1944: The GI Bill
Post-War Assistance
One benefit of serving in WWII was the promise of the GI Bill, which provided veterans with assistance through education, job training, and low-cost mortgages. However, African Americans were often excluded from these benefits and were hired for “mostly menial and low-paying” jobs (Feagin, 2014, p. 59). Political scientist Ira Katznelson (2005) found that Black veterans “were refused loans for nakedly racist reasons, targeted as being high-risk candidates… in New York and the northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill supported home purchases by non-whites” (p. 140). Katznelson also found that the GI Bill:
“[P]roduced practices that were more racially distinct and arguably more cruel than any other New Deal-era program. The performance of the GI Bill mocked the promise of fair treatment” (p. 141).
The GI Bill was not equally available to Blacks.
When discussing the African American experience with Title III of the GI Bill, which covered property loans, historian Kathleen Frydl (2009) wrote “it is more accurate simply to say that [B]lacks could not use this particular title” (as cited in Coates, 2014).
With few options for mortgage assistance and meager income from low-paying jobs, thousands of African American veterans had little choice but to move to - or remain in - segregated urban neighborhoods, most of which had been yellowlined or redlined by the HOLC and FHA. Public housing was available, but it was temporary.
In Baltimore, attempts to integrate African Americans into the city were foiled by racist government agendas. New Black housing projects were relegated to sites like Cherry Hill, which was a less desirable area given its proximity to a municipal incinerator (Pietila, 2010, p. 86). As a result of these racist policies, African American populations remained concentrated in socio-economically challenged areas.
Segregation and Urban “Blight”
Segregation reinforced economic disparity, depressed housing costs, and increasingly separated struggling sections of the city from the thriving parts of town. Urban researcher Hans Skifter Andersen (2002) noted, areas experiencing urban decay or “blight” often become ensnared in a cycle of “self-perpetuating negative social, economic and physical processes … that make them increasingly different from the rest of the city” (p. 153). Anderson described the structural and personal dynamic that characterized Baltimore’s urban decline,
Segregation is a product of structural factors in cities and of decisions taken by individual households. In their search for location, people choose between places that have different perceived qualities regarding housing, physical and social environment, access to transport, jobs, services and natural beauties, and status and cultural identity. When these qualities are more unevenly distributed in space, which means that differences between “bad” and “good” or “ordinary” areas are more obvious, segregation will tend to become stronger because the incentives for house hunters to choose or avoid certain urban areas will be increased. (p. 155)
The Cherry Hill Neighborhood of Baltimore
Source: Baltimore Sun
Further, he notes that once begun, segregation initiates a downward spiral that further isolates these areas and creates increased poverty and displacement.
Segregation takes place as an interaction between social and spatial differentiation and leads to a concentration of poor and excluded people – or special ethnic groups – in certain parts of the cities. This concentration leads… to changes in the quality of the neighbourhoods and to an exclusion of places as possible living areas. This exclusion of places then adds to spatial differentiation in the cities and increases segregation. Another self-perpetuating process … indicates that living in deprived housing estates could lead to further social exclusion of people staying there, which again tends to increase social inequality. (p. 155)
As the United States, and Baltimore, emerged from the Great Depression and World War II, underlying structural inequalities and racial tensions remained. In many ways, cities replaced the plantation as the visual depictions of racial inequality in America.