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About "DNA."

On "DNA.," Kendrick Lamar adopts multiple viewpoints; celebrating, critiquing, and exploring his black heritage and culture. In the music video, Kendrick and actor Don Cheadle appear to trade bars, engaging in an argument using the song's lyrics during an interrogation scene. We also learn that "DNA" stands for "Dead Nigger Association."

Lamar is wearing a traditional Kung Fu uniform throughout the piece. In an interview with , Don Cheadle confirmed that he inadvertently inspired the 'Kung Fu Kenny' persona. Cheadle portrayed a Chinese-speaking martial artist named Kenny in the 2001 action-comedy sequel .

At the beginning of the video, the song "YAH." can be heard echoing above-almost as if it is playing in Kendrick's head as the camera pans down. "YAH." comes directly after "DNA." on DAMN. 's tracklist.

Following his initial encounter with Cheadle, who seems to be portraying a law enforcement figure, the ending of "BLOOD." suddenly begins playing; when Cheadle turns on the lie-detector device, he begins convulsing, almost as if in a trance. This snippet comes from the video of Geraldo Rivera criticizing Kendrick's lyrics on "Alright," one of his most successful singles. The music video also contains snippets from "Hood Politics," another song from Lamar's March 2015 award-winning album, To Pimp A Butterfly.

Lastly, the song's second verse samples a different segment of the same Fox News clip from "BLOOD." and it's worth noting that "BLOOD." precedes "DNA." on the album.

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DNA. Lyrics: I got, I got, I got, I got- / Loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA / Cocaine quarter piece, got war and peace inside my DNA / I got power, poison, pain and joy inside my DNA / I got

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HIGH SCHOOL WAS the white space just above C4, not yet on the 1936 map. It was a Catholic school, built in 1945. My dad had gone there, my aunts and uncle too. By the time I passed through, the kids mostly came from the north end of town, far above Shaw Avenue - what a city planning document once called Fresno's Mason-Dixon line. They came from Clovis, a white-flight suburb east of the city whose population boomed after the forced desegregation of Fresno schools in the '60s and '70s. And they came from the country, since wealthy fruit farmers, family ranchers turned agribusiness Republicans, would send their white kids by long commute to the main Catholic High School in the Central Valley. Being Catholic it attracted Mexican American kids and Filipino kids as well, a few Asians. The tiny handful of Black students often came on athletic scholarships - I'm not sure how the regulations worked. In 1948, the year my dad was born and his childhood home built, in zone C1 of the HOLC redlining map, students there put on a minstrel show.

Autobiographical examples open windows onto larger social processes. As Saidiya Hartman explains, the single story, necessarily limited, can do its best to avoid "navel gazing," and "fold[ing] onto itself," and evoke material histories that matter beyond the instance described. But any effort to untangle and account for the density of relation between part and whole, instance and system, must always only be in process, incomplete - a project, as Hartman says, suitable for a poetics rather than a project of critique. It is an experiment. The results cannot be guaranteed.

By the time I arrived to San Joaquin Memorial in the mid-1990s, kids were throwing white supremacist hand signs in team pictures and told jokes where the punch line was someone being lynched. Any white person from Fresno will have similar stories. My sophomore year, a junior lineman chased one of our Black teammates around the locker room making chainsaw noises, playacting a murder. People laughed. "What? - he's my friend," chainsaw guy said when a couple of us told him to stop. He hugged the Black teammate. The chased teammate didn't say anything. The white guy was older than us, and one of my friend's cousins. I put on my stuff and went to practice.

Across decades of defensive forgetting, details remain sharp. The wide, low table the two jumped over during the chase, painted with school colors; the place of my locker, on the bottom row three or four from the corner they ran around next. The cartoon chainsaw-noise, coming from the weightlifting area beyond my line of sight. I know the names of all the people involved, and think of them sometimes. I wonder whether their minds have been altered in any way by time. One of the hand-sign guys worked in human resources for a while. Somebody is a chiropractor. Another is now a sheriff for the County of Fresno.

¤

Fresno is not a place usually associated with the story of segregation in America. No firehoses, no dogs. It is, in a sense, normal: agricultural, poor, sprawling, conservative; atypical for California but a synecdoche, as I heard over and over again in interviews, for social processes visible throughout the United States. " The Best Little City in the U.S.A.," as the old gateway arch at Van Ness Avenue reads. It was only three weeks ago when I learned that, like hundreds of other cities in the United States, maybe all of them, my hometown was born in apartheid - that the story goes back to the beginning. The lateness of this knowledge is the point. Lauren Michele Jackson wrote on Twitter recently that "the year of white people realizing things is EXHAUSTING." I want to trace the mechanisms by which such belatedness has become general and put a finger on the concrete practices that have made the conversion narrative - the narrative of white discovery - a characteristic but insufficient genre in the era of Black uprising. My aunt sent the map by group email.

Like all redlining maps, the chart of Fresno that pinged my iPhone just days after police murdered George Floyd was created by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation in the New Deal era. As many reading this will already know, the purpose of the HOLC maps was to organize urban spaces across America according to "residential security" and determine eligibility for federal loans in the fraught, post-Depression rebuilding years: a state mechanism of selective investment. (There were hundreds of HOLC maps, searchable here.) While the precise uses to which the charts were put varied from city to city, the color-coded swatches of supposed risk decorating the HOLC map of Fresno sponsored material practices of discrimination overseen by the federal government. Redlining meant home ownership and upward life-plots for some, itinerant rentals in substandard housing and serial poverty for the rest. Under the program, poor white families were more likely to secure home loans than even affluent Black ones. In Fresno and across America, " when conventional loans were made in HOLC red-coded 'Hazardous' areas, they had higher interest rates for borrowers" than loans in green or yellow ones.

But the official policies comprising this positive program of racist social engineering were just the tip of the iceberg, since they provided warrant for any number of unofficial agreements and tacit compacts that barred nonwhites from areas graded "Best." Studies like The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit and American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland have tracked these dynamics in canonical sites of American antiblackness; I am only just reading them. In Fresno and elsewhere, to protect the growing city's islands of white normalcy, other zones had to be created. These areas, graded D and bright pink on the 1936 Fresno map, were effectively walled off into reservations for the city's undesirable elements. Thus did certain quarters of my hometown enter the ranks of America's "sundown towns," the thousands of "normal" places, not usually in the South, that used legal or extra-statutory means to keep "African Americans or other groups from living in [them] and [were] thus 'all-white' on purpose." "Outside of the traditional South," James Loewen shows, "probably a majority of all incorporated places [in the United States] kept out African Americans" - 71 percent of all towns and cities in Illinois, for example. It is an American story, sharper in Fresno than in many other places. As a Fresno State report summarizes: "Discriminatory housing policies and practices, restrictive covenants, redlining, as well as differentials in interest rates, and subprime loans" all "helped produce and continue to perpetuate the distinctive separation of whites and nonwhites in residential space in Fresno."

Like the white expanse where my high school would soon be, Fresno's Fig Garden area didn't exist in time to be graded on the 1936 redlining map. Friends of mine from what we called old Fresno families lived there: kids of doctors and judges, people with pool houses. In truth, there are no old Fresno families. While founded in 1872 and incorporated in 1885, the city is almost entirely an artifact of the 20th century. Now hovering at just over half a million, the city's population has more than quadrupled since World War II, confirming that Fresno's sprawling and exponential growth tracks precisely with the period of gathering environmental catastrophe known as the Great Acceleration, in this as in other facts the city is an exemplum of vast, even global processes - an American Babylon. Fig Garden was designed in the '40s as an enclave for the city's rich whites, a fact described with perfect openness. A 1944 deed there specifies that

[n]either said premises, nor any part thereof, shall be used in any manner whatsoever or occupied by any Negro, Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, Armenian, Asiatic or native of the Turkish Empire, or descendent of above named persons, or anyone not of the white or Caucasian race, provided, however, that such a person may be employed by a resident upon said property as a servant for such resident.

The goal of such instruments was to reinforce the partition already accomplished by the HOLC maps and double down on official government segregation with private mechanisms meant to further insulate the map's tiny green zones and slightly larger blue ones from what the 1936 Fresno report calls the " infiltration of [...] colored races." It worked. By the 1950s, nearly 100 percent of Fresno's Black residents lived west of the railroad tracks, around D4 and D5; a decade later Fresno had the highest rate of Black-white segregation in California, a landscape characterized by narrowed life-chances and foreclosed possibility for residents of the west side, a shot at "average childhood" for the rest. Infants in west side ZIP codes today have a one in four chance of dying before age one, while several neighborhoods to the north have, in the words of a recent study, "no infant mortality" at all. In 2018, Fresno ranked 10th on a list of worst cities for Black people in America; activists call it "Mississippi, California."

Reis Thebault, who wrote for The Atlantic about Fresno's history of segregation, told me by email that on his first day of reporting there, he asked someone where to go if he wanted to see an example of the city's racial divisions. "He said: 'just drive down Blackstone Avenue with your eyes open.'" But, Thebault explained, "at the same time, I don't think many people know how it happened. The consequences are obvious enough; the wealth inequality there is plain. But I found that people hadn't realized or internalized that it was the government that did this - local, state, federal. And I think this is true not just in Fresno but in most any American city."

