How Race Survived U.S. History by David R. Roediger
Roediger, David R. 2008. How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon. New York: Verso.
175 - This sort of coercion from Southern Democrats occured repeatedly, a particularly striking example being the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1938.
176 - That bill began by serving Southern planter interests in laying out wages and hours provisions, which, it stipulated, would not apply to agricultural workers--who in the South and Southwest were overwhelmingly black and Mexican. As the legislation proceeded, Dixiecrats wanted and won still more, forcing no fewer than five Senate roll calls to expand exemptions to those trucking farm produce or packaging and preparing fesh fruits and vegetables; in each case, they held Northern liberal' feet to the fire, and the whole law hostage.
181 - In a fascinating mid-1960s speech at Howard University, President Lyndon Johnson retrospectively acknowledged that thirty-five years previously "the rate of unemployment for Negroes and whites was about the same." He continued, "Tonight the Negro rate is twice as high." Johsnon might have added that the origins of this pattern lay in the New Deal, during which black women suffered especially great losses in job opportunities, and reformers either ignored or contributed to the problem. Such differentials in employment solidified the notion that African Americans sought handouts rather than work. That notion, developing decisively outside as well as within the South, was driven by racist fantasies but also by specific national policies contributing to job loss and to discrimination in the provision of welfare. In much of the North, where African Americans voted and could successfuly demand access to welfare but not to good jobs, ADC payments, in the words of the historian of welfare Michael Brown "coercively substitute[d] for jobs." Denied training, the black poor could get a measure of cash relief, fueling yet again the notion that they were among the undeserving poor. [. . .]
New Deal housing policy similarly showed that national failures to address racial justice stemmed from more than simply Southern racism. The post-World War I campaigns to enforce residential segregation through the mass signing of restrictive covenants by whites had left the real estate industry, and many homeowners, convinced that stable property values required Jim Crow practices everywhere. While the New Deal never began to budget enough money for housing to address the needs of the third of all Americans whom Roosevelt counted as "ill-housed," its housing
182 - policies did manage to set pernicious precedents where race was concerned. Initiatives took place on two tracks.
One set of programs funded highly unequal, overwhelmingly segregated, public housing: the very shoddiness of the structures and crowding of the units could unfairly identify residents as undeserving recipients of welfare. The other track of federal housing policy subsidized and stabilized private homebuyers' loans, the overwhelmingly white recipients of which were cast as embodiments of an American Dream based on individualism, rather than as welfare recipients. Using realty indistry guidelines on the quality of neighborhoods, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) from 1933 to 1935 and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) set up in 1934 developed metrics to "grade" the desirability of neighborhoods partly based on their racial composition. The color-coding of FHA maps of the neighborhoods outlined the often African American and/or diverse neighborhoods graded as least desirable in red. Since the lowest grade meant the denial of loans, the term "redline" came into the language to mean the identifying of a neighborhood for unfavorable treatment. The "color line" defined the state-sponsored "redline" more than any other factor. "Segregation," fair housing activist Charles Abrams wrote in 1955, "was not only practiced. . .but openly exhorted" in the federal home loan programs. Rating neighborhoods, the FHA grouped "racial occupancy alongside pollutants like smoke and odors." It offered a model restrictive covenant enforcing segregation and extolled such devices as the "surest possible protection against undesirable encroachment."
205 - Affirmative action, the main "wedge issue" dividing voters over race since 1969, took shape during a moment when the Nixon adminsitration posed itself as a liberalizing force. [ . . .] "quotas" themselves had already been found legally untenable in a series of rulings growing out of the language on "preferential treatment" in Title 7 Section J of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. So strong was the wording of that passage, and so explicit the denail of any intent of racial preferences by Democratic leader Senator Hubert Humphrey in debates on the bill, that
206 - those in the Johnson administration wanting to attach firm numbers to plans to desegregate the skilled construction trades had to abandon such plans in cities like St. Louis, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. [ . . .]
But Nixon, on taking office in 1969, subverted the OeO even as he resurrected Johsnon's abandoned Philadelphia Plan to desegregate the building trades in that city, finding language to circumvent explicit reference to quotas. Although applying to just hundreds of jobs initially, the plan had great symbolic impact--the building trades so expressed craft-union racism as to make James Baldwin doubt that there was a labor movement in the US at all--and effectively divided trade-union and African American Democratic constituencies. Some Nixon scholars find evidence that the Philadelphia Plan expressed a longstanding and continuing commitment by the president to a dying strain of moderate Republican anti-racism. This certainly was the case with Arthur Flectcher, the dynamic black liberal Republican who provided much of the plan's language and who spoke of it as a continuation of Dr. King's work. But the larger truth is that Nixonian affirmative action matured in the thrall of a presidency committed to a Southern strategy of coded racism and to dividing and conquering his enemies. Moreover, by 1970, Nixon's Democratic adviser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, urged a period of "benign neglect" of supposedly overly polarizing questions of racial justice. [. . .] The Philadelphia Plan and Fletcher were both gone by 1973. Affirmative action thus implied at best a return to a gradualist approach to racial justice and an atmosphere of partisan angling for advantage.
207 - Liberal Democrats soon became the reluctant cusodians of affirmative action, as Republicans turned increasingly against the initiatives that Nixon had helped to instigate, branding them forms of "reverse racism." Reagan was an especially effective and insistent enemy of largely non-existent "quotas."
