Angela Davis, “Underexposed: Photography and Afro-American History,”
Century of Black Photographers, 1840-1960

[T]he underlying cause of urban slums is that the residents are too poor to pay for adequately maintained housing. Also many of the residents display destructive behavior patterns that raise maintenance costs… The real problem is that our housing standards keep rising and thesepeople don’t have the capacity to keep up with the standards.

Anthony Davis, responding to HUD’s homeownership problems

in the Chicago Tribune.

You imagine the proverbial light bulb going on. Then imagine the voice within: Money. And then again: Money!

The narrator has a house or not. Doesn’t matter, he sees a house, multiple houses. The narrator has a job or not. Doesn’t matter, for there are fewer lines drawn in red around certain neighborhoods. And he’s in!

In an instant, the narrator is a real estate broker, or an appraiser, or a banker. In an instant, he’s showing houses and speaking confidently about how easy it is for you to own your own home. In the evening, he spends his evenings counting his gold coins near his fireplace, much like George Eliot’s Silas Marner.

The narrator doesn’t know anything about Janice Johnson or Johnnie D. Brown or any of the single mothers his business depends on. But what does it matter?

Lies abound and omissions work miracles at the end of the day when meddling inquires necessitates an explanation. And if default on the mortgage comes around, followed by a foreclosure, no problem. It’s all good for growth—the growth of the business. The success of the company, bank, agency.

The success of narrator assures the success of the narrative surrounding the housing crisis in United States during the 1970s.

This land is your land, this land is my land…

Our fellow citizen, the narrator, the individual, becomes an army of thousands, expanding the workforce at the Department of House and Urban Development (HUD), the banking industry, the real estate agencies, and the financial mortgage companies. He accumulates wealth by whatever means necessary, no matter who harmed, who suffers. The narrative’s mantra is, Profits First!

It’s capitalism’s bottom line.

And you? You haven’t anything in the end.

When I left Chicago for California in 1977, after graduating from college, the first in the family to do so, the sign posts were visible, the writing clear, and beyond the doors had already closed. While no one in my immediate family lived in public housing, my neighborhood in the Washington Park area was beginning to show signs that the Richard M. Daley administration’s reluctance to serve the community had a hidden agenda. The steady play of burning down landlord-abandoned buildings and the shutting down if not relocation of schools, hospitals, local stores, and neighborhood businesses created desolate areas where their were once working class neighborhoods. In due time, the barren landscape was spotted by prospectors from the city. They had a vision. The remaining human life on this land need not ask about the future. Money was available for creating more cell space for anticipated occupants.

Young African American men of my generation began disappearing from the local organizations, even from Operation Breadbasket. Fewer were in high school, and even fewer were visible on college campuses. Most had been drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. It was harder and harder to find a Black Panther or a member of the Nation of Islam on the corners, selling the The Black Panther or The Final Call.

In 1972, I was among a group of first-in-family-Africa American college students, and by the last year, I was alone. I recall seeing one black professor.

I wasn’t a single mother, didn’t lived in public housing, didn’t have a mortgage. But I, as with so many American college and post graduate citizens in the land of the free, will never forget the years of threat to garnish merger pay checks from freelance writing and part-time college teaching positions.

Across the US, black women were already entangled in confrontation with the government and forces determined to keep America great.

Janice Johnson, a mother of an eight-year-old son, a welfare recipient, was one such woman in 1970. She came to depend on the newly created HUD, established to assist working class and low-income citizens achieve the dream of owning their own home. Pressed into doing something to confront the inhuman conditions African Americans faced in urban settings, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson hadn’t considered history—American history—when they thought that HUD and the banks and the real estate agencies would go out of their way to assure that African American women received non-discriminatory treatment in the securing of housing. Indifference, cruelty, and exploitation wouldn’t come between the single mother seeking to provide decent, humane living conditions for her family.

It seems simple enough to Kennedy and Johnson: decent housing for the most vulnerable—except for black woman in the US.

Janice Johnson and her eight-year old son finally vacated that building in the Northeast Philadelphia area. It was already condemned and nearly vacant, except, I suspect, for the presence of rats and roaches. She trusted sellers and brokers. The idea of buying that house at 2043 West Stella Street seemed a good one. Certainly, it would be upward progress. Yeah?

What could go wrong?

Johnson meets a man identifying himself as “Mr. Zade.” Not quite the same “Mr. Zade” he might have been in the past, but an upgrade. A 2.0 Mr. Zade—no longer a landlord but a real estate broker now. A man who thinks big. Has a vision in which America is for the free. America is great. Zade has a house in mind for Johnson and her young boy. It’s a good house. And, of course, the FHA has approved of the sale of this good house.

Johnson signs the paperwork and waits. And waits. Finally, Zade. Oh, the floors at 2043 have collapsed! However, however, there’s another house at 2013 West Stella. Better! Much better!