Before I'd learned about the Fig Garden deed, my dad recalled to me that in the mid-1970s he'd read an old ownership document for a house on Huntington Avenue, a now marginal area at the south end of town that was once among Fresno's "better," i.e., whiter, neighborhoods. This deed had the same language as the Fig Garden one. "It eliminated 'Negroes,' Chinese, and Armenians," my dad told me over the phone. "I couldn't believe it." The deed he was describing was for the house my sister came home to from the hospital, signed by the previous owner: the first place she ever lived on earth. I was two. On the 1936 map it is B4, bright blue: "still desirable."

¤

Where does the locker room story start? At what point does an anecdote begin? Or more abstractly: How to tell the history of a social process, of a racism baked into the very background of life, when the springs and levers of that process - its causes - have been hidden from you and nearly every other white person you know, on purpose, for decades? And when the story is then not just about structures of dispossession and apartheid as such, but also about their strange epistemological status, their partial but not total occlusion from the perspective of those whose very lives were sustained and insulated by the apparatus in question? And how about when those lives, the naïve and supposedly protected ones I mean, are not the proper subject of the story at all - are rather a distraction from it, a distraction that has for too long masqueraded as the central plot? What shape could such a story take?

In the hallucinatory handful of days since the well-documented and public fact of Fresno redlining became known to me, I have learned what scholars of race and ghettoization in Fresno have long understood; what the faculty and staff at the Central Valley Health Policy Institute, for instance, have made their lives' work; and what nonwhite residents of Fresno know firsthand. It is that Fresno's story is the story of American segregation writ small, the HOLC map but one moment in a longer unfolding of a present defined, still, by a white supremacy built into the city plan. Is it a secret? Andrea Castillo reported on Fresno's history of segregation for The Bee and now works for the Los Angeles Times. "It really depends on who you're talking to," she told me. "Black residents in Fresno know the history very intimately. [...] Anyone willing to spend some time in neighborhoods south of Shaw Avenue would see it for themselves. [...] Maybe [what was striking to readers of the Bee] is that I was more willing to describe the cause as what it is: racism."

This cause operated from the start. The Central Pacific tracks running north-south up the west side formed a dividing line from the beginning, one of those old-fashioned boundaries, literally the tracks, separating the elect from the abandoned, the drowned from the saved. "If you were white," said the late Fresno historian Bill Secrest several years ago, describing the birth of Fresno in the 1880s, "you lived on the east side of the tracks where the courthouse was, where all the retail and best neighborhoods were being established. If you were Chinese, you moved to the other side of the tracks." Fresno's primal moment of anti-Chinese exclusion established what historian Ramon Chacon calls a "pattern of racial segregation and ghettoization" that set terms for the city's development going forward. The Yokuts tribes native to the Fresno area had long been pushed out, of course, expropriated to make way for a railway depot and the settlement following it.

Following these original crimes, history came in waves, piling at this novice historian's feet: redlining in the late '30s; whites-only deeds in the '40s and after. In the '50s, the main road running parallel to the Central Pacific tracks, Highway 99, was expanded into a multi-lane expressway, designed not just to shuttle traffic between Los Angeles and San Francisco but to carve the city in two, sealing hazardous elements from Fresno's white core and demolishing thriving mixed-race neighborhoods in the process. When Black residents first arrived to Fresno in numbers after World War II, after the Bay Area armament factories closed down, they arrived to a place where segregation had been built into the city grid, the postwar garden partitioned forever from the urban plantation.

In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. visited Fresno and spoke at Ratcliffe Stadium, an area described in the HOLC report as "level and [...] occupied by American whites entirely, most of whom are laborers and artisans, a few being small businessmen." I played a football game there once, just before I left town forever; the picture shows me with my two maternal grandparents, the last photo I have of the three of us. Three thousand people came to hear King's speech at Ratcliffe, but nobody I know. King had come to speak against Proposition 14, which would allow housing segregation by enabling landlords to decide themselves to whom to rent or sell; deeds could exclude anyone. At the Fresno speech, King said: "[S]egregation is the Negro's burden and America's shame, morally wrong and sinful and a new form of slavery, a cancer on the body politic which must be cured." Despite King's speech, Prop 14 passed, only later to be overturned by the Supreme Court. But in Fresno the cancer had already spread. By 1973, a real estate broker and longtime Democratic political operative could refer openly to Highway 99 as " Fresno's Berlin Wall." Shaw Avenue, which runs east-west and cordons Fresno's south and west sides from the sprawling and majority-white northern developments, would be called the city's Mason-Dixon line in an official city planning document. When Malcolm X visited southwest Fresno in October 1963, he told a crowd of some 200 people that "[t]he day is past when the Negro will turn the other cheek." "These statements," reported the Fresno Bee, "drew the heaviest applause at the rally." A clipping of the speech ended up in his FBI file.

In middle and high school, my own childhood intersected with this world-historical plot only glancingly. It happened below the Mason-Dixon line of Shaw but east of the Berlin Wall, just outside the blue island of B1, on the upper spur of C1, marked "Definitely Declining." From the mid-1980s to the 1990s, this bubble of protection floated uneasily between the "nice" areas to the north and west and "rougher" ones to the south, common Fresno code for the relative density of white and nonwhite residents. We rode bikes along an irrigation ditch to get ice cream.

Describing Claudia Rankine's cancellation of this practice in Citizen, Kamran Javadizadeh refers to "the naïveté of the post-Romantic lyric" as "a literary form of white innocence." Like its cousins the reflective personal essay or the narrative of white political awakening, first-person reflective poetry often works to uphold the mythology of transcendence that seals off and elevates white subjects in a world structured to engender and sustain this sanctifying effect. Thus do typical features of the lyric mode - confessional voice, involuted self-regard, and the presumption that the identity at the heart of the story is somehow universal - become signals for a style of autobiographical poetics that Javadizadeh, discussing Robert Lowell, calls "hygenic sincerity": the pose by which the white writer seeks to secure a presumptively transcendent selfhood by feigning to be affected by the power of other people's suffering.

This essay is not a lyric. The period of history I associate with bikes and ice cream was, on the west side, an era of widening wealth gaps, gathering toxicity from concentrating air and water pollution, and the effective hollowing-out of the city's Black middle class, such that the best advice from Black parents to their children in this period was (as I heard several times in researching this essay) "to leave Fresno." "Right now," said Tania Pacheco-Werner, a medical sociologist at Fresno State who helps run the Central Valley Health Policy Institute there, "Black mothers don't see a future for their Black young people in Fresno. They are not wrong."

Pastor D. J. Criner is an activist and community leader who heads Saint Rest Baptist Church on the west side. When I talked to him by Zoom, he described a world of Black-owned businesses that, even through the early 1990s, flourished "up and down Elm," all of which shuttered after waves of disinvestment and a sustained, targeted refusal to provide infrastructure to the area. "Self-made, self-owned Black businesses, I'm talking about," he said. "Scott's Cleaners, Everybody's Market, Salaam's Soul Food - a golden age of Black business." It was all gone by the time Criner arrived to Fresno in 2005. "People told me I missed it." The decades-long process of disinvestment gutting Black Fresno began in the 1970s and was punctuated by the burning of Los Angeles, four hours to the south, during the 1992 uprising against racist policing, an event Criner mentioned in his timeline of this period. From 1989 to 1991, a world away from those conflicts and far, too, from the yellow spur embracing us on Dayton Avenue, I attended an effectively white middle school in a majority Black Fresno neighborhood, one large city block from Pastor Criner's church on Elm. The school had been created from thin air in the early 1980s, I have learned, as part of the long and failed attempt to desegregate the schools of southwest Fresno.

The middle school was a magnet; they bused us in. The majority-Black, non-magnet high school to which my school was attached had, in 1966, 1,161 students, of whom three were white; it was 99.6 percent nonwhite in 1970 - this was before the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare found that Fresno Unified was in violation of the Civil Rights Act and the busing began. In 1970, six meetings were held at the north end of town to debate the plan, where, the Fresno Bee reported, "the great majority indicated they are opposed to busing their children to other schools to achieve the racial and ethnic balance required by law or for any purpose."

Nine years later the west side's effectively all-Black Irwin Junior High School was closed down entirely, "as part of the district's desegregation plan." The buildings sat vacant until 1983, when the computer-focused magnet school I attended - Computech - was invented on the same site, to "answer [...] the need for desegregation in the Fresno community," in the words of a promotional article in PC Magazine. "[W]ith a dazzling array of computer programs and an impressive staff," said the 1985 fluff piece, the rebranded middle school aimed "to draw children from the affluent white families at the north end of town to the predominantly black Edison High School in west Fresno." The "goal that gave it life" was "to peacefully achieve a racial balance in a nearly all-black school." The all-Black high school and the new middle school for computer-savvy whites were separated by chain-link fence. I have trouble remembering if it was possible to walk through a gate to get there.