175 - This sort of coercion from Southern Democrats occured repeatedly, a particularly striking example being the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1938.
176 - That bill began by serving Southern planter interests in laying out wages and hours provisions, which, it stipulated, would not apply to agricultural workers--who in the South and Southwest were overwhelmingly black and Mexican. As the legislation proceeded, Dixiecrats wanted and won still more, forcing no fewer than five Senate roll calls to expand exemptions to those trucking farm produce or packaging and preparing fesh fruits and vegetables; in each case, they held Northern liberal' feet to the fire, and the whole law hostage.
181 - In a fascinating mid-1960s speech at Howard University, President Lyndon Johnson retrospectively acknowledged that thirty-five years previously "the rate of unemployment for Negroes and whites was about the same." He continued, "Tonight the Negro rate is twice as high." Johsnon might have added that the origins of this pattern lay in the New Deal, during which black women suffered especially great losses in job opportunities, and reformers either ignored or contributed to the problem. Such differentials in employment solidified the notion that African Americans sought handouts rather than work. That notion, developing decisively outside as well as within the South, was driven by racist fantasies but also by specific national policies contributing to job loss and to discrimination in the provision of welfare. In much of the North, where African Americans voted and could successfuly demand access to welfare but not to good jobs, ADC payments, in the words of the historian of welfare Michael Brown "coercively substitute[d] for jobs." Denied training, the black poor could get a measure of cash relief, fueling yet again the notion that they were among the undeserving poor. [. . .]
New Deal housing policy similarly showed that national failures to address racial justice stemmed from more than simply Southern racism. The post-World War I campaigns to enforce residential segregation through the mass signing of restrictive covenants by whites had left the real estate industry, and many homeowners, convinced that stable property values required Jim Crow practices everywhere. While the New Deal never began to budget enough money for housing to address the needs of the third of all Americans whom Roosevelt counted as "ill-housed," its housing
182 - policies did manage to set pernicious precedents where race was concerned. Initiatives took place on two tracks.
One set of programs funded highly unequal, overwhelmingly segregated, public housing: the very shoddiness of the structures and crowding of the units could unfairly identify residents as undeserving recipients of welfare. The other track of federal housing policy subsidized and stabilized private homebuyers' loans, the overwhelmingly white recipients of which were cast as embodiments of an American Dream based on individualism, rather than as welfare recipients. Using realty indistry guidelines on the quality of neighborhoods, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) from 1933 to 1935 and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) set up in 1934 developed metrics to "grade" the desirability of neighborhoods partly based on their racial composition. The color-coding of FHA maps of the neighborhoods outlined the often African American and/or diverse neighborhoods graded as least desirable in red. Since the lowest grade meant the denial of loans, the term "redline" came into the language to mean the identifying of a neighborhood for unfavorable treatment. The "color line" defined the state-sponsored "redline" more than any other factor. "Segregation," fair housing activist Charles Abrams wrote in 1955, "was not only practiced. . .but openly exhorted" in the federal home loan programs. Rating neighborhoods, the FHA grouped "racial occupancy alongside pollutants like smoke and odors." It offered a model restrictive covenant enforcing segregation and extolled such devices as the "surest possible protection against undesirable encroachment."
205 - Affirmative action, the main "wedge issue" dividing voters over race since 1969, took shape during a moment when the Nixon adminsitration posed itself as a liberalizing force. [ . . .] "quotas" themselves had already been found legally untenable in a series of rulings growing out of the language on "preferential treatment" in Title 7 Section J of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. So strong was the wording of that passage, and so explicit the denail of any intent of racial preferences by Democratic leader Senator Hubert Humphrey in debates on the bill, that
206 - those in the Johnson administration wanting to attach firm numbers to plans to desegregate the skilled construction trades had to abandon such plans in cities like St. Louis, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. [ . . .]
But Nixon, on taking office in 1969, subverted the OeO even as he resurrected Johsnon's abandoned Philadelphia Plan to desegregate the building trades in that city, finding language to circumvent explicit reference to quotas. Although applying to just hundreds of jobs initially, the plan had great symbolic impact--the building trades so expressed craft-union racism as to make James Baldwin doubt that there was a labor movement in the US at all--and effectively divided trade-union and African American Democratic constituencies. Some Nixon scholars find evidence that the Philadelphia Plan expressed a longstanding and continuing commitment by the president to a dying strain of moderate Republican anti-racism. This certainly was the case with Arthur Flectcher, the dynamic black liberal Republican who provided much of the plan's language and who spoke of it as a continuation of Dr. King's work. But the larger truth is that Nixonian affirmative action matured in the thrall of a presidency committed to a Southern strategy of coded racism and to dividing and conquering his enemies. Moreover, by 1970, Nixon's Democratic adviser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, urged a period of "benign neglect" of supposedly overly polarizing questions of racial justice. [. . .] The Philadelphia Plan and Fletcher were both gone by 1973. Affirmative action thus implied at best a return to a gradualist approach to racial justice and an atmosphere of partisan angling for advantage.
207 - Liberal Democrats soon became the reluctant cusodians of affirmative action, as Republicans turned increasingly against the initiatives that Nixon had helped to instigate, branding them forms of "reverse racism." Reagan was an especially effective and insistent enemy of largely non-existent "quotas."
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