Just as the doctrine of white supremacy came into being to justify the profitable system of slavery, through shrewd and subtle ways some realtors perpetuate the same racist doctrine to justify the profitable real estate business.1
—REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
Rev. Martin Luther King, at the time of his assassination, was on the front lines of the fight for workers in Memphis and in the process of launching a nationwide poor people’s campaign. Few recall that exactly one week after his murder, on April 11, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Fair Housing Act. The Act outlaws discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of dwellings, and in other housing-related transactions, based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, or disability. This law, Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, honored the Herculean struggle waged by King for two years to highlight the issue of housing segregation and discrimination.
In 1965, King brought the civil rights movement to the North and took on the issue of open housing in Chicago and its suburbs. At the time, Chicago was the second-largest city in the United States, and its systems of education, employment, and housing were as segregated as any in the deep South. King hoped to release what he called an army of nonviolent protesters that would challenge these conditions and bring about fundamental change. However, he hit a solid wall of white—and often violent—opposition that involved elected officials, law enforcement authorities, bankers, real estate agents, lawyers, and ordinary citizens. As a result, legislation was stalled in Congress until the political opening caused by King’s murder—and the widespread riots that followed—allowed Johnson to push the bill through in only a week.
Today, we see a more dressed-up but similar rogues’ coalition, which, rather than prevent black homeownership, has figured out a way to exploit it. Instead of bottles and bricks thrown at protesters and marchers, the weapons of choice have been usurious mortgage contracts and signing pens. The language of segregation and interposition has been replaced with false narratives of getting a piece of the American pie and property ownership as freedom. The evil of “states’ rights” has given way to the perniciousness of bankers’ rights. For many families in the black community, home mortgages became new shackles, ending dreams and futures.
As Laura Gottesdiener documents in her brilliant discourse on the battle over home and community by African Americans, housing has always been integral to the fight for racial equality and justice. In a humane and somber voice, she captures the brutality of how those working in the political, real estate, banking, and financial sectors coordinate and collude to garner superprofits irrespective of the mass destruction caused to millions of individual mortgage holders or the nation’s economic security as a whole. So egregious have their practices been that they triggered massive national and international losses, bringing global economies to the brink of collapse. This criminal enterprise, for which not a single banker or official in the financial or banking industry has yet to be prosecuted or imprisoned, has forced millions of American families out of their homes and into the streets. African American and Latino homeowners, in particular, have paid dearly, as they were disproportionately targeted and victimized by the predatory schemes and con games enacted by those devoid of any sense of national community or conscience.
As far back as 2006, the Center for Responsible Lending was already wary of the subprime loans targeting the black community. The Center predicted that unless the government intervened, it was likely that bankers would directly cause “the largest loss of African-American wealth that we have ever seen, wiping out a generation of home wealth building.”2
Gottesdiener exposes how very deliberate, shocking strategies to target the black community were implemented. Black churches, rather than white ones, were seen as sites to heavily promote and market toxic loans. Real estate agents were given bonuses if they could convince black clients, regardless of their ability to carry the terms of the loan, to take the higher-cost, higher-risk deals. Shameless racism and financial predation were the order of the day throughout the entire home-financing industry.
The housing devastation experienced by the black community in the last few years is but one outrage in a context of unyielding economic turmoil. Many scholars and economists have lamented the disparate impact of the recession on black and Latino communities. As Dollars & Sense magazine noted, “The Great Recession produced the largest setback in racial wealth equality in the United States over the last quarter century.”3 Indeed, only halfway through the crisis, the “typical black household in 2009 was left with less wealth than at any time since 1984.”4 CNN Money released a report in 2012 stating that not only is the median wealth of white households twenty times that of black households, but black wealth has undergone a devastating decline—53 percent from 2005 to 2009—with the result that the typical black household possessed less than $5,000 in wealth, compared to over $100,000 for whites.5
But the crisis that has eviscerated African American homeowners and potential homeowners is about much more than just profits and rapacious greed. Fundamentally, the battle is over community. For many African Americans, owning a home is about building a community and maintaining the stability that allow for active participation in one’s neighborhood and in society more generally. The goal of owning a home has never been simply a pie-in-the-sky or abstract notion of the American Dream. It has been an indicator of individual achievement but also a collective accomplishment embedded in the struggle for racial equality, justice, and solidarity.
