[solemn music]
[hammering]
- Nathan Denzin: Owning a home has always been key
to the American dream.
According to the U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development, "Homeownership is a pillar
"of wealth building for most families, a source of wealth
that can be passed down to future generations."
- Having the ability to purchase a home
and live where one chooses is, you know,
should be a fundamental right.
- Nathan: As African Americans moved to Wisconsin
in large numbers after World War II,
they entered a segregated housing market.
- When we think about racism, when we think about Jim Crow,
we have a tendency to focus on the South,
when it was universal throughout the United States.
- Nathan: Including here in Wisconsin,
where starting around 1900,
racism was built into home ownership.
- Racially restrictive covenants were clauses
that were inserted into property deeds
that prevented people who were not white from owning,
buying, or occupying property.
- Nathan: Anne Bonds and Derek Handley are professors
at UW-Milwaukee, where they map old covenants
in the city of Milwaukee and its surrounding suburbs.
- By 1928, about half of all homes that were owned
by white people in the United States had some sort
of a restrictive, racially restrictive covenant.
- Nathan: Often, restrictive covenants
had sweeping language.
Derek Handley reads this one from Wauwatosa.
- Number eight, "Ownership and occupancy
"by members of white race only.
"No lot in said subdivision shall be conveyed or leased to
"or occupied by any person who is not a member
"of the white race.
"This prohibition is not intended
"to include domestic servants while employed
by an owner or occupant of any such lot."
So now African Americans have limited areas
in which they can live, in which they can spread.
And so now they're gonna be crowded into one area.
- Black people who come
during the Great Migration are already coming
to a space that has a history of anti-Blackness,
that has a history of racism.
These are the people who are shaping the texture
of your life.
- Nathan: Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara,
a UW-Madison history professor,
also works with the Madison organization Nehemiah.
She's an instructor in its "Justified Anger:
Black History for A New Day" course.
The nine-week course teaches the community
about race, history, and justice.
- Housing is critical because this idea of being able
to pay the same amount, month after month, for 30 years
with little to no money down transformed American life.
- Nathan: While restrictive covenants
were made unenforceable by a 1948 Supreme Court ruling,
they continued to be added to property deeds.
- After 1948, we have examples of deeds in the 1950s,
and the latest one we found so far is 1962.
- Nathan: Even though covenants fell out of use
in the '60s, other long-standing tools of racial segregation,
like redlining, continued to carve up neighborhoods.
- The term redlining comes from a set of maps
that were drawn by the federal government.
- Nathan: Reggie Jackson educates people about diversity.
He says that the redlining maps weren't common knowledge.
- They were, for the most part, secretive maps.
Nobody really knew they existed
other than bankers and some realtors.
- And so the Home Owners' Loan Corporation in 1933
and the Federal Housing Administration in 1934
adopted a mechanism where they drew lines on a map.
- Nathan: UW-Madison professor Kurt Paulsen
is a historian of urban planning.
- What redlining said was
who could get a mortgage refinanced.
- Nathan: Redlining maps, like this one drawn
for Milwaukee in 1938, divided cities into four grades.
Green areas were considered the best place
for banks to invest in,
while red areas were deemed hazardous
and not worthy of additional investment.
- One of the criteria that the FHA
and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation used
was the presence of what they call, quote,
"inharmonious racial groups."
- Neighborhoods where Black people live
were always redlined, and so what that meant was
it was exceptionally difficult to become a person
who could get a traditional bank mortgage to purchase a home
or a business property.
- What that meant was that a Black person,
if they moved into a yellow or a blue zone,
would change that neighborhood to a red zone,
and all of a sudden, that white person's property would be,
would lose huge value.
- Nathan: UW Law School professor Ion Meyn
says the patterns of segregation we see today
stem from these policies.
- So a Black person became a threat to white wealth
and it created hyper segregation.
- And it not only created disinvestment
in older urban neighborhoods,
it facilitated suburban development.
- Nathan: Because redlining maps
sent government subsidies to the suburbs,
urban communities were left
with old housing and high prices.
- In many cases, Black people in deteriorating
and urban neighborhoods were paying more in rent
than white families were paying in the suburbs.
- That means that Blacks have been left out of the ability
to build generational wealth.
[chiming music]
- And what you have is basically a system
of state-sanctioned apartheid.
- And I remember as a kid, you know, hanging out here,
riding my bike around Milwaukee, and I never saw white people
because everybody in the neighborhood was Black.
I didn't really understand it when I was a kid.
I just, you know, it's just the way it is.
- Nathan: Reggie Jackson has lived in Milwaukee
for most of his life and takes people
on segregation tours of the city.
We joined him to see the lines of segregation up close.
- One of the best ways to see the segregation
of Milwaukee is to visibly just drive along one
of our main streets, North Avenue.
- Nathan: He says the Milwaukee River
is one of the largest invisible borders.
- Once you cross from the west to the east across the river,
you know that you're not gonna see a residential area
that has anything other than white people in it,
for the most part.
Developers not trying to build homes in this part of town.
It's a really, really a sad situation to me.
- Nathan: Jackson says that in order
to restore Black neighborhoods in Milwaukee,
investments in jobs and affordable homes are a must.
- Reggie: Clearly missing is the fact
that people can't afford to become homeowners.
People aren't making enough money.
- Nathan: But Jackson says that in order
to capture investment for the future,
we have to look at how we got here.
- Ours is a complicated history, and we can't hide from it.
We have to understand it; think we have to learn from it,
and we have to grow from it.
- Nathan: For Here & Now, I'm Nathan Denzin.