One of the most notorious of the white-only communities created by the Housing Act was Levittown, New York, built in 1949 and followed by other Levittowns in different locations. The program effectively resulted in the government funding white flight from cities. The act subsidized housing for whites only, even stipulating that Black families could not purchase the houses even on resale. The Housing Act of 1949 was proposed by Truman to solve a housing shortage caused by soldiers returned from World War II.
Civil rights activists saw the landmark case as an example of how to start to undo trappings of segregation at the federal level.īut while the Supreme Court ruled that white-only covenants were not enforceable, the real estate playing field was hardly leveled. Kramer, attorneys from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led by Thurgood Marshall, argued that allowing such white-only real estate covenants were not only morally wrong, but strategically misguided in a time when the country was trying to promote a unified, anti-Soviet agenda under President Harry Truman. Louis, despite a covenant dating back to 1911 that precluded the use of the property in the area by “any person not of the Caucasian race.” In Shelley v. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that a Black family had the right to move into their newly-purchased home in a quiet neighborhood in St. Huge numbers moved northeast and reported discrimination and segregation similar to what they had experienced in the South. Segregation During the Great Migrationĭuring the Great Migration, a period between 19, six million African Americans left the South. This invoked Virginia’s anti-mixed race marriage law and was not technically in violation with the Supreme Court decision. Richmond, Virginia, decreed that people were barred from residency on any block where they could not legally marry the majority of residents. Using loopholes in that ruling in the 1920s, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover created a federal zoning committee to persuade local boards to pass rules preventing lower-income families from moving into middle-income neighborhoods, an effort that targeted Black families.
Warley, the Supreme Court found such zoning to be unconstitutional because it interfered with property rights of owners. Housing SegregationĪs part of the segregation movement, some cities instituted zoning laws that prohibited Black families from moving into white-dominant blocks. The ruling established the idea of “separate but equal.” The case involved a mixed-race man who was forced to sit in the Black-designated train car under Louisiana’s Separate Car Act. Ferguson that segregation was constitutional.
In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. While the colonization plan did not pan out, the country, instead, set forth on a path of legally mandated segregation. In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln recognized the ex-slave countries of Haiti and Liberia, hoping to open up channels for colonization, with Congress allocating $600,000 to help. One group argued for colonization, either by returning the formerly enslaved people to Africa or creating their own homeland. In the lead-up to the liberation of enslaved people under the Thirteenth Amendment, abolitionists argued about what the fate of slaves should be once they were freed. Segregation was made law several times in 18th- and 19th-century America as some believed that Black and white people were incapable of coexisting.
Segregation is the practice of requiring separate housing, education and other services for people of color.
Segregation and the Public Works Administration.