Reviews in American History

Reviews in American History 29.1 (2001) 119-125

Race Matters:
The Folks Next Door

A. Scott Henderson

In 1953, a University of Chicago Law Review article concluded: "Of all discriminations encountered by the Negro and other minority groups, none has proved more difficult to overcome than exclusion from housing." Readers might have construed this statement to mean that housing discrimination was largely a thing of the past. Indeed, only a few years earlier the Supreme Court had declared that judicial enforcement of restrictive covenants was unconstitutional. This pronouncement capped a long struggle by civil rights activists to undermine the use of deed restrictions to maintain racially homogeneous neighborhoods. Celebrations, though, were premature. Housing discrimination, then and now, continues to be a significant problem. Furthermore--unlike open housing--other steps toward racial equality, even ones as controversial as affirmative action, have rarely provoked violence. ¹

It is this ongoing history of both the struggle to create, and the conflict over, open housing that Stephen Meyer chronicles in a well-written and exhaustively documented narrative. From the outset, Meyer notes that his purpose is to analyze, within a national context, the issue of race and housing. This, in turn, is the work's greatest strength: It is not limited by a regional or single-city focus. To achieve his objective, Meyer has detailed the events that occurred in more than a dozen cities over a span of seven decades. While Meyer understandably gives more attention to some cities (for example, Chicago and Detroit), he has nonetheless produced a representative study that encompasses all regions of the United States.

Meyer structures his analysis chronologically, beginning with the first phase (1900 to 1916) of the Great Migration--the movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, Midwest, and West. During this initial period, as African Americans moved to cities such as Baltimore and Kansas City, municipal services were strained and housing shortages developed. When African Americans attempted to remedy the [End Page 119] latter by moving into all-white neighborhoods, racial conflict ensued. City officials tried to contain this conflict by enacting zoning ordinances that segregated the urban landscape. For the most part, this ungentlemanly agreement worked: The force of law was used to keep whites and African Americans separated. With separation came a reduction of racial conflict.

African Americans, though, were not passive victims. Meyer correctly underscores that one of the earliest activities of newly formed NAACP chapters was to challenge the constitutionality of racially restrictive zoning ordinances (it was the reason that the Louisville chapter was formed). This emphasis helps dispel the common tendency to associate the NAACP almost entirely with school desegregation. Ultimately, the NAACP won an important legal victory. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Supreme Court ruled that racially restrictive zoning was unconstitutional. The Court's reasoning, however, left no doubt where its sympathies lay. Racially restrictive zoning was unconstitutional not so much because it prevented African Americans from buying certain properties, but because it prevented whites from selling their property to particular individuals. Meyer points out that southern communities generally defied the Court's ruling, which forced the NAACP to continue its battle against racial zoning for another thirty-five years.

Despite Meyer's use of the NAACP's actions as a way to organize his story, the narrative is neither top-down nor institutional history. Meyer utilizes the plight of specific African-American individuals and families to illustrate how deeply the currents of racial hatred could run. One such episode involved the Sweet family of Detroit, who moved into a previously all-white block in 1925. A confrontation between the Sweets and a mob who surrounded their home resulted in the death of a white man, for which various members of the Sweet family were arrested, tried, and eventually acquitted. The Sweets' ordeal gave important publicity to...