The Computech experiment took place in D5, a zone the 1936 map had graded "Hazardous." Cordoned off from investment in the '30s, turned by real estate policy and Highway 99 into an open-air prison for nonwhite residents, the area was, by the 1990s, almost entirely Black and deeply impoverished, "a segregated enclave" in the words of Chacon, where, according to a 2009 report, child and elderly poverty rates are " two to three times as high as they were throughout the [greater] Fresno MSA." Half a lifetime earlier, in 1964, another report confirmed that this depleted present had been prepared for in the past: that the past is, in this material sense, still present. "This section of the Metropolitan Area," the old report observes, "has the lowest educational attainment, highest proportion of unskilled and unemployed persons, the lowest income, the lowest home value, and the highest proportion of unsound housing." On current digital maps of "SB535 Disadvantaged Communities," it is Census Tract 6019000902, in the 96th percentile for "pollution burden" in California and the 99th percentile for low birth weight. The other scores for this space tell a story of structural exclusion from a modern political system by which some lives are protected and maintained, put in position to write essays for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and others cast aside. The relevant data is measured in YPLL, " years of potential life lost."

In a famous moment of The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon describes the colonized space as a world "cut in two," divided into the "settler's town" and the "native town." (Miriam Zuk, who researched Fresno's racist geography and now works on environmental justice in Chicago, told me that colonialism is a useful metaphor for understanding space in Fresno.) Fanon explains that inhabitants of the colony's abandoned zones - "the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation" - develop enmity for the settlers beyond the fence even when, and even more strongly because, they rarely meet. One day in eighth grade, I was milling around with other kids from neighborhoods to the north, waiting for our bus home. I hit the pavement, unconscious. Somebody had punched me from behind and walked away, a stranger. Fanon writes: "At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native [...] from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect." It went down in the school logs as a random act, with no cause at all.

¤

It is plain enough that the swatches of color decorating the Fresno map encipher a program of openly racist social engineering by which a fast-growing city was shaped into a certain vision of American utopia. Producing this world required the creation and maintenance of perfectly segregated subdistricts whose boundaries were, and continue to be, enforced by violence - the economic and the physical kind, no less damaging for having been set into motion by pen and ink. If this makes Fresno a microcosm for American life in the age of Black resistance, it also means that its present should be seen as the " still unfolding aftermath " of the original acts of partition whose archives and records have been hiding in plain sight. My dad said he'd already known about the redlining of our hometown; that he'd seen the map before. Did everyone know this history? "Sure, people who paid attention knew, I guess. Not everybody wants to know that kind of thing."

John Capitman is executive director of the Central Valley Health Policy Institute and Nickerson Professor of Public Health at Fresno State. "I don't know if I'd call it repression exactly," Capitman told me on the phone. I had asked him about the particular form of unknowing that enabled Fresno's racism to be both profoundly obvious and somehow, still, a secret. He told me that, after arriving to Fresno in 2005, he conducted college interviews in Fresno and would ask applicants how the city's infamous inequality had affected them personally. Latino, Black, and Asian kids, Capitman recalled, all answered this question vividly and without hesitation; "but the white kids would just kind of sit there, and say something to the effect that, 'Well, it hasn't really affected me personally...' It was remarkable.'" Describing current meetings of the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, on whose board he sits, Capitman said that certain white politicians "put a lot of energy into denying" the existence of racism in their hometown. These officials "willfully refuse to take in the information" and "are not willing to accept" plain facts on a spreadsheet, truths they see staring them in the face. In Sundown Towns, Loewen describes this epistemological mirage-effect as "knowing and not knowing": "White residents do know the racial composition of their town, of course; it may even be a reason why they chose to move there. But most haven't thought about how it came to be so white; it just seemed natural."

For me, the HOLC chart's checkerboard of dispossession provides a tool for remapping white childhood in light of the geography of partition that enabled and sustained that profoundly incomplete experience, unwinding at a glance what Javadizadeh called the white speaker's illusion of transcendence. The map in this sense can work like any other poetic text, reorienting one story line and replacing it as though in an instant with another, truer one. To respool the narrative of white childhood in this way is to set conditions for playing that film again from the beginning, otherwise. In the new version, small instances become large and non-events decisive, while the things you actually remember fall into the shadows, no longer important. Flickering half-scenes and tiny moments - a locker room episode, a punch in the face - become invested with significance they had been denied. The main character becomes deeply secondary. And the whole ensemble shifts genres, in this case from lyric pastoral to something much like tragedy, as the perspective shifts from the view from inside a bubble to one that would show that very bubble in the process, generations long, of being produced. "No 'I' [...] is the whole of anything," Rankine has said. "We cannot be committed to any version of the first person to the extent that we are unwilling to interrupt, diverge, or reroute in the name of known and unknown truths."

Today the neighborhood my own life-plot barely touched is home to nearly all of Fresno's heavy industry, to a meat rendering plant, to a city park built on top of Superfund site. Said West Fresno resident Robert Mitchell: "You awaken with the smell [of the rendering plant], you walk around constantly with the smell, and unless one has lived in the area with this type of stench, you don't understand how it impacts you." According to the EPA, this space is now the single "most environmentally, socially, and economically vulnerable place in California," first among the state's 8,000 voting precincts. In 2010, three times as many tons of toxic chemicals were emitted in South Fresno in comparison to the North. No surprise, then, that geographic representations of cancer risk and respiratory hazard in Fresno today take shape as ghostly replays of the 1936 zoning map - the same film played over again, 70 years on. In July, COVID-19 tests administered in southwest Fresno returned an astonishing 44.2 percent positivity rate, more than quadruple the already runaway infection rates of the city's north side. Again, the map is a color-coded guide to where life matters, and where it does not, in the town I left after high school.

JePahl White is a longtime resident of the westside whose great-grandfather came to Fresno and found a way to live south of Fresno's Mason-Dixon line. "In the 1950s," White said in an interview, "my great-grandfather, Thomas Butler, brought four generations of his family from Oklahoma to Fresno, California, to this property right here," on Fresno's west side. White lists the names of relatives who have died early from kidney disease, cancer, and other ailments associated with the toxic environment of this abandoned zone, not far from my magnet middle school or the abandoned commercial strip on Elm. "I can remember vividly drinking the groundwater here on the property, drinking from this hose. And then later, being diagnosed with kidney disease, and kidney issues. Some of them later to be attributed to 'environmental factors' by some of my doctors." My own grandfather came to Fresno from Oklahoma too, but settled eventually on what was then Fresno's north end, near C1, in 1948, where "well-built new residences [were] occupied for the most part by 'white-collared' workers and business men with incomes ranging from $1,500 to $3,000 a year." Every family on the block was white. Life expectancy in the Fresno's northwest ZIP codes, where my high school friends now live with their families, is as much as 20 years higher than those in the Black southwest.

The treeless and heavily policed deathworld of Fresno's west side is usefully understood as an internal colony, as Zuk and Capitman both suggested to me in our conversations. It is also, by definition, a place of improvised life and adaptation, where "possibility" is produced " in the space of enclosure." Pastor Criner told me about how, when he first arrived to Fresno on a football scholarship to Fresno State, he'd been told to stay away from West Fresno. "But they couldn't keep us away." He found a place called Hunt's nightclub, and linked up with its community of middle-aged and older Black Fresnans, "40, 50, 60 years old," Criner said. "They embraced us, and they took care of us, because they saw we were Black and we had that connection - that connection of not having. When you don't have anything, you embrace what you do have, and you take care of other people who don't have." I told him I hadn't been able to find Hunt's in any records I'd seen. "No, you wouldn't! To African Americans it was very well known, a legend of West Fresno, but nobody who's white has ever heard of it. It was just Mrs. Hunt's house. She used the kitchen for food and made the whole thing into a kind of juke joint; she was legendary for how she brought people together." An old article about Hunt's, the only printed trace I've since been able to find, says it used to be a grocery store, and that Zelma Hunt, aged 84 in the year 2000, came to Fresno from Oklahoma too. She first lived in a tent city less than a quarter mile from the site of the nightclub. The article says the place "is not going to win any interior decorating awards," and quotes a middle-aged Black resident, Henry Nutt, who says: "If you grew up in west Fresno, you know about Hunt's. If you're coming here, you're coming home."

¤

If the childhood of somebody who is now an English professor occurred against a backdrop of geographical and social apartheid, a densely organized system of racist practice orchestrated to secure his own life through the selective immiseration of others, this is hardly news. The news, instead, might be that an elaborate machinery has worked, over decades, to hide the processes of that supposed protection from conscious apprehension, building up edifices of defense that produce responses ranging from curious unknowing to what Capitman called "angry denial." To be white in the United States is to belong to a class for whom forgetting is a matter of psychic maintenance. What would be required to counteract this habitual forgetting might be something like what Capitman, in our phone call, described as "the capacity to hold contradictory ideas in the mind at once." It is the habit of mind that would let you see, in effect, two films at once - your own mystified lyric and the actual disaster film, all together in one story. It was this "cognitive capacity to hold contradiction in mind," Capitman said, that he found so undeveloped among his white students. Pastor Criner used the metaphor of The Matrix. "It's like, finally people wake up and realize that what they have been living is a dream, and not reality. But people are benefiting from that dream, benefiting from the racism while other people are being pushed to the side - still. And so to realize that, to see that? It's terrifying for people." When, just a moment before this, I told him I'd only recently learned of the redlining map, he shook his head and laughed.

