Segregation in Public Spaces and Jim Crow Laws

• Public Spaces: Segregation was enforced in various public places such as restaurants, hospitals, prisons, funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries. White politicians often competed to create more stringent segregation laws.
• Specific Laws: For instance, some laws prohibited blacks and whites from playing chess together, reflecting the extreme lengths to maintain segregation.
• Supreme Court Ruling (1896): The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld these laws, deeming them legal as they “reflected customs and traditions” and “preserved public peace and good order.”

Post-Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

• Southern Manifesto (1956): After Brown v. Board of Education struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine, 101 out of 128 Southern Congress members signed the Southern Manifesto, pledging to maintain segregation by all means possible.
• New Jim Crow Laws: Five states passed nearly 50 new Jim Crow laws after 1954.
• Segregation Academies: Private whites-only schools, often Christian, emerged across the South.

Rise of Law and Order Rhetoric

• Civil Rights and Anti-War Protests: The civil rights movement and anti-war protests of the 1960s, some of which turned violent, fueled the political rise of “law and order” rhetoric.
• Richard Nixon’s Campaign (1968): Nixon was the first candidate to campaign specifically on a law and order platform, with 81% of Americans agreeing that law and order had broken down, blaming communists and civil rights activists for the unrest.

Disparities in Household Wealth

• Home Ownership: The primary source of intergenerational wealth in America is home ownership. From the 1930s to the 1960s, federal policies encouraged white homeownership while discouraging black homeownership.
• Redlining: The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) created a risk rating system in 1934 that marked black neighborhoods as too risky for federally backed mortgages, a practice known as redlining.
• Restrictive Covenants: New suburban housing developments often had deeds restricting ownership to whites only. For example, 40% of new housing developments in Minneapolis in 1948 had such covenants.
• Realtors’ Code of Ethics: Until 1950, the Realtors’ code of ethics prohibited selling homes in white neighborhoods to black families.

Federal Policies and Segregation

• FHA Underwriting Manual: The FHA manual stated that “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities” and recommended using highways to separate black and white neighborhoods.
• GI Bill: After World War II, the GI Bill provided subsidized mortgages to returning veterans, but discriminatory practices excluded many black veterans. For example, in New York and New Jersey, fewer than 100 out of 67,000 new mortgages went to non-whites, and in Mississippi, only two out of 3,200 mortgages were guaranteed to black veterans.

The War on Drugs

• Economic Vulnerability: By the 1970s, many African Americans lacked college degrees and had grown up in segregated schools. Manufacturing jobs moved to the suburbs, where black workers struggled to follow due to residential segregation.
• Drug Epidemic Response: The response to the drug epidemic was to treat it as a criminal issue rather than a health crisis, leading to the militarization of police forces and an increase in drug-related arrests.
• Anti-Drug Policies: The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act established mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, disproportionately affecting black communities. It mandated evictions from public housing for drug-related offenses and eliminated many government benefits for those convicted of drug crimes.
• Clinton Presidency: Funding for public housing decreased significantly while prison funding increased. The number of Americans imprisoned for drug crimes skyrocketed, with most arrests being for possession rather than distribution.

Incarceration and Policing

• Prison Population: From 1980 to 2000, the US prison population exploded from 350,000 to 2.3 million, giving the US the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
• Militarization of Police: Between 1997 and 1999, the Pentagon supplied police departments with military equipment, drastically changing policing tactics and increasing the use of SWAT teams.
• Impact on Black Communities: The war on drugs and militarized policing disproportionately targeted black communities, exacerbating economic and social inequalities.

These historical and systemic factors have significantly contributed to the racial wealth gap and ongoing racial disparities in America.