The Great Migration Continues
The Great Migration was the second, larger wave of black migration from southern states to northern and western states, after the Exodusters movement. The Great Migration lasted by some accounts through the 1950s, as black families were still leaving the south for the north.
Redlining
This was the time of redlining, when federal officials from the Home Owners' Loan Corporation graded some Topeka neighborhoods as "Hazardous" or "Declining," and discouraged banks from providing loans for any home purchases in those areas. Many of the neighborhoods degraded by the HOLC ratings were home to black families, Latino families, other immigrants, and poor white families. What happened next shouldn't surprise anyone. Investment in those neighborhoods has stalled for 80 years. Today, these neighborhoods still suffer from depressed home values and aging infrastructure.
All of North Topeka, most of central Topeka, and almost all of East Topeka were in the Hazardous or Declining categories in 1940. Only a few neighborhoods in Topeka were graded either "Still Desirable" or "Best." The auditors of the HOLC shaped the future of Topeka and helped propel the population outward from downtown.
https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=5/39.1/-94.58
A terrible followup to the redlining declarations was the city's comprehensive plan, started in 1940 but completed after World War II. In 1945, Bartholomew and Associates published their Comprehensive Plan for the City of Topeka and Shawnee County, Kansas. While the 200-page plan was probably lauded as progressive in its day, today it reads as overtly racist.
For example, the Bartholomew plan propose a "Minimum Housing Standards Ordinance," which ends with several suggested avenues of correction and enforcement of properties not meeting the proposed standards. In reality, these were avenues to push the poor, immigrants, and BIPOC into the criminal-legal system.
Today's analog to this proposal, the City Code Compliance department, is perhaps the most hated office of the City of Topeka, and there have been occasions in Topeka where code compliance officers have been shot at. Sacajawea and the Mandans might have been wise to consider Lewis and Clark to be code compliance officers. They arrived unannounced and unwelcome on foreign land, claiming to own it, then proceeded to judge the common standard of living to be insufficient (read: incongruent with western tastes), and threatened the lives and livelihoods of the people therein.
Everyone deserves to live in a safe and healthy home. But if someone does not currently live in a safe home, do they need a letter of enforcement from the government telling them of their faults? Or do they need help?
Also in the Bartholomew plan, the consultants suggest several solutions for improving housing availability in Topeka. One proposal is to bar the poor from owning property and requiring them to rent. Is that not a regurgitation of slavery? To suggest that some people are not good enough to own anything, and that they should be prevented from doing so?
Comprehensive Plan https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015020942101
The neighborhoods declared "hazardous" and "declining" are still struggling today because of decisions made in the 1930s. In the City of Topeka's Neighborhood Health Map from 2017, all of North Topeka is either "Intensive Care" or "At Risk"; all of downtown is "At Risk"; and central-east Topeka is also "At Risk." These maps are compiled from current data points of poverty, Part I Crimes per 100 persons, single family homeownership, and boarded houses.
If Topeka, or any North American city, had followed a traditional development pattern throughout the 20th century, we may have seen a slow change in these neighborhoods - even a transition for some of these families out of poverty and into wealth and opportunity. But the baby boom after World War II completely changed the country's white leaders' goals for urban development.
Black family wealth and its barriers between WWI and WWII
After the civil war and emancipation, black Americans started the slow climb toward family wealth. By moving to safer states and cities, they could start new ventures - farms, families, churches, and businesses. The critical element for independence would be land. This would allow freed people to use their own labor to build their own wealth.
But it wasn't easy.
Northerners may have seen the Civil War as the chance to finally make the South reckon with its problem of people as property. Lincoln issued the Emanicipation Proclamation as a strategic move, hoping to deplete the south of its primary labor force. That document exempts the four states that had not seceded but still allowed for people to be owned as slaves - Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware - so it wasn't truly a national emancipation. Not until the end of the war and the ratification of the 13th Amendment was slavery truly over as a private enterprise.
In another strategic move at the end of the war, northern general William Sherman issued Field Order 15, commandeering 400,000 acres of coastal land from the southern states, from Charleston, South Carolina to St. John's River in Florida, to be given to free black Americans. This move, later known as "40 acres and a mule," had been organized by a group of 20 black ministers from the Savannah, Georgia area, and was seen by the war effort as another way to splinter southern power. Word of the program spread nationally, and by June of 1865, as many as 40,000 Black Americans had moved to the area and claimed their 40-acre plots.
It was a perfect opportunity: the war was over, slavery was over, and the Union had righted the wrongs of generations of southern slavery. Free people were starting their new lives on their own land, and could work their way into prosperity.
But it was a short-lived dream. President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor (and a sympathizer with the South), overturned the order in the fall of 1865, and reverted the land back to its original owners.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/ https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/shermans-field-order-no-15
Blockbusting in Baltimore and elsewhere
Land is one of the most important fixed assets Americans use to build security and accumulate wealth, but black families have been locked out of many opportunities to own. When those opportunities have arisen, white Americans have not reacted from their freedom-loving hearts. They have been scared witless. This fear led to policies like redlining and racial covenants on deeds, preventing black or immigrant families from buying this or that house. But it had unintended consequences. As Antero Pietila recounts in "Not in my Neighborhood," this fear was a capital opportunity for enterprising real estate salespeople. If a shrewd businessman could buy a house in a declining white neighborhood and sell it to a black family, the remaining white families would start to sell, too. The salespeople could buy those other houses for cheap, and sell them at above-market rates to black families. Because black families were prohibited from securing loans for homes, they were often paying cash. Buying a house in a neighborhood like that might have been a big opportunity for a black family to be closer to resources within the city, or to be able to claim a certain social status by citing their street or neighborhood. White families fled, black families moved in, real estate sharks got rich, and cities couldn't keep up with the change. This practice later became known as blockbusting.
great review of Color of Law
At last its on paper for the doubters to see!
Finally, somebody takes the time to confirm what many of us had always suspected, that is was the law that prevented integration. I grew up one of the all black communities the author talked about. Made up of temporary housing left over the WW2. My Father a returning war vet, tried, again and again, to get a VA loan to get a house the only places where the houses were, the white communities where he watched white vets get their loans and move out years before. Finally my parents saved their money and checked out several places (By then fair housing was the law in California but it did nothing about federal law forbidding financing), they found a white owner not only willing to sell but loaned them part of the down payment (this was in the mid 60's, 20 years after the end of WW2). Not only did that owner catch flack but the other white neighbors were not happy with us moving in, one of whom was an officer...in the German army during the war(so an African-American vet can't move into a neighborhood that a former enemy can - just because he's white?).
We were "lucky" there was no violence, many neighbors just ostracized us, and a few wanted to buy us out. Other Black families who moved out found them all put into the same block. Imagine in the 60's in an era where there was no internet, faxes, bulletin boards, nor large realtors like Century 21. Realtors were all local, and territorial and yet they all decided to forgo competition and agreed to block place all the black families in one block where they can be "monitored".
Every time I hear someone spread that myth "Oh Black people don't want to move into white neighborhoods because they love being among their own" I straighten them out, African Americans never had a choice!