For those of us buoyed up by deprivation, whose lives have been cordoned off from ambient heavy metals and defunded schools, sealed away and preserved from not just the aerosolized residue of animal carcasses but also the knowledge that others were not, the task becomes to acquire this habit of mind at a very late hour. If one step in such a process is to coordinate the geographies of white memory against the record of American dispossession that is the true story of that memory, another is to work toward modes of expression that might displace or unwind the very narrative habits that have arisen to buttress that culpable naivete. "[C]onfessional poetics," as Javadizadeh explains, "reifies the white subject whose identity it began by assuming." For the would-be confessionalists and aspiring memoirists, the challenge becomes to develop a practice of white memory that might work against the lyricizing impulse, or within and against it, and labor to develop a method adequate to the " EXHAUST[ION] " Black Americans feel when confronted with news that, as Jackson put it, white people have learned something.

Such a practice might begin, and only begin, by working to show an illusion in the process of being formed. It might go further to try to index historical processes even in their refusal to become fully tangible, and account as well for the feeling of true life - the material experiences of real human beings born 10 miles from you - having slipped through the hand. To hold contradiction and preserve it in this way would be to evoke the sweep of a history many of us were prevented from seeing, even while our own minds and bodies floated on structures of advantage that were, for others, something you could smell in the air. For the essay writers and the football types, the ones who went away to school, the job is to un-tell a story that was designed, generations ago, with you at the center. Because it turns out the main characters in the film are people whose names you never knew: activists like Mary Curry, Robert Mitchell, Pastor Paul Binion II, Debbie Darden, JePahl White, and Pastor Criner himself - along with Barbara Hunt, who attended city council meetings almost every day for decades before she passed away and told city leaders, over and over again, that they were killing people. White officials condescended to her. But to the west side she was a "survivor" and a "fighter," in her daughter's words, and ( said The Bee) was "big on collecting city documents, especially the long, tricky, single-spaced documents on bonds," which she used as evidence in her continual assault on white power in Fresno. Hunt, as it happens, was the daughter of Mrs. Zelma Hunt, the same legend of Black Fresno who welcomed Pastor Criner and his teammates to the west side almost two decades ago.

¤

In addition to the people named in the essay, I thank Brianna Calix, Debbie Darden, and Bob Mitchell for sharing their expertise with patience and generosity. Any errors are only my own. Written July 2020.

¤
Nathan K. Hensley is associate professor of English at Georgetown University and the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty. He was born and raised in Fresno, California.

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Remapping White Childhood: On Fresno Redlining

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HIGH SCHOOL WAS the white space just above C4, not yet on the 1936 map. It was a Catholic school, built in 1945. My dad had gone there, my aunts and uncle too. By the time I passed through, the kids mostly came from the north end of town, far above Shaw Avenue - what a city planning document once called Fresno's Mason-Dixon line.

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Redlining, the practice of limiting where ethnic minorities could live and own property in local communities, has been a stain on Fresno's history for decades.

Now, Fresno County Assessor-Recorder Paul Dictos wants to stamp out the remnants of the discriminatory practice in official records.

In some cases, documents called covenants still contain language barring nearly all nonwhites from owning or living in specific homes across Fresno County, Dictos said.

Although such restrictions have been unenforceable for decades, they remain on the books. Dictos is seeking authority from the Board of Supervisors to strike them once and for all.

"It is an affront to me as an elected official to have them there, while I'm elected. And I think that there's a way to wipe them out," Dictos said.

Thousands of Documents Likely

"It is an affront to me as an elected official to have them there, while I'm elected. And I think that there's a way to wipe them out." - Fresno County Assessor-Recorder Paul Dictos

Dictos said there are thousands of documents to research, although he believes the last covenants were filed in 1962. He has noticed the same language in the covenants he's seen.

A covenant is a document filed by a developer that mandates what is and not allowed in a new neighborhood. It may include restrictions on farm animals at a residential property or specify what color of house paint is allowed.

Discriminatory housing has been outlawed since the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. Local historians and housing rights attorneys GV Wire℠ spoke with do not believe any local ordinances were ever passed to specifically outlaw the practice.

Dictos said when a home is purchased, there is usually a reference in the sales contract to covenants on file with his office.

The assessor-recorder is responsible for determining property values, recording property ownership and changes, as well as maintaining certain vital records such as birth certificates.

One Neighborhood Example

Dictos shared one example of a restrictive covenant, filed in 1947 for the development at the southwest corner of Chestnut and Holland avenues, south of Fresno State.

Paragraphs 7 and 8 read:

"No part of said subdivision, nor any building thereon, shall be sold, conveyed or leased, by Deed or otherwise, to any Negro, Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, Armenian, Malayan, Asiatic, or Native of the Turkish Empire, or any person not of the Caucasian race, or any descendent of any one or more of said persons.

"Neither said real property nor any part thereof, nor any lot nor part thereof, shall be used or occupied in any manner whatsoever by any Negro, Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, Amenain [sic], Malayan, Asiatic or Native of the Turkish Empire, or any person not of the Caucasian Race, or any descendent of any one or more of said persons; provided, however, that such person may be employed as a servant by a resident upon such property."

Born of Greek descent, Dictos said the covenant would apply to him as well.

"I shouldn't be here. I'm a native of the former Turkish Empire," Dictos said.

"Neither said real property nor any part thereof, nor any lot nor part thereof, shall be used or occupied in any manner whatsoever by any Negro, Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, Amenain [sic], Malayan, Asiatic or Native of the Turkish Empire, or any person not of the Caucasian Race, or any descendent of any one or more of said persons; provided, however, that such person may be employed as a servant by a resident upon such property." - a 1947 Fresno land covenant that remains on the books

About Developer Hubert Richert

The area was known as the Richert Tract, for its developers, Hubert C. Richert and his wife at the time, Willetta A. Richert (newspaper archives reports them divorcing in 1950).

Fresno County librarians believe Richert Avenue in Fresno was named after Hubert.

According to his 1989 obituary, Richert was an innovator in processing dates. He moved to Indio, where he picked up the name "The Date King of Coachella Valley."

Richert graduated from Fresno State and was active in alumnus activities. There are at least two current scholarships in the Media, Communications and Journalism department that he founded.

Housing Groups Support

Prentice Milrod, executive director of Central California Legal Services, applauds Dictos taking interest.

"As a resident of Fresno County, I'm grateful to know our County officials are making our property records comply with our laws and reflect the values we claim. This is a first step toward ensuring we can all choose to live in neighborhoods of opportunity; I hope the other branches of our local governments are prepared to match his effort with actions of their own to guarantee fair housing," Milrod said via email.

M.J. Borelli, executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Central California wondered what took so long.

"They should have already purged these things. I mean, this has been in place for decades," Borelli said. "If our office were to discover those kinds of documents, it would be well within our jurisdiction to try to see those documents purged."

Supervisor Looking Forward to Dictos Ideas

At least one supervisor is eager to hear his proposal.

"I am open to review any proposals Paul would bring forward," Supervisor Nathan Magsig said.

Nothing has been submitted yet.

Read the 1947 Covenant for the Richert Tract

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Dictos Wants to End Stain of Fresno's Discriminatory Housing Covenants - GV Wire - Explore. Explain. Expose

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Redlining, the practice of limiting where ethnic minorities could live and own property in local communities, has been a stain on Fresno's history for decades. Now, Fresno County Assessor-Recorder Paul Dictos wants to stamp out the remnants of the discriminatory practice in official records.

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A few weeks ago we brought you a report about how rare maps are shedding new light on the history of racial discrimination in Fresno. In the 1930's many neighborhoods with high minority populations were frozen out of government backed home loans by the federal government, in a practice called redlining. But that wasn't the only government backed segregation that happened in the San Joaquin Valley. In fact, decades ago, in some prestigious Fresno neighborhoods being white was a requirement. FM89's Diana Aguilera visits one of them with this special report.

The unincorporated community of Fig Garden in Fresno is known for its vintage homes, large Cedar trees and a homey historic feel. But local historian Bill Seacrest says the neighborhood has a long often overlooked history starting from its beginnings in the early 1900s.

"What they wanted of course in Fig Garden was a well to do white clientele. Anybody else could really stay out of it."

And that meant minority groups.

"Anyone who was Hispanic, anyone who was African American, anybody who was Asian, anybody who was Chinese, Japanese I'm certain would have been unwelcomed in the Fig Garden in the 1920s and Armenians too."

Back in the day, deeds to properties explicitly restricted any minority group from purchasing, leasing, or occupying homes in this area and other parts of town. This practice was known as a racially restrictive covenant, a legally enforceable contract in a deed.

During the early to mid-1900s, it was used nationwide to prevent people of color from purchasing homes in white communities.

