The Great Migration and the Birth of the Ghetto

 

As early as the 1900s, Blacks responded with the greatest mass exodus our country has ever seen, called the Great Migration.  But rather than a new day, they were greeted with new forms of racial violence.  What guns and violence could not do, then redlining and white flight did.  In the process, newly created racialized zones came into being.  These zones, characterized as ghettos, where the over-policing, underfunded schools, and limited social mobility served to create the cradle-to-prison pipeline, extreme levels of poverty, and isolation.  These truths account for the increasingly frustrated, violent, and hopelessness frequently witnessed in these racialized zones.  

My Grandfather was part of the Great Migration.  Born in rural Mississippi, he had been a sharecropper working on the same land that his grandfather had been a slave.  Even with 5 sons and 2 daughters and a wife laboring in the fields, he was barely able to scrape out an existence.  In good years there was just enough to make small repairs on the house, buy some much-needed clothes for the fast-growing kids, and maybe a trinket for my grandmother.  Regardless of whether it was a good year or bad, lynchings and mob violence constantly terrorized Black communities.  By 1915 he had had enough, so he packed up all his belongings and family and made the trek up north. They landed in East St. Louis, along with hundreds of others.

East St. Louis was the place to be.  It was filled with opportunities, particularly in response to the labor shortages created during World War I and military production.  Almost immediately, white business owners tried to block the new migrants from gaining either political or economic power.  And while they were only hired in the lowest paying and skilled jobs, their white peers looked upon them as a threat.  The black population went from 6,000 to nearly 12,000 between 1910 to 1917.  Things exploded as Blacks were hired to take the jobs of the largely white workforce that were on strike.  The white workers lodged a formal complaint to City Council on May 28^th.  Ironically, a rummer surfaced at the same time of an attempted robbery of a white man by an armed black man.  White mobs began beating African Americans.  Tensions continued through the long hot summer, then on July 1^st, after a white man driving a Ford shot into Black homes, African Americans returned the fire at another oncoming Ford.  Two white men were killed; they turned out to be police officers.  The next day, white mobs with pipes, baseball bats, and guns attacked and burned Black properties, and several Blacks were lynched across the city.  After a week, nine whites and hundreds of Blacks died, and total property damage was estimated to be $400,000.  Over six thousand Blacks left the city in fear.   Similar race riots would take place in other cities including Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, and Rosewood, Florida, in 1923.  

In East St. Louis and elsewhere, an uneasy truce was established as Blacks and Whites coexisted in racially, segregated zones.  Hence, I grew up on the city's south side, going to all Black schools with all Black teachers.  I was aware of the disparate conditions in the schools, as we barely had supplies while our white neighbors to the north, had an abundance.  Not only were there differences in the schools and resources, but as I learned later, banks, insurance companies, and businesses shunned the Black side of town.  This shunning was officially known as redlining.

In 1916, just across the river, in St. Louis, the residents voted on “a reform” ordinance that prevented people from buying homes in any neighborhoods where more than 75 percent of the residents were of a different race.  This became the first referendum in the country that sanctioned racial segregation in housing.  Although this ordnance was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court (Buchanan v. Warley) in the next year, many St. Louis communities responded by creating racial covenants, where residents and prospective new owners signed legal documents promising never to sell to an African American.  From this point forward, white property and privilege were dictated and embedded into law and policies as new small and exclusive suburban municipalities came into being.  (Lipsitz, 2011)  These covenants remained in effect until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in 1948 (Shelley v. Kraemer).  What racial covenants could not accomplish, redlining did.

Redlining was first coined in the 1960s by John McKnight to describe the discriminatory practice of excluding certain areas by banks for investment based on community demographics.  These practices expanded to cover a whole range of financial investments to include developmental, insurance, and even healthcare and were sanctioned at all levels of government.  These discriminatory practices designated Black and Brown communities as “hazardous” and unworthy of investment and development due to the racial composition of the residents.  In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration, under Rosevelt’s New Deal, declared that neighborhoods with poor housing markets, declining public health, unemployment, and economic immobility were reasons to deny mortgages to residents.  The reality was that these neighborhoods were comprised of large numbers of “undesirable populations,” including immigrants, people of color, those of the Jewish faith, and the poor. (Lockwood, 2020)  Then in 1965, the Federal Highway Act began constructing highways to create more efficient routes joining the suburbs and cities.  They created “controlled access” expressways that deliberately divided redlined neighborhoods but did not provide access to the very residents affected.  Thus, residents in these communities could not use the new routes to the resources, markets, jobs, and services located in other parts of the city.  All of this led to decreasing availability of healthcare, employment, affordable food, and quality housing.  In a word, all of this led to the creation of “the ghetto”.  What followed was predictable, as crime rates rose and property values and taxes sank, as racially biased policing intensified, as did the cradle-to-prison pipeline, and despair replaced hope. The church was one of the last refuges of hope, but even that was attacked.