Question

The large concetration of African Americans in segregated neighborhoods in the North often resulted in the acquisition of political power and influence.

Answer 1

The reality is that segregation was enforced by racially overt federal, state, and local policies in every metropolitan area, without which private actions of prejudice or discrimination would not have been very successful. And if we recognize that our segregation is a government-sponsored scheme, which we would of course call de jure segregation, then we can only attempt to fix it. Because it is hard to imagine how to fix it if it happens by individual choice. When government action happens, then we should be able to develop equally effective government action to undo it.

The African-Americans had less housing options. African-Americans were willing to pay more to buy homes than whites were for similar properties, and property values usually increased as African-Americans moved into a white neighborhood. Only after a concerted effort on the part of the real estate industry to build and congest all-black suburbs and turn them into slums did property values go down. But that was the rationale and, perhaps more, it persisted for at least three decades.

When the civilian housing industry picked up in the 1950s, mass production builders were subsidized by the federal government to create suburbs on grounds that those suburban homes would be sold only to whites. No African-Americans were allowed to buy them, and the FHA often added an additional condition requiring that any act in a home in those subdivisions prohibit African-Americans from reselling.

Finally we had a situation everywhere in the world where the white projects had a large number of vacancies and long waiting lists for the black projects. The problem became so obvious that African-Americans had to have the government and local housing authorities open up all the programs. Thus these two policies, the integration of public housing in urban areas and the subsidization of white families to leave urban areas and suburbs, created the kind of racial trends we know today.