"There was a lot of latent, a lot of background prejudice that was here in Fresno and many other cities and towns throughout the United States. And the way Fig Garden was protected at the time was emblematic of that." - Seacrest

Credit Diana Aguilera / Valley Public Radio

These type of covenants weren't only practiced between property owners. They were also used by real estate boards and neighborhoods associations. In 1948, the Supreme Court found that while racially-based restrictive covenants were not themselves unconstitutional, enforcement of the covenants was unconstitutional. But it wasn't until 1968 when racially-restrictive covenants in deeds was ruled illegal.

Local attorney Howard Watkins was surprised when he bought a home in 1975 a block away from Huntington Boulevard, another prestigious neighborhood in southeast Fresno.

"The ones that went with the home we bought on Fifth and Balch, a block of Huntington, barred ownership by people from the Ottoman Empire explicitly saying Armenians couldn't buy."

Even though it wasn't enforceable at the time, it still triggered a reaction from him.

"It brought it home on somewhat of a personal level," Watkins says. "It wasn't discriminating against me but I found it appalling that in a democracy, in America, we would have formal recognition of discrimination."

This historic district is now home to many racial groups including Hispanics and Armenians. Back then Armenians were viewed as recent immigrants and often were specifically excluded from purchasing a home.

Barlow Der Mugrdechian with the Armenian Studies program at Fresno State says tensions escalated to a point where many Armenians moved out of Fresno to bigger cities.

"Many people went to the Bay Area or Los Angeles and they simply didn't move back. The memories were too hard too painful to remember to come back that they were discriminated against."

Besides not having purchasing power, minorities also suffered from job discrimination and overall segregation.

I asked Der Mugrdechian to read a deed from a home in Fig Garden written in 1944.

"Neither said premises nor any part thereof shall be used in any matter whatsoever or occupied by any Negro, Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, Armenian, Asiatic or native of the Turkish Empire. Now you don't really have the overt discrimination but you have other forms."

Decades later, local historian Bill Seacrest and I walk through Fig Garden. We're right by the underpass on Van Ness Boulevard leading from the Tower District to Fig Garden.

"It represents a symbolic division line," he says. "Minorities and people of color lived on one side of the underpass and then the privileged, entire white, lived on the other side of the underpass."

But he says times have changed and even Fig Garden has become more racially diverse. He says it's now based on your socioeconomic status whether or not you can afford to buy a home and not on your skin color.

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Diversity In Fresno: How Racial Covenants Once Ruled Prestigious Neighborhoods

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A few weeks ago we brought you a report about how rare maps are shedding new light on the history of racial discrimination in Fresno. In the 1930's many...

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Fair Housing Act | CRT | Department of Justice

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(1) a physical or mental impairment which substantially limits one or more of such person's major life activities, (2) a record of having such an impairment, or (3) being regarded as having such an impairment, but such term does not include current, illegal use of or addiction to a controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C.

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Late in the Civil War, the Union general William T. Sherman confiscated four hundred thousand acres of land from Confederate planters and ordered it redistributed, in forty-acre lots, to formerly enslaved people-a promise revoked by President Andrew Johnson almost as soon as it was made. More than a hundred and fifty years later, the debate on what America owes to the descendants of slaves, or to people robbed by the legal discrimination that followed, still rages. David Remnick talks with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Susan B. Glasser about how reparations has become a major focus in the 2020 Democratic primary contest. And we'll visit Georgetown University, where students have chosen to take reparations upon themselves.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Revisits the Case for Reparations

The writer set out to make America stop laughing at jokes about reparations. Five years later, Presidential candidates are taking his research very seriously.

"Come on and Bring on the Reparations"

Sekou Sundiata's poem, read for us by Carl Hancock Rux, addresses the debts that white culture and society owe to African-Americans.

Reparations and the #Resistance

After decades on the fringes, the debate around reparations has moved into the political mainstream, with eight Presidential candidates interested. Why now? And is there a future for reparations?

At Georgetown, Students Vote to Pay Reparations for the University's History with Slavery

In 1838, Georgetown administrators sold nearly three hundred enslaved people to sugarcane plantations to help fund the college. In 2019, students voted to pay reparations to their descendants.

Who Should Receive Reparations for Slavery and Discrimination?

Three prominent scholars discuss how reparations would work, and address a controversy over who would be eligible.

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Late in the Civil War, the Union general William T. Sherman confiscated four hundred thousand acres of land from Confederate planters and ordered it redistributed, in forty-acre lots, to formerly enslaved people-a promise revoked by President Andrew Johnson almost as soon as it was made.

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They speak as if slavery ended last week, and colored-only water fountains still trickle just outside white-only waiting rooms.

Democrats gathered on Capitol Hill on Wednesday and unleashed a cancer upon America. If allowed to grow, slavery reparations will devour this country by embittering whites and others who never owned slaves. This malignancy will enfeeble blacks by convincing them that Abraham Lincoln never lived, the Confederacy never died, and they are doomed in a land that hates their guts.

"We as a nation have not yet truly acknowledged and grappled with racism and white supremacy that has [sic] tainted this country's Founding and continues [sic] to persist in those deep racial disparities and inequalities today," Senator Cory Booker (D., N.J.) told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties as it weighed a measure to establish a reparations commission.

Booker, who is black, lamented "this history that has not been addressed, the silence that persists" and the "enduring injustices in our nation." He said that in his community, "you see how deeply unfair this nation is still to so many people."

Somehow, despite America's alleged bone-deep bigotry, Booker grew up as the son of two IBM executives in Harrington Park, N.J., a suburb that was 81.6 percent white and 0.6 percent black in 2000. He graduated from Stanford University, studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and earned his final coat of polish at Yale Law School. He now is a senator from a 68 percent white state.

So, might there be limits to America's anti-black animus? Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Texas) seems dubious.

"Slavery has never received an apology," she said at Wednesday's hearing. "The role of the federal government in supporting the institution of slavery and subsequent discrimination directed against blacks is an injustice that must be formally acknowledged and addressed." She also denounced "the continuing de jure and de facto impact of slavery today."

Such impact never stopped Jackson Lee, who is black, from graduating Yale and UVA Law School.

"I'm sorry that this is something our government was responsible for," Representative Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.), who is white, said at the hearing. "Everyone alive is responsible to do something now."

Huh?

Our government, the United States government, vanquished the Confederacy and, with it, slavery. The U.S. government's Republican-led Radical Reconstruction policy educated, integrated, enfranchised, and empowered former slaves, some of whom were elected to Congress. Alas, resurgent Democrats torpedoed that initiative in 1877.

The U.S. government integrated the Armed Forces in 1948. The U.S. Supreme Court judged school segregation unconstitutional in 1954. The U.S. government adopted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which killed Jim Crow statutes across the South. The U.S. government's Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed black access to ballot boxes in the South and beyond. The U.S. government's Great Society, War on Poverty, racial-preference programs, school-desegregation decisions, education subsidies, public housing, food stamps, and much more were designed largely to help millions of blacks overcome more than a century of Democrat-enforced discrimination and destitution after slavery ended.

And the U.S. government was led for eight years by Barack Obama, a black man, whom the American people - including 43 percent of whites in 2008 and 39 percent in 2012 - sent to the White House.

The U.S. government and the American people took these and other measures to advance blacks. Regardless, Democrats speak as if slavery ended last week, and colored-only water fountains still trickle just outside white-only waiting rooms - from sea to shining sea.

Democrats cannot inspire people with a vision of united Americans sharing an even greater nation. Instead, they launch carcinogenic schemes in hopes of riding waves of intense racial strife. If they can demoralize and enrage blacks just enough, Democrats reckon, blacks will engulf the polls and buoy this sick party's chances in November 2020. If this electoral math requires America to be inundated with tumors, Democrats could not care less.

The chemotherapy for this cancer is for citizens to vote against every Democrat on every ballot until this malignant party is flushed once and for all from the American body politic.
Michael Malarkey contributed research to this opinion piece.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor, a contributor to National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research.

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Democrats Unleash the Cancer of Slavery Reparations | National Review

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They speak as if slavery ended last week, and colored-only water fountains still trickle just outside white-only waiting rooms. Democrats gathered on Capitol Hill on Wednesday and unleashed a cancer upon America. If allowed to grow, slavery reparations will devour this country by embittering whites and others who never owned slaves.

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Black Reparations (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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States have long demanded reparations from other states at the end
of wars. More recently non-state actors such as the Aborigines of
Australia, the Maori of New Zealand, and many American Indian nations
of North America are demanding the return of their tribal lands from
Europeans as reparations; Ea…

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The U.S. government has agreed to pay a total of $492 million to 17 American Indian tribes for mismanaging natural resources and other tribal assets, according to an attorney who filed most of the suits.

In a joint press release by the Departments of Interior and Justice, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewel said, "Settling these long-standing disputes reflects the Obama Administration's continued commitment to reconciliation and empowerment for Indian Country."

The settlements mark the end of a push by the Obama administration to resolve what the U.S. says is more than 100 lawsuits totaling more than $3.3 billion brought by American Indian individuals and tribal governments against the federal government. The policy of reaching settlements on the disputes, some of which date back more than a century, is part of a campaign promise the president made to American Indians before he took office.

"Few have been ignored by Washington as long as Native Americans, the first Americans. Too often, Washington has paid lip-service to working with tribes," then-candidate Obama said in a speech at the Crow Nation Reservation in Montana in May 2008. "My Indian policy starts with honoring the unique government to government relationship, and ensuring treaty responsibilities are met."