The four families profiled by Gottesdiener speak over and over again about their fear of losing community roots, an anxiety in some ways more terrifying than just the physical or economic loses they face. Detroit’s Bertha Garrett speaks for them and many more when she states, “Memory lives in a space. This is what people don’t understand. We raised our kids here. It’s more than just an investment.” To uproot a people is to uproot their culture, social networks, economic ties, and even spiritual bonds. The stories told by Garrett, Griggs Wimbley, Michael Hutchins, Martha Biggs, and too many others echo the narratives of refugees around the world who have been forced to search for a new home, new roots, new social and personal connections. In the lingua franca of the United Nations, the economic storm that swept the nation generated a humanitarian crisis consisting of millions of people internally displaced by foreclosure and eviction.
Like Dr. King, Gottesdiener also draws a link between two historic facts: that prior to the Civil War enslaved blacks were legally seen as “property”; and that following the Civil War, acquiring “property” was a considered a foundational need for a free people, a view that even the U.S. government held for a brief period during Reconstruction. The notion of people who were once “property” now owning property was a radical one that challenged long-held views about the place of African Americans in U.S. society. Historically, from sharecroppers’ fields to urban ghettos, the struggle over land and home has embodied the complex dialogue between race and belonging. She quotes Professor Margalynne J. Armstrong, who states “African Americans have a relationship to property that differs from that of other Americans. Our introduction to this country was as a form of property, [and] contemporary relationships between African Americans and property are still impaired.”
We owe Gottesdiener a great debt for her research and powerful argument in A Dream Foreclosed. There is a debate going on in the United States that few are aware of or acknowledge. That debate is over whether housing—clean, affordable, safe—should be seen as a fundamental human right. And, in fact, a host of international legal documents, many of which the U.S. government has signed and ratified, see it as such. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”6 Article 11 of the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights declares, “The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions.”7
Fortunately, as Gottesdiener details and celebrates, the tale does not end with bankers simply getting away with visiting economic mass destruction on black America. The crisis has also given birth to an innovative and growing fightback across the nation. Above all, A Dream Foreclosed documents that a movement of resistance to the housing-as-profit thinking has reemerged and is challenging fundamental assumptions about the significance of home and community. Groups such as Take Back the Land, City Life/Vida Urbana, and others have stopped dislodgments, reversed evictions, and occupied territories in the name of protecting human rights. These acts of courage and conscience hearken back to the heroic campaigns of the 1930s that fought farm seizures and landlord abuses. Many forget or never knew that those battles eventually led to the development of progressive public housing policies in the United States.
While countless stories have been reported about the bursting of the housing bubble, the struggle for access to housing is rarely covered in the major media or even in the alternative press. Gottesdiener’s effort here is a much needed and welcomed counterweight to the millstone of national silence. She takes sides in this battle and gives voice to those who are rarely, if ever, heard. A Dream Foreclosed takes up a question raised by Dr. King many years ago:
Now, in order to answer the question, “Where do we go from here?” which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now.... Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home. . . . But difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future.8
Martha Biggs takes a break looking out the window of the home for just a second. Although, Martha knows that any moment people could come to evict her family, she is still more afraid of having no place to go and subjecting her family to sleeping back in the family’s minivan. Photo and caption by Brent Lewis.
11. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 118.
2. Jeannette Wicks-Lim, “The Great Recession in Black Wealth,” Dollars & Sense, http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2012/0112wicks-lim.html, accessed April 2013.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid
5. Tami Luhby, “Worsening wealth inequality by race,” CNNMoney, June 21, 2012, http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/21/news/economy/wealth-gap-race/index.htm, accessed April 2013.
6. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/, accessed April 2013.
7. The International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CESCR.aspx, accessed April 2013.
8. Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here?” Annual Report delivered at the 11th Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, GA, August 16, 1967.