Housing Segregation

Since the end of the 19th century, housing in American cities has been starkly segregated by race. Although the means used to achieve housing segregation changed over these years—shifting from public policies such as racial zoning to private practices such as restrictive covenants, real estate discrimination, and orchestrated campaigns of harassment and violence—the end result remained constant. Whites and nonwhites, particularly African Americans, have lived in separate and often unequal sections of cities.

Housing segregation first became prominent in cities across the country around the beginning of the 20th century. As late as the mid-19th century, blacks and whites lived together in the cities of the North and South. In the antebellum South, the intermingling of white and black residences had been dictated by the demands of slave owners, who wanted their slaves [Page 360]kept close at hand and, thus, under constant watch. In the North, meanwhile, the black population of most cities represented such a small fraction of the overall population that intermingling of the races went largely unnoticed. With the demise of slavery in the South and the resulting mass migration of large numbers of African Americans to the industrial North, however, both regions embarked on a new era in which housing patterns became much more rigidly segregated.

The means used to create and then continue the practices of housing discrimination and segregation have evolved over the course of the 20th century. Initially, residential segregation was promoted as the official policy of municipal governments, which used various forms of racial zoning to separate the races. Baltimore, Maryland pioneered the institution of housing segregation legislation with a 1910 ordinance that provided for the designation of all-white and all-black city blocks. Other municipal governments followed Baltimore's example, and similar residential segregation measures soon appeared in cities to the south and west. When Louisville, Kentucky adopted such a segregation ordinance in 1914, however, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) challenged the law in court. In the 1917 case of Buchanan v. Warley, the U.S. Supreme Court held that such racial zoning was unconstitutional. The right to sell and own private property, the Court ruled unanimously, could not be limited by government at any level.

With cities and states barred from enacting public policies of residential segregation, those who sought to prevent residential integration turned to private methods. Chief among these was the racially restrictive covenant. Originally, occupancy restrictions had been written only into the deeds for individual parcels of property, mandating that such property could not be transferred to a specific racial minority, religious group, or combination of both. With the abolition of state-sponsored residential segregation, however, white homeowners banded together, often at the urging of real estate agencies and under the leadership of a local homeowners' association, to combine individual deed restrictions in a broader covenant that covered an entire street, block, or neighborhood. The restrictive covenant represented a contractual agreement in which property owners promised that they would not allow a particular group—most commonly, African Americans—to own, occupy, or rent their property. As covenants spread across the country, the NAACP once again went to court to challenge the foundations of housing segregation. In the 1926 case of Corrigan v. Buckley, the Supreme Court held that racially restrictive covenants represented private discrimination and therefore did not constitute the sort of “state action” found in earlier segregation ordinances. In the decades thereafter, covenants became the key means for ensuring residential segregation across the country. During the 1930s and 1940s, their implementation was encouraged by a mutually reinforcing set of forces—real estate agents, mortgage brokers and lending institutions, and, most important, the federal government.

...