Those treaty responsibilities include agreements dating back to the 1800s that made the U.S. government the trustee for huge swaths of tribal land. The Department of the Interior says it manages almost 56 million acres of land on behalf of tribes, and handles at least 100,000 leases on that land for a wide variety of uses including housing, timber harvest, farming, livestock grazing, oil and gas extraction. More than 250 tribes have some assets held in trust by the federal government.

Under those trust agreements, the U.S. government must make sure tribes receive "just compensation" for the use of their land or resources. "The government bought the land from Indians, but it didn't pay the Indians," says Melody McCoy, a staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund who has spent 20 years handling lawsuits against the federal government over alleged trust mismanagement and underpayment.

"The U.S. government would say it held the assets in trusts benevolently, for the protection of Indian lands and money," says McCoy, who handled 13 of the 17 newly announced settlements. "The flip side of that is that in exchange, the government was supposed to be a good trustee, and it wasn't. Land was not managed well. Money and resources were not managed well."

The result was decades of allegedly lost income for Native Americans across the country.

Before the Obama administration could turn to the business of settling the 100-plus lawsuits by tribes, it had to resolve a 13-year class-action lawsuit alleging the government failed to pay individual people billions of dollars in profits from land that had been seized from American Indians. A $3.4 billion deal was reached in 2009.

The tribal lawsuits proved more difficult to settle, because they often concerned payments the tribes alleged should have been made over the course of decades. "There were substantial litigation risks and problems to both sides," which drove both sides to the bargaining table, McCoy says. By 2012, the administration had reached settlements with dozens of tribes.

The settlements announced Monday are the second round of agreements. McCoy says that since Obama took office, there have been 95 total settlements with tribes, and that 11 more, some of which she handles, are in active negotiation. "It is quite an accomplishment," she says.

Although most of the 17 settlements are still awaiting final court approval, a handful of documents have been released, naming the Muscogee Creek Nation of Oklahoma, The Colorado River Indian Tribes and the Gila River Indian Community. The settlements range from $25,000 up to $45 million, says McCoy, who has seen documents for 15 of the 17 settlements announced.

She says the money from the tribal settlements will be transferred directly from the U.S. Treasury to tribal governments, and that there are no stipulations about how it will be spent. In a departure from more than a century of policy, the U.S. government now insists that tribal governments take the payments, refusing to hold the settlement assets in trusts.

"Going forward, the U.S. certainly has an opportunity to treat tribes more fairly," McCoy says. As for the tribes she has personally represented against the federal government, she says they are pleased.

"My clients feel like they had an extraordinary opportunity to engage with the U.S. government to government at the political level," she says.

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U.S. Government To Pay $492 Million To 17 American Indian Tribes

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The U.S. government has agreed to pay a total of $492 million to 17 American Indian tribes for mismanaging natural resources and other tribal assets, according to an attorney who filed most of the suits.

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African Americans Don't Need Reparations. We Need Responsibility

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African Americans have had many opportunities to put ourselves on equal footing with other Americans and pursue the American Dream.

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Reparations for Slavery Reading

Are the conditions really a "legacy of slavery"? If so, what should be done? Some African-Americans argue today for reparations--a sort of compensation for the free labor blacks were forced to render during 250 years of slavery.
The Idea of Reparations
Reparations for the slavery is not a new idea. Before the Civil War ended, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued an order in South Carolina. He wanted 40 acres and the loan of an Army mule set aside for each former slave family. This order was never carried out. After the war, Radical Republicans in Congress passed laws requiring confiscation of former-Confederate property to provide the ex-slaves with "40 acres and a mule." In 1866, President Andrew Johnson vetoed the legislation.

The next push for reparations took place at the turn of the century. Several black organizations lobbied Congress to provide pensions for former slaves and their children. One bill introduced into the U.S. Senate in 1894 would have granted direct payments of up to $500 to all ex-slaves plus monthly pensions ranging from $4 to $15. This, and several similar bills, died in congressional committees. The pension movement itself faded away with the onset of World War I.

During the 1960s, some black leaders revived the idea of reparations. In 1969, James Forman (then head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) proclaimed a "Black Manifesto." It demanded $500 million from American churches and synagogues for their role in perpetuating slavery before the Civil War. Black nationalist organizations, such as the Black Panther Party and Black Muslims, also demanded reparations.

In the 1980s, a new call arose for black reparations. It was stimulated by two other movements that successfully secured payments from the U.S. government. The Supreme Court in 1980 ordered the federal government to pay eight Sioux Indian tribes $122 million to compensate for the illegal seizure of tribal lands in 1877. Then in 1988, Congress approved the payment of $1.25 billion to 60,000 Japanese-American citizens who had been interned in prison camps during World War II.

In April 1989, Council Member Ray Jenkins guided through the Detroit City Council a resolution. It called for a $40 billion federal education fund for black college and trade school students. About the same time, a conference of black state legislators meeting in New Orleans backed the idea of a federally financed education fund for descendants of slaves. Shortly afterward, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-MI) drafted a bill calling for the establishment of a congressional commission to study the impact of slavery on African-Americans.
The Conyers Bill
Rep. Conyers introduced his bill (HR 3745) in November 1989. The preamble of the bill declared its purpose:

To acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a Commission to examine the institution of slavery, subsequent de jure and de facto and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.

This bill failed to make it to a House vote, but Conyers did not give up. In every session of Congress since then, he has introduced new legislation to establish a commission to study the issue and make recommendations to Congress. While none has succeeded, Conyers vows to keep trying.

Throughout the years, people have proposed different reparation plans. Some, like Robert Brock, a Los Angeles campaigner for reparations, argued for direct payments to descendants of slaves. "The government owes us money on a number of different fronts," the 66-year-old black activist declared, ". . . for labor, for loss of culture and of humanity."

Some supporters of reparations, like journalist Ron Daniels, proposed government financing of a national fund to develop educational and economic opportunities for the entire African-American community. Daniels argued in an editorial that "America must own up to its responsibility to make a damaged people whole again."

Others, such as the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA), advocate a broader approach. They believe that government could satisfy the call for reparations by a variety of means, including land, ownership of companies, stock, money, and aircraft. The group also calls for a method of self-government for American blacks to give them autonomy.

Just as advocates are not unanimous about the form of reparations, neither are they united on the amount. Some favor direct payments to slave descendants ranging from $25,000 to $100,000 or more. Others, like N'COBRA, believe a final amount cannot be determined until more study has been done to determine the harm slavery has caused blacks. But they suggest the total amount could be in the "trillions."
Reparations, Pro and Con
Many people and groups have voiced their opposition to the whole idea of slavery reparations. Major arguments against reparations include:

There are no black slaves living today. Slavery ended more than 160 years ago at the cost of several hundred thousand lives lost in the Civil War. It is unfair to ask American taxpayers, many of them from families that came to the United States after slavery ended, to pay for the wrongs of slavery.

The problems faced by African Americans today are not the "legacy of slavery" or even racism. Many blacks have succeeded very well in American society. The problems of poor African Americans are caused by social ills within the inner city, such as the breakdown of families, high crime rates, and dependence on welfare.

Federal and state governments have already spent billions of dollars on social programs such as welfare, subsidized housing, health care, employment development, affirmative action, and education. These programs have benefitted African Americans.

African Americans, particularly the young, need to overcome their problems through their own efforts and not depend on more government handouts and benefits.

Reparations would be too expensive, depriving the country of the opportunity to fix the Social Security and Medicare systems and meet other budget needs that benefit all Americans.

Any reparation plan would lead to unfairness and huge administrative costs. Who would receive reparations? Descendants of slaves? All blacks? Would well-off African Americans receive payments? If a fund were set up, who would administer it? Would those unhappy with the plan call for even more reparations or file lawsuits?

Advocates for reparations reject these arguments. They contend:

The claim for reparations is not against white Americans or even individual Americans. It is a claim against American government and society, which has continued from the time of slavery. As all members of society share in society's benefits, they also must share the burdens in the form of taxation. Through slavery, African Americans were terribly wronged and modern blacks were robbed of their inheritance. Further, blacks face racism every day. They deserve to be compensated.

The problems faced by many blacks today come from slavery and society's ongoing racism. Blacks were uprooted from their homes in Africa and brutalized in America by a system that destroyed the family structure and degraded the individual. When slavery ended, African Americans owned nothing. Isolated and discriminated against, they were denied education, contacts with society, and economic opportunity. Compared to whites, blacks remain in a disadvantaged position and will remain so until they receive compensation and society's racism ends.

Welfare, subsidized housing, affirmative action, and other previous efforts to address socio-economic problems of the black underclass have been too little and too late. They failed because society has failed to come to grips with the central problem--its own racism and discrimination. In some cases, social programs, though well-intentioned, actually increased black isolation and further degraded the black community. In addition, these programs benefitted other groups, not just blacks. By doing so, they failed to address the unique claims based on slavery that African-Americans have.

Reparations will not promote dependency. Instead, they will give individual African Americans and the community as a whole a chance to create their own economic base and become self-reliant.

