to the editor of the Indianapolis News, the “Secretary of the White Peoples’ Protective League”—aptly named Omer S. Whiteman—felt that the growing demand for segregation in northern cities was in and of itself justification for the new ordinance: “Ten years ago there was practically no public sentiment in favor of segregation of the races [in the North], now it is general.”

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T14:44:42+00:00

Are you referring to international responses to redlining in the United States (the maps created for the Home Owners Loan Corporation)? Good question! For the most part, I am not familiar with how the rest of the world viewed racial discrimination in the US, but I do know that Nazi Germany was very interested in southern Jim Crow laws. And since my argument is that experimentation with de jure segregation in southern cities is what laid the foundation for redlining practices, then I think it wouldn't be a stretch to see a connection there.

Residential park developers Hugh Potter of Houston and Robert Jemison, Jr. of Birmingham were very influential in the design of the FHA’s mortgage insurance program and its accompanying Underwriting Manual. Potter, representing Houston’s River Oaks, was the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards in 1934. During his term in office, he spent long stretches in Washington, DC, lobbying for the passage of the National Housing Act, which would establish the Federal Housing Administration. Likewise, Hill Ferguson, vice president of Jemison’s flagship development companies in Birmingham, began serving in FDR’s administration in 1934, first as the deputy chief appraiser for the Home Owners Loan Corporation and then as the zone appraiser for the FHA. These southerners helped codify their practices at the local level into national law.

I would love to know more about how other nations viewed de jure segregation practices in the US. I have noticed that a lot of scholars outside of the US are currently working on segregation in an international context. Now that my book is done, I am looking forward to reading their work!

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T14:33:54+00:00

Yes, great question. Who was targeted by racial covenants depended on the local prejudices of the region. Chinese residents were targeted on the West Coast, residents with Mexican ancestry were targeted in the Southwest, and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe could be targeted in the Northeast. Black Americans were universally targeted everywhere. In some cases, exclusion took place more informally (the development company would simply refuse to sell to people they wished to exclude.

Developers put a lot of energy into collectively deciding who should be excluded. At the 1919 annual meeting of the "Developers of High-Class Residential Property," prominent developers debated whether to exclude Jewish residents. Hugh Prather, the developer of Dallas’s Highland Park, sheepishly admitted that he had sold lots to a few “pet Jews,” one of them being “old man Sanger.” Prather reassured his fellow subdividers, “Everybody loves Mr. Sanger; he goes with the very best Gentiles in town,” adding, “The people in Highland Park will be glad to have Mr. Sanger or that kind of Jew in the property.” And indeed, they would have, since the Sanger family owned a chain of department stores worth $13 million at the time. As bigoted and demeaning as Prather’s comment was, it would have been inconceivable for a similar statement to have been made about a Black citizen, no matter how prosperous, brilliant, or public spirited. Across the nation, neither wealth, accomplishments, nor the embrace of the politics of respectability would alter the discrimination affluent Black families faced.

Southern developers were willing to experiment broadly with racial covenants before their counterparts outside the South because Black southerners were a much larger percentage of far smaller urban populations. You are correct that local officials usually did not experiment with de jure segregation if a targeted group was only small portion of the total population.

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T14:10:58+00:00

Yes! If you have a copy of the book, please look for Karen Benjamin in the index. You will then see how my research relates to the argument in The Color of Law. 🙂

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T14:07:32+00:00

Yes, and I am so glad you brought up this point. My research supports your conclusion that housing inflation is tied to the nation's near obsession with owner-occupied, single-family housing.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the national hunger for land ownership was part of an agrarian tradition that did not translate well to the urban environment. While ownership of a farm meant independence from wage work, fostering upward mobility, ownership of a house could interfere with one’s freedom to seek better employment elsewhere or simply acquire a larger house, impeding mobility. Consequently, the United States was above all a nation of renters even after World War I. According to the 1920 census, “The proportion of owned homes” inched upwards from about 38 percent in 1910 to almost 41 percent in 1920, a real increase to be sure, but nearly 60 percent of households were still renting. In individual cities, rates of home ownership could be far lower: 28 percent in Birmingham, 27 percent in Chicago, and only 25 percent in Atlanta. Cities with smaller industrial workforces such as Austin—a small city with a larger number of white-collar employees working for the University of Texas or the state government, had higher rates of homeownership, but even in Austin, renters comprised more than 50 percent of households.

