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• 1 2022-12-02T05:46:53-08:00 The Roots of Housing Discrimination 7 plain 2024-01-15T19:45:17-08:00      The cornerstone of racial discrimination of African Americans in housing was laid in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Former African slaves, now American citizens had a keen understanding of the importance of land ownership and property seeing that many were considered property themselves. In the post-antebellum South, the practice of share cropping and debt peonage created a system in which many African Americans found it difficult to own land and turn a profit. Many were trapped in the short-term credit cycle with White lenders as they had to borrow against expected harvest to pay for equipment, supplies, and the rent, or mortgage of their land (Newkirk, 2019). If those landowners were unable to pay, they then lost their land to creditors. This cycle established in post-Civil War became the pattern of behavior throughout the Jim Crow era.
  
       Racial discrimination was not isolated to the South. As many African Americans looked to escape the repressive discrimination of the South they migrated north and westward. This period in our history has been dubbed “The Great Migration”. This change in demographics was one of the greatest large movements of people in our country’s history that came in two waves, from 1910-1940, and then from 1945-1970. As our nation engaged in two world wars the industrialized North became a hub for jobs and opportunity. The map below visualizes this mass exodus.
  
  
  
       African Americans who came up in the Great Migration arrived to face an environment ripe with racial housing discrimination such as restrictive covenants, reduced access to lending, and redlining, which set in motion the wealth disparity we see today.