The cost of reparations may be great, but a debt is owed and must be paid. The moral claim for reparations at least equals that of any other government program. America is a rich country, and if the will exists, the money can be found.

Just as it is too early to decide how much is due in reparations, it is too early to agree on how to distribute the reparations. Fair methods can be worked out once society acknowledges its obligation to provide reparations in the first place.

While it is unclear whether those advocating reparations for slavery ever will be successful, it is likely the debate will go on.
Points of Inquiry

1. After the passage of the 13th Amendment following the Civil War, should the former slaves have been granted reparations?

2. How are reparations for black slavery similar and different from the following:
a. reparations paid by the U.S. government to the Sioux Indians for lands illegally confiscated in 1877?

b. reparations paid by the West German government to Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps?

c. reparations paid by the U.S. government to Japanese Americans interned unconstitutionally in prison camps during World War II?

3. Do you agree or disagree that many problems faced today by the African-American community are the "legacy of slavery"? Why or why not?

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Reparations for Slavery?
Today, even after the success of the civil rights movement, the black American population on average has higher infant-mortality rates, lower life expectancy, higher rates of unemployment, lower income, and higher rates of impris, Today, even after the success of the civil r…

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An economist at the University of Illinois calculated that slaves would be owed $6.5 trillion in 2014 dollars. (New Republic)

In the US, over twice as many black families in the live in poverty than white. Black families are more l ikely than any other race to live in poverty. (United States Census Bureau)

In 2016, the UN urged the US to pay reparations after their The Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent had an 11 day "fact finding" mission in the US. (RT)

Many major US corporations have benefitted financially from slavery, including Lehman Brothers, Aetna, JP Morgan Chase, and Wachovia, all of whom released formal apologies in the early 2000's. Other companies (Brooks Brothers, AIG) have not released formal apologies. (Atlanta Black Star)

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History can't be rewritten, but can it be redressed? Even though the United States ended slavery more than a century ago, the effects of the atrocity still endure. Does the United States need to make up for that? If so, are reparations the answer?

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Slaveowners felt entitled to and often received compensation from local, colonial and state legislatures, especially in times of crisis - when enslaved women and men ran away, participated in rebellions or were executed for crimes. During the American Revolution, owners asked to be compensated when bondspeople had died while working in lead mines in Virginia, for example, and when they sided with the British and ran away.

After the revolution, as Northern states carried out gradual-emancipation plans, compensation was attractive to slaveowners seeking to ease their financial burdens. The 1804 Gradual Abolition Act in New Jersey, for example, did not free anyone immediately. It allowed children of enslaved women to be treated as "apprentices" (slavery by another name) until they reached a certain age and would be freed. The law included a clause that allowed slaveowners to gain compensation by letting their bondspeople go free and then reclaiming them as "bound out labor," which gave them access to state funds for their troubles.

In a break from tradition in the 1850s, the abolitionist Elihu Burritt organized the National Compensated Emancipation Convention in Cleveland to advocate payments to slaveowners, as well as smaller sums to be paid to the people they had enslaved. Nothing came of his dual proposal, however.

To be sure, the major benefactors of slaveowner reparations within the Atlantic slave system were Europeans. When England abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies, it offered compensation to 46,000 slaveowners at the cost of around $26.2 million.

France went further by penalizing Haiti for the revolution that abolished slavery in its former colony St. Domingue. It levied a huge sum on the island, which crippled it in decades of debt. Former slaves were forced to pay indemnities to former slaveowners in exchange for official recognition as the first black independent nation-state in the Western Hemisphere.

The long and insistent coupling of compensation for slaveowners with emancipation is useful for consideration in current debates about reparations for the descendants of the enslaved. Critics and skeptics are fond of saying that enslaved people should have asked for recompense back then. African-Americans did precisely that, going back to the colonial era. They petitioned for "freedom dues," they sued the estates of former masters for their unrequited toil, and they asked for land to restart their lives as free men and women. Relatively few of those efforts were successful.

An overwhelming majority of white people believed that slaveowners, not enslaved African-Americans, deserved recompense for the benevolence of manumission. The only "reward" that was widely supported was colonization: a trip "back to Africa." The act allocated $100,000 for the voluntary removal of the newly freed people (at $100 per person) to go to Liberia or Haiti, which rarely happened.

Preserving sacred property rights and moving the Negro problem offshore meant that there was no justice for enslaved African-Americans. All of the candidates running for president must support the federal government's issuing of reparations to African-Americans who were economically affected by slavery. Justice requires this.

Tera W. Hunter (@TeraWHunter) is a professor of history and African-American studies at Princeton and the author of "Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century."
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some . And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | When Slaveowners Got Reparations

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Slaveowners felt entitled to and often received compensation from local, colonial and state legislatures, especially in times of crisis - when enslaved women and men ran away, participated in rebellions or were executed for crimes.

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On Sept. 20, 1945, three months after the end of World War II, Chaim Weizmann, on behalf of the Jewish Agency, submitted to the governments of the US, USSR, UK, and France, a memorandum demanding reparations, restitution, and indemnification due to the Jewish people from Germany for its involvement in the Holocaust. He appealed to the Allied Powers to include this claim in their own negotiations for reparations with Germany, in view of the "mass murder, the human suffering, the annihilation of spiritual, intellectual, and creative forces, which are without parallel in the history of mankind."

Due to the deadlock, and later interruption of the Allies' negotiations for reparations, no further development in Weizmann's request took place until March 12, 1951, when Israel's foreign minister Moshe Sharett submitted a note to the four Allied governments which claimed global recompense to the State of Israel of $1.5 billion from the German Federal Republic (West Germany). Sharett's claim was based on the financial cost absorbed by Israel for the rehabilitation of those Jews who escaped or survived the Nazi regime and came to the newly created Jewish state. The financial expense incurred by Israel in the absorption of 500,000 Nazi victims could be covered at $3,000 per capita.

As a result of unofficial preliminary contacts, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer declared on September 27, 1951, that his government was ready to compensate Israel for material damage and losses and to negotiate with Israel and with representatives of Diaspora Jewry for other reparations. The following month, the Jewish community established the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (Claims Conference) in New York, presided over by Nahum Goldmann, to help with individual claims.

In Israel, the Knesset fiercely debated whether to accept the reparations from Germany over a three day period in early January 1952. Menachem Begin and the Herut Party were among the most vocal members of the opposition, who considered the reparations offer as blood money. By the end of the debate, a small majority of 61-50 succeeeded in passing the resolution to enter into direct negotiations with West Germany over specific reparations amounts. Outside the Knesset, thousands of Israeli's protested and rioted the decision, at times even pelting the plenum building with stones, leading the police to use tear gas to disperse the crowds.

Following Israel's approval of the resolution, a West German delegation headed by Professor Franz Boehm met with the Israeli delegation led by Giora Josephthal and Felix Eliezer Shinnar at The Hague in March 1952. The delegation of the Claims Conference, headed by Moses Leavitt, was put in charge of negotiations on individual claims for indemnification. At the negotiations, Israel reduced her claim of $1.5 billion against the whole of Germany to $1 billion against West Germany alone while reserving the right to claim the balance from East Germany - which neither attended the negotiations nor ever provided compensation.

On September 10, 1952, after six months of negotiations, an agreement on reparations between Israel and West Germany was signed in Luxembourg by Sharett and Adenauer. The agreement was ratified and came into effect on March 21, 1953, after a delay caused by the Arab states' efforts to prevent ratification.

Under the agreement, West Germany undertook to pay a total of $845 million: $100 million earmarked for allocation by the Claims Conference and the remainder to Israel. Direct compensation would be paid in annual installments over a period of 14 years (between April 1, 1953, and March 31, 1966). The money to Israel was split - 30 percent was to pay for Israel's crude oil purchases in the United Kingdom and with the balance of 70 percent Israel was to buy ferrous and nonferrous metals, steel, chemical, industrial, and agricultural products from Germany.

The agreement was carried out by West Germany government both in letter and in spirit and the goods bought and imported under the agreement represented between 12 and 14 percent of Israel's annual imports over the decade, thus making an important contribution to Israel's growing economy.

In 1988, the German government allocated another $125 million for reparations, enabling remaining Holocaust survivors to receive monthly payments of $290 for the rest of their lives. In February 1990, before its unification with West Germany, East Germany admitted for the first time that it was also responsible for war crimes committed by the German people during World War II and agreed to pay reparations.

In 1999, in response to the filing of numerous class action lawsuits in American courts, the German government and German industry agreed to compensate Jews and non-Jews specifically for slave and forced labor they performed for German industry during the war. Among the German industries that came under the lawsuits were Deutsche Bank AG, Siemens, BMW, Volkswagen, and Opel. In return for the dismissal of all such lawsuits and the guaranteeing German industry "legal peace" from any such further litigation, the German government created a foundation - "Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future" - with assets of approximately $5 billion. Slave and forced laborers still alive at the time of the settlement could apply to receive a lump sum payment of between $2,500 and $7,500 from the foundation; in all, over 140,000 Jewish survivors from more than 25 countries received payments. Final payments from the Foundation were to be made by September 2006.

