As you all know, every February we celebrate Black History Month! This year, Homes RI celebrated by learning about different historical Black leaders who had an impact on housing and shared some stories on our social media. In order to preserve leaders’ legacy, we have compiled all of the stories for you to read below with some provided links for more information. Join us in celebrating by reading below!
Dorothy Mae Richardson
To kick off Black History Month, we began by uplifting African American community activist, Dorthy Mae Richardson (May 3, 1922 — April 28, 1991).
Dorothy Mae Richardson, a resident of the Central North Side of Pittsburgh, began a grassroots movement in response to the difficulty of finding suitable homes for Black Americans in the mid sixties. Her group, Citizens Against Slum Housing (CASH), put pressure on neighborhood landlords to do a better job maintaining their properties.
“I could see houses starting to lean, windows rotting away. The solution was not to tear down the whole neighborhood and move everybody into public housing. The solution was to fix the houses.”
CASH transformed the group into Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) an organization that “amassed a $1 million high-risk revolving loan for homeownership and home repairs” through public-private partnerships between NHS and 16 banks, resulting in thousands of Black households having access to low-interest home purchase and repair loans.
The accomplishments of NHS inspired many community leaders and led to the founding of similar programs in 300 cities across the United States. In 1978, Congress institutionalized the NHS network by establishing the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, known today as NeighborWorks America.
Chicago Freedom Movement
The following week, we celebrated Black History Month by learning about the Chicago Freedom Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel (first on left) and Al Raby (second on left).
After World War II, the number of Black Americans in Chicago greatly increased as many families moved to the city from the South during the Great Migration to flee racial violence and seek economic opportunity. This increase in the African American population led to segregated policies of redlining and restrictive covenants, discriminatory practices in which the Federal Housing Administration drew red lines around neighborhoods deemed “undesirable.”
In addition to redlining, Black Americans were excluded from homeownership and were victims of “contract selling,” a practice in which they were forced to make monthly payments (usually double or triple the home’s actual cost) to the home’s seller until they were entirely paid off. These families had all of the responsibilities of a homeowner but none of the security — they did not build equity and they could be evicted for missing a single payment. (It is estimated that 90% of Black Americans in Chicago bought their homes through contract sales during the 1950s.)
In 1966, the Chicago Freedom Movement focused on homeownership and rental injustices facing black families. Residents who joined the movement strategized how to address their issues, held rent strikes, hosted workshops for youth on nonviolent activism, and boycotted banks and businesses that discriminated against Black Americans.
The Chicago Freedom Movement was the most ambitious civil rights campaign in the North of the United States, lasted from mid-1965 to August 1966, and is largely credited with inspiring the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
Learn more here: https://nlihc.org/resource/chicago-freedom-movement
Shelley vs Kraemer
The following week, we celebrated Black History Month by learning about the historic Shelley v. Kraemer Supreme Court case in 1948!
In September of 1945, Louis and Fern Kraemer, a white couple, put their house up for sale in a quiet residential community in St. Louis. J.D. and Ethel Shelley, a black couple who had moved from Mississippi to Missouri a few years earlier, enlisted the help of their pastor, Elder Robert Bishop, who worked in real estate, in finding a home. Bishop showed them the Kraemer’s property and they put in offer in under Bishop’s wife’s name.
Unbeknownst to the family and Pastor, the home was subject to a restrictive covenant dating back to 1911 that prohibited the use of the property by “any person not of the Caucasian race,” and prevented “people of the Negro or Mongolian Race” from occupying the it. Louis Kraemer sued to prevent the Shelleys from gaining possession of the property.
The Supreme Court of Missouri held that the covenant was enforceable against the Shelleys because the covenant was a private agreement between its original parties. However, on January 16, 1948, the US Supreme Court ruled that “the (racially) restrictive agreements, standing alone, cannot be regarded as violative of any rights guaranteed to petitioners by the Fourteenth Amendment” BUT that that judicial enforcement of such covenants would be “state action” and would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that “nor shall any State…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The Court’s ruling had a significant impact on expanding African American rights, especially during a time in which they suffered under Jim Crow laws, and provided support to future Supreme Court Justices to enforce the Equal Protection Clause.
Learn more here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/shelley_v_kraemer_(1948)
Detroit Housing & the NCAAP
With this week’s post for Black History Month, we are learning about 1960’s Detroit and the NAACP’s and Congress on Racial Equality’s (CORE) influence on housing conditions.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s, urban renewal was quickly changing housing patterns in Detroit. With new residential development, White residents were moving to the suburbs, opening up opportunities for Black residents to be able to purchase homes in neighborhoods from which they were previously excluded. However, the 1960’s was ripe with the expansion of racial segregation and intense overcrowding. In response to continued housing segregation, discrimination, and poor housing conditions, black Detroiters engaged in multiple forms of housing activism.
For middle-class Black residents, homeownership opportunities in newly opened neighborhoods were created through “blockbusting,” a practice in which real estate agents sold a home to a Black family then spread rumors to White residents that more Black families were coming, knowing it would make them leave. Unfortunately, when real estate agents ran out of Black professionals to sell to, they sold to Black residents with fluctuating income, which resulted in high-turn over for properties and a decrease in their value. Wanting to maintain their property value, Black professionals tried to move to the suburbs but were met with racially restrictive covenants and other forms of racial discrimination.
The NAACP and the Coordinating Council on Human Relations began a campaign for open housing in Detroit and its suburbs in order to eliminate this discrimination. Throughout the 50’s and 60’s the NAACP organized demonstrations and marches and visited real estate agents to see which realtors were steering black Detroiters away from white neighborhoods.
The most visible protest for open housing took place in 1963 during a ceremony that was part of Detroit’s bid to host the Olympics in 1968. The NAACP, CORE and the Trade Union Leadership Council saw the event as an opportunity to embarrass the city into open housing laws for the world to see and staged a protest. While the results of this action varied among Detroit’s suburbs, they did succeed in opening up certain exclusive neighborhoods. However, they were not as effective in improving housing for Detroit’s Black tenants and poor Black residents because the housing crisis was monumental for those who could not afford ownership.
By 1964, CORE and the NAACP had organized more than fifty tenants’ rights groups in apartment buildings on the West Side, empowering poor Black Detroiters to solve their own problems with housing. Although these tenants’ rights groups won moderate reforms from the city, overall conditions in apartments for poor Black Detroit residents changed very little and remained a source of tension up until the Detroit Rebellion in 1967 and after.
Read more here: https://riseupdetroit.org/chapters/chapter-3/part-1/housing/
Do you have a story you would like to uplift? Email our Community Relations Specialist, Daria. at dmontaquila@housingnetworkri.org to submit a blog post or idea!
