Addressing Racial Injustice
February is Black History Month, a time to remember the contributions that African Americans have made to our country and to honor the African American history of struggle and liberation.
Remembering the past is an essential step to overcoming it. Aided by having a Democrat in the White House, the National Park Service is expanding its African American history sites. One of the first entries on the National Register of Historic Places approved under the Biden-Harris administration is the Birwood Wall in Detroit. In 1941, a developer proposed a new whites-only housing development in Detroit near a redlined neighborhood. In order to secure Federal Housing Administration money for a new housing development for whites, the developer built a six-foot-high wall separating the federally subsidized whites-only community from the redlined community and underinvested schools on the other side.
Birwood wall, 1941. Credit: U.S. Farm Security Administration.
Birwood wall today. Image credit: Király-Seth.
Concrete hardens with the prejudices of its era, and our federal dollars fire the cement kilns. This infrastructure sticks around a long time, affecting every aspect of people’s lives: who they talk with, where they learn, what air they breathe.
The Biden-Harris administration has been taking strong actions to overcome historical racial injustices such as housing discrimination, the racial wealth gap, racist highway planning decisions, and environmental injustice in disadvantaged communities.
Under the Biden-Harris administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is committed to implementing the full Fair Housing Act so that federal dollars are not used to entrench housing segregation but rather to build shared prosperity for a multiracial democratic society. The Fair Housing Act, included in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, bans discriminatory practices in housing such as racial and religious rental restrictions and the “redlining” of communities of color by financial institutions to deny them access to credit and federal dollars, which is responsible for much of the racial wealth gap.
Under the leadership of HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge, the HUD is implementing a key component of the Fair Housing Act, called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, which was buried by the Nixon administration. It was resurrected briefly at the end of the Obama administration, killed by the Trump administration, and is now back. And the Biden-Harris Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is vigilant about rooting out the redlining.
These actions are taking place alongside many other initiatives to preserve and expand the supply of affordable housing, like fighting exclusionary zoning, helping state and local governments use American Recovery Plan funds for affordable housing projects, and selling vacant federal properties to public and nonprofit affordable housing programs rather than Wall Street.
These efforts are urgently needed. Many African Americans remain trapped—often physically—in communities that have been starved of public services, their resources plundered to finance white-flight suburbs. De facto segregation continues to exist. The Chicago tenement building in which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., lived during the Chicago Freedom Movement, which led to the Fair Housing Act, sat vacant for decades in North Lawndale, a segregated neighborhood facing historical environmental injustice and disinvestment by the city. Mayor Brandon Johnson is now working to remedy this.
The Biden-Harris administration is charting a new course, with new programs to ensure that affordable housing is available to all, that transportation projects connect rather than isolate, and that the effects of environmental injustice in disadvantaged communities are remedied.