The German government and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany announced an increase in funding for social welfare services for Holocaust survivors by $88 million on July 10, 2018. This funding increase will allow survivors to recieve more frequent and better quality home care, food support, transportation and medical services. This allocation makes Germany's 2019 total pledge to the Claims Conference $564 million.

Sources: American Jewish Historical Society, American Jewish Desk Reference, (The Philip Leff Group, Inc., 1999), p. 30.
Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2008 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.
Germany Increases Funding for Holocaust Survivors by $88 Million, , (July 10, 2018).

Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Documents Relating to the Agreement between the Government of Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, Signed on 10 September 1952 at Luxembourg (1953); N. Robinson, Ten Years Indemnification (1964); F.E. Shinnar, Be-Ol Koraḥu-Regashot bi-Sheliḥut ha-Medinah: Yaḥasei Yisrael-Germanyah 1951 - 1966 (1967); Bank of Israel, Ha-Shillumim ve-Hashpa'atam al ha-Meshek ha-Yisre'eli (1965); The Autobiography of Nahum Goldmann (1969), 249-82; I. Deutschkron, Bonn and Jerusalem (1970).

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On Sept. 20, 1945, three months after the end of World War II , Chaim Weizmann, on behalf of the Jewish Agency, submitted to the governments of the US, USSR, UK, and France, a memorandum demanding reparations, restitution, and indemnification due to the Jewish people from Germany for its involvement in the Holocaust.

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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Editor's note: On February 1, 2023, the College Board announced its finalized curriculum for an AP African American Studies course. It has removed work-present in the pilot program-by writers such as bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of this article.

We've gathered dozens of the most important pieces from our archives on race and racism in America. Find the collection here.
And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith t he LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today. Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury By our unpaid labor and suffering, we have earned the right to the soil, many times over and over, and now we are determined to have it. done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.
- Deuteronomy 15: 12-15

- John Locke, "Second Treatise"

- Anonymous, 1861

Listen to the audio version of this article: Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone.

I. "So That's Just One Of My Losses"

C lyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross's parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross's mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired-the protection of the law.

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote-a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. "You and I know what's the best way to keep the nigger from voting," blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. "You do it the night before the election."

The state's regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi's black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt-and they often were-the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state's penal system.

Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being made to work at gunpoint. "You didn't talk about it or tell nobody," Earvin said. "You had to sneak away."
"Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia," the AP reported.
When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping.

This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. "Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia," the AP reported, as well as "oil fields in Mississippi" and "a baseball spring training facility in Florida."

Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a more challenging school. There was very little support for educating black people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears, Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for black children throughout the South. Ross's teacher believed he should attend the local Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and get back in time to work in the fields. Local white children had a school bus. Clyde Ross did not, and thus lost the chance to better his education.

Then, when Ross was 10 years old, a group of white men demanded his only childhood possession-the horse with the red coat. "You can't have this horse. We want it," one of the white men said. They gave Ross's father $17.

"I did everything for that horse," Ross told me. "Everything. And they took him. Put him on the racetrack. I never did know what happened to him after that, but I know they didn't bring him back. So that's just one of my losses."

The losses mounted. As sharecroppers, the Ross family saw their wages treated as the landlord's slush fund. Landowners were supposed to split the profits from the cotton fields with sharecroppers. But bales would often disappear during the count, or the split might be altered on a whim. If cotton was selling for 50 cents a pound, the Ross family might get 15 cents, or only five. One year Ross's mother promised to buy him a $7 suit for a summer program at their church. She ordered the suit by mail. But that year Ross's family was paid only five cents a pound for cotton. The mailman arrived with the suit. The Rosses could not pay. The suit was sent back. Clyde Ross did not go to the church program.

It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American-he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle. He thought about fighting. "Just be quiet," his father told him. "Because they'll come and kill us all."

Clyde Ross grew. He was drafted into the Army. The draft officials offered him an exemption if he stayed home and worked. He preferred to take his chances with war. He was stationed in California. He found that he could go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the streets without being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and receive service.

Ross was shipped off to Guam. He fought in World War II to save the world from tyranny. But when he returned to Clarksdale, he found that tyranny had followed him home. This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie River. The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law.

Clyde Ross was among them. He came to Chicago in 1947 and took a job as a taster at Campbell's Soup. He made a stable wage. He married. He had children. His paycheck was his own. No Klansmen stripped him of the vote. When he walked down the street, he did not have to move because a white man was walking past. He did not have to take off his hat or avert his gaze. His journey from peonage to full citizenship seemed near-complete. Only one item was missing-a home, that final badge of entry into the sacred order of the American middle class of the Eisenhower years.

In 1961, Ross and his wife bought a house in North Lawndale, a bustling community on Chicago's West Side. North Lawndale had long been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but a handful of middle-class African Americans had lived there starting in the '40s. The community was anchored by the sprawling Sears, Roebuck headquarters. North Lawndale's Jewish People's Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a "pilot community for interracial living." In the battle for integration then being fought around the country, North Lawndale seemed to offer promising terrain. But out in the tall grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale kleptocrat, were lying in wait.
From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market.
Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner's responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He'd bought "on contract": a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting-while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full-and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.

The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay-taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they'd bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. "He loads them up with payments they can't meet," an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. "Then he takes the property away from them. He's sold some of the buildings three or four times."

Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from "restrictive covenants" to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.

Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated "A," indicated "in demand" neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked "a single foreigner or Negro." These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated "D" and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.

"A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy," Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. "Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws."

The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth:

Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the "self-fulfilling prophecies" of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.

In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. "It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill," a housing attorney told the historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family Properties. "The thrill of the chase and the kill."

The kill was profitable. At the time of his death, Lou Fushanis owned more than 600 properties, many of them in North Lawndale, and his estate was estimated to be worth $3 million. He'd made much of this money by exploiting the frustrated hopes of black migrants like Clyde Ross. During this period, according to one estimate, 85 percent of all black home buyers who bought in Chicago bought on contract. "If anybody who is well established in this business in Chicago doesn't earn $100,000 a year," a contract seller told The Saturday Evening Post in 1962, "he is loafing."

Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto.

Clyde Ross still lives there. He still owns his home. He is 91, and the emblems of survival are all around him-awards for service in his community, pictures of his children in cap and gown. But when I asked him about his home in North Lawndale, I heard only anarchy.

"We were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know that we were that ignorant," Ross told me. He was sitting at his dining-room table. His glasses were as thick as his Clarksdale drawl. "I'd come out of Mississippi where there was one mess, and come up here and got in another mess. So how dumb am I? I didn't want anyone to know how dumb I was.

"When I found myself caught up in it, I said, 'How? I just left this mess. I just left no laws. And no regard. And then I come here and get cheated wide open.' I would probably want to do some harm to some people, you know, if I had been violent like some of us. I thought, 'Man, I got caught up in this stuff. I can't even take care of my kids.' I didn't have enough for my kids. You could fall through the cracks easy fighting these white people. And no law."
Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.
But fight Clyde Ross did. In 1968 he joined the newly formed Contract Buyers League -a collection of black homeowners on Chicago's South and West Sides, all of whom had been locked into the same system of predation. There was Howell Collins, whose contract called for him to pay $25,500 for a house that a speculator had bought for $14,500. There was Ruth Wells, who'd managed to pay out half her contract, expecting a mortgage, only to suddenly see an insurance bill materialize out of thin air-a requirement the seller had added without Wells's knowledge. Contract sellers used every tool at their disposal to pilfer from their clients. They scared white residents into selling low. They lied about properties' compliance with building codes, then left the buyer responsible when city inspectors arrived. They presented themselves as real-estate brokers, when in fact they were the owners. They guided their clients to lawyers who were in on the scheme.

The Contract Buyers League fought back. Members-who would eventually number more than 500-went out to the posh suburbs where the speculators lived and embarrassed them by knocking on their neighbors' doors and informing them of the details of the contract-lending trade. They refused to pay their installments, instead holding monthly payments in an escrow account. Then they brought a suit against the contract sellers, accusing them of buying properties and reselling in such a manner "to reap from members of the Negro race large and unjust profits."

Video: The Contract Buyers League

In return for the "deprivations of their rights and privileges under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments," the league demanded "prayers for relief"-payback of all moneys paid on contracts and all moneys paid for structural improvement of properties, at 6 percent interest minus a "fair, non-discriminatory" rental price for time of occupation. Moreover, the league asked the court to adjudge that the defendants had "acted willfully and maliciously and that malice is the gist of this action."

Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer appealing to the government simply for equality. They were no longer fleeing in hopes of a better deal elsewhere. They were charging society with a crime against their community. They wanted the crime publicly ruled as such. They wanted the crime's executors declared to be offensive to society. And they wanted restitution for the great injury brought upon them by said offenders. In 1968, Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer simply seeking the protection of the law. They were seeking reparations.

II. "A Difference of Kind, Not Degree"

According to the most-recent statistics, North Lawndale is now on the wrong end of virtually every socioeconomic indicator. In 1930 its population was 112,000. Today it is 36,000. The halcyon talk of "interracial living" is dead. The neighborhood is 92 percent black