The Impact of Residential Inequality

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s quest for civil and economic equality was an important and overdue progressive movement. The decades of economic injustice that burdened both southern and northern black families still affect modern society. King’s message took aim at several economic issues facing impoverished America, but one particular battle stands out from the rest. King argued that housing inequality was much to blame for both the racial and class discrimination of the black community. Housing inequality continues to be the dominant racial and class divider forty years after King’s assassination. King believed housing reform was vital step towards racial equality.

Over six million African Americans migrated from the south between 1910-1970 during the Great Migration. The reasons for the migration include the issues of racial and social inequality that plagued the south, but there was also a movement to find work in the industrialized cities of the north. The manufacturing of textiles provided opportunity for employment and a better life for many that had previously struggled to survive. The migration created fear of racial integration, and led to the “white flight” to the suburbs in the late 1940’s through the 1950’s. This transition to the suburbs by middle and upper class white families left the cities in decline. Property values fell and cities became an example of racial segregation. Inner-city communities became impoverished with increasing joblessness (http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-white-flight.htm). The poverty stricken neighborhoods became the burden of future generations. “The disproportionate number of children in poverty led OEO (Office of Economic Opportunity) to explain . . .  ‘condemned to deprivation, inadequate educational opportunity and cultural alienation, far too many . . . children will inherit poverty for their entire lives and, in turn pass it on to their children’” (Jackson 252). The lack of opportunity along with intense white opposition allowed for housing inequality to continue.

Housing reform faced a series of difficult obstacles in King’s time. During the Kennedy administration, conservative Dixiecrats prevented any adequate legislation to be passed that would allow for future desegregation. The party of civil rights faced a divide between the northern liberals and the southern Democrats, but not all opposition came from the Dixiecrat wing of the party. “Liberals faced a growing northern movement of working-class whites increasingly resistant to any threat to their ostensible ‘rights’ to decent homes in exclusively white neighborhoods” (124). The Democratic Party had control of both congressional and executive branches of government, but was unable to attain progress in King’s eyes. In 1962 the President signed the housing order, which prohibited the Federal Housing Administration “from insuring any mortgages benefiting discriminatory home builders” (128). The problem was not solved with the bill because it came “two years late” and was “weakened by Kennedy’s failure to secure a ‘retroactive clause’” (128).

 King believed housing inequality was the source of economic injustice throughout the country. He stated, “residential discrimination was the key to the ghetto and de facto segregated schools, recreational facilities, and churches” (127). With housing inequality comes unequal education, and therefore unequal opportunity to rise out of poverty. He was deeply concerned with the growing separation between the two communities. Residential desegregation was the most important step in solving economic a civil inequality. “In 1957 he had called housing  ‘the crux of the race problem’ in the cities” (126).

King believed in a distinct link between economic and civil rights. “The struggle for integration and equality was part of the ‘fight of the common man’ against poverty and ignorance. Civil and economic rights would merge in collective struggle” (77).  With the arrival of globalization, and the transition of the U.S. economy from industry to services, uneducated citizens have become more at risk of poverty and job loss. The steel factories of Pittsburgh are long gone, and the auto manufacturers continue to tumble. Inner city schools continue to graduate fewer students every year. It’s time to resolve the issues of the past to ensure universal progress in the future. In the words of Jane Addams, “the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”