Johnson has an eviction notice from the condemned building’s landlord: she and son must vacate, or else! So, yes. Zade points her in the direction of Security Mortgage Services, a financial mortgage company. They will help. In a short time, Johnson is approved. Through HUD, the FHA will finance the house for a loan in the amount of $5, 800.

So what could go wrong?

It’s not as if most of America had been living under a rock, as they say, in those years after the passing of the Civil Rights Act. Richard M. Nixon attempted to conceal the break in of Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate building. He tried to play dumb about the missing 18-minutes of tape from his recording system. But Nixon didn’t bother to conceal how he would treat African Americans. He had no intentions of deviating from the narrative, the mega-narrative, that America is First—and that doesn’t mean black people. America is great and free—but not for black people no matter what it says on that document LBJ signed. The sign posts would be clearly marked.

We live in a divided country and we do because so many Americans engage the history of enslavement by viewing a movie. 12 Years A Slave. Harriet. A couple of hours every other year or so. White Americans return to their lives without further consideration of who they might be as a result of decades of a practice of indifference and cruelty.

Who are you as a result of the injustice of legalized segregation, lynchings? Who are you as a result of redlining and the burning down of African American homes and towns? Who are you as a result of the systemic practice of discrimination, which maintained ghettos that, in turn, stigmatized human beings who by no means desired to live among the rats and roaches?

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, in Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Justice, Power, and Politics), has uncovered the lies and omissions within that narrative of US history as it relates to the housing crisis in the 1970s. What really happened after the practice of redlining ended? Just how fair and just were fellow American citizens to low-income African Americans seeking to purchase their own homes? What really happened to African American women, in particular, single mothers of small children with no where to turn? Was there a difference between the official narrative, compiled by the government and the banking and real estate industries and the lived experiences of the African American women?

Four decades later and the housing crisis is worse for the most vulnerable African Americans, children. Forty plus years of uprooting the parents of black children from inner city dwellings to deliberately expensive rentals where agencies discriminate on the sly against black citizens, forty years of low-income employment, of schools fit-to-fail, of incarceration, of police shootings—and we’ve arrived here where children are experiencing homelessness.

As Taylor writes, racial segregation is maintained not just by policies and illegal practices but “with violence and hatred prompted by the racist views that Blacks kept property values down and were physical markers of inferior status.”

History. Tethered to the first civil rights bill in 1866, writes Taylor, is this “right to purchase property to freedom and citizenship.” It’s an American thing. Property equals freedom. True citizenship. While in Europe, people live their entire lives in apartments without a thought to owning land, in American, to be free is to own land. Own a home.

The right to property meant something different for a people who had once been property. To own meant being a human being. African Americans faced obstacles to the purchase of a home—until the 1970s. Under the Nixon administration, new policies focused on existing housing options in still segregated neighborhoods.

Nixon has his “silent majority.”

Announcing his new policy, Nixon exclaimed: “We will not seek to impose economic integration upon an existing local jurisdiction; at the same time, we will not countenance any use of economic measures as a subterfuge for racial discrimination… This Administration will not attempt to impose federally assisted housing upon any community.”

Existing house will do! Keep them away from my base!

Even Daley complained. How was he, a mayor, to be left along with the economic responsibility of confronting the urban crisis—and with the suburbs were in resistance mode?

Existing housing often didn’t improve the quality of life for these women and their children. And, if a black family moved into a white neighborhood, often in the suburbs, well, we know that history. Black homeowners were threatened and forced, eventually, to flee those homes while others had their homes destroyed by fire at the hands of fellow citizens determined to maintain their freedom and citizenship within an all-white suburb.

Low-income African American women were kept in deplorable conditions, one way or the other. Taylor writes about the new policies that punished black women from complaining. If a black woman complained about damages or requested repairs, they were often received a summons to appear in court where they were charged with violating housing codes and fined!

Of course, for these women, often mothers, the fine meant, in the long run, foreclosure. No money for repairs, no money for fines!

Taylor points to the lack of ethics on the part of the banking and real estate industries, an all those who jumped on the bandwagon to make a killing, fast. The narrative that capitalism is best honors scrupulous.

Nonetheless, as Taylor writes, politicians and HUD officials spoke about “counseling” for these “unskilled” homeowners. Perhaps the teaching of housekeeping skills for “women in subsidized housing on how to clean one’s home”!

I remember the late 1950s and early 1960s when both my mother and her sister, my aunt, cleaned house for whites on the northside of Chicago. For a time, my aunt was part of the “housekeeping” for Northwestern University.

Then came the stigma of subsidy. “Subsidy” itself became a dirty word, Taylor explains. The word become associated with black women who were depicted as “unfit,” and unclean. “Unsophisticated.” What is is called when policies have favored a privileged race and class? What is is called when corporations and banks are “bailed” out? What is is called when wealthy white Americans receive huge tax breaks? What is it when good schools in white neighborhoods receive funding and black schools or de-funded or closed down?

Where’s the shame in these practices of separate and unequal?