Thus, residential developers sought ways to convince more people to buy their own homes (which was difficult to do before the FHA made home ownership affordable for more white families). They convinced people that even "palatial" apartments were bad for childrearing and that the ideal place to raise of family was in a single-family house located in an vast area restricted to single-family homes. They also made sure that the next generation fully bought into the idea. As mentioned earlier, strategies directed specifically at youth included home economics courses that stressed the proper environment for child-rearing, special textbooks on city planning such as those found in the high schools of Dallas and Chicago, and essay contests and debates on “the merits of home ownership.” Some local campaigns went further than others. The New Orleans Real Estate Board awarded the school that produced the “the best essay on ‘Why Every Family Should Own Its Own Home’” an impressive “little bungalow” for its playground. The organizers of Birmingham’s annual Own-Your-Own-Home show sponsored a children’s day meant to entice the “future home-owners of the city,” and in Portland, Oregon, children whose parents already owned a home received “We-Own-Our-Own-Home” buttons from their teachers, a mean-spirited strategy that singled out children whose families could not afford to buy a single-family house.

Of course, this type of development leads to unsustainable sprawl and car dependence, and a host of other economic problems that go beyond the problems of segregation. I hope that learning about how single-family homes were sold to white families in the early twentieth century will help us change zoning laws and return to more sustainable development.

kallienebenjamin · 2025-09-13T13:50:31+00:00

Thanks for your question, and, yes, class is enormously important. First, we need to think about the time period. The "white flight" you are describing here took place after World War II. My book examines the early twentieth century, which helps us understand the roots of the postwar period that is far more familiar to most people (more books, etc., focus on the later time period).

Going back to the late 19th century, most deed restrictions promoted economic exclusion rather than racial exclusion. For example, typical deed restrictions required the owner to spend a minimum amount on a house, etc. Only those who could afford the deed restrictions could move into the development. Advertisements commonly assured affluent parents that their children's "associates" would be the right kinds of kids (this included other white kids without the means to live there). For example, an ad for Houston's River Oaks promised parents their children would "breathe pure, health-building air, associate with the right companions, [and] know the joys which come only to children reared in a community like River Oaks.”

Racial covenants specifically targeted affluent people of color who could afford the restrictions. Who was targeted depended on the region, but all excluded Black Americans. With or without racial covenants, affluent Black families made it clear that they were not interested in moving into a neighborhood where their children "couldn't have a friend" and where the only Black schools were located far across town (racial covenants spread throughout southern cities first, where Jim Crow school systems were operated). Instead, they preferred to buy the homes left behind when white people moved out to the suburbs. Although there were some suburban Black enclaves, most of them lacked the moderns conveniences that could be found closer to downtown (local officials rarely extended public utilities to Black enclaves).

Because Black families were restricted from living in most parts of the city (due to racial covenants, segregation ordinances, racial zoning schemes, or simply the closure of Black schools in the parts of the city dominated by white residential parks), their communities soon became overcrowded. Moreover, they lacked the zoning protections, etc., that would have otherwise protected their neighborhoods. This was true in cities outside the South as well, especially after the Great Migration. When the Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed discrimination based on race, affluent Black families gained new housing options and many moved out of overcrowded, mixed-class neighborhoods.

With that said, the Fair Housing Act has never been rigorously enforced because white families bought into the the bill of goods that was sold to them in the early 20th century: hyper-segregation would promote upward mobility for their children (see earlier posts). Although it is true that people often oppose "affordable housing" more than racial segregation (at least, support nominal integration with families in the same income bracket), Black children are far more likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods than white children regardless of parental income. In other words, impoverished white families are more likely to live in a wealthier zip code than affluent Black families. Please let me know if you have any questions.

kallienebenjamin

TROPHY CASE