In the 1970s, the cruel stigmatizing of African American women opened the door for studies on the pathos of the black community in America. Maybe the problem with black families had to do with these unsophisticated and unfit African American women. And of course, I remember Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the horrors of the African American matriarchy, and, as a young black woman, feeling the sting.

Taylor quotes the African American Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, whom I had the good fortune to meet in the early 1980s in Chicago, spoke up for black woman when she addressed the NAACP in Andover, Massachusetts. Chisholm stated that “the FHA [is] marked by a legacy of racism and profiteering in the administration of previous housing programs and has knowingly tolerated the development of federally financed slums, the perpetuation and acceleration of segregated housing patterns and the gouging of the poor by speculators, builders and bankers who all pocket federal dollars for violating federal laws.”

But if you think the banking and real estate industries were “criminalized” as the African American women were dehumanized, then you still think racism is post something, and white supremacy only refers to individuals as opposed to a systemic (structural) way of operating in order to maintain the unreality of a whites only America.

A few politicians spoke out. Taylor mentions how Senator Walter Mondale sounded like a “revolutionary” when testifying that urban ghettos shared the characteristics of some countries during colonialism. Mondale called it: exploitation in urban settings! And he added that he knew the committee already knew the story. He wasn’t voicing anything Congress didn’t know.

In Illinois, Governor Charles Percy spoke about a “moral” calling to provide fair housing in this country. “Cut out the rot that is infesting our cities.”

Taylor is clear: all of this nonsense about unskilled, unsophisticated black women was intended to conceal the reality of all those “federal officials signing off on criminally defective houses.”

It’s the kind of criminality most Americans don’t want to hear or read about. Best to stick with local news stations and small local papers featuring the week’s news loop: police are looking for a black man…

And somethings never change.

The government wants to sell Janice Johnson a house. She wants a home. She doesn’t want her child on the street, homeless. While Johnson attempts to make the house a home, she discovers, in days, she’s moved into a disaster. A tragedy, really. As Taylor writes, “the sewer line broke, spewing wastewater all over the basement floor. The electricity for the house was sporadic and haphazard. There were holes and other irregularities in the foundation of the house.” Her dining room table fell through a rotting floor.

To add insult to injury, Johnson discovers that all the windows were sealed up, “nailed shut and inoperable.” A ghetto? A cell? A coffin?

Then on Halloween night, her son wakes up to find a rat in his bed. There were rats, Johnson said, “all throughout her house.” And let’s not forget, this is a house with FHA’s stamp of approval!

This is the America, as I heard someone say, for the brave.

Zade sends repairmen, but the conditions of this house are beyond repairs. Inhabitable. As inhabitable as the apartment Johnson fled. Her appeals to the real estate agency didn’t reach someone with a heart. This is fast-buck land. Writes Taylor, the broker “reminded her that the problems in her house were now her own.”

Johnson’s attempt to achieve the “American dream” began, as Taylor notes, “the beginning of an American nightmare.”

...For Janice Johnson. Otherwise, that American nightmare began in Africa, on whatever fateful day Johnson’s ancestors were forced aboard a ship, forced to abandon home and offspring. Some white Americans had a dream. Of freedom.

A person can’t ride your back, Dr. Martin L. King once said, unless it’s bent.

It was the African American women who brought about investigations of the ranks and file of federal officials, bankers, financial mortgage companies, real estate brokers, and appraisers. A group of black women resisters filed suit in Seattle charging this gang of profiteers with violating the 14^th Amendment, among other things.

“Among the most courageous of the women who went public was Johnnie D. Brown,” Taylor writes. A mother of six, receiving AFDC, Brown came down with an illness that hospitalized her for a week. To make matters worse, her welfare check was late, forcing Brown to miss paying the mortgage. Yet, she didn’t give up; she sent partial payments for months.

Brown was trusting. She believed she had caught up only to came face to face with the free America. Brown, writes Taylor, had been “charged a $625 legal fee.” And then things changed—Brown refused to pay! Marching off to a local attorney, she files a class-action lawsuit “on behalf of her and hundreds of other homeowners.”

Marginalized, stigmatized, low-income, nonetheless, these black women exerted their power as a collective to effect change for the many brave black women forced to confront the injustice and indifference from an America free of their responsibility to others.

We don’t need fictitious; we have history!

These African American women asked questions. If your goal is to stand up, speak up, be human, you asks questions.

How is “fast foreclosures” of mortgages legal, let alone, an example of justice? And what about the 14^th Amendment’s equal protection cause? Were not “subsidized homeowners” being “treated differently from other homeowners when rapid foreclosure processes were initiated on their properties”?

HUD tried to have the case dismissed, but their efforts failed.

As Taylor explains, Brown’s lawsuit “would remove the financial incentives for mortgage banks to remain engaged in the FHA market to the extent they had been.”

End of story—no, not quite. That was history. And in Race for Profits, Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor has done us well.

But the struggle continues because the capitalists regroup. They always do.

And what do we do with the 2020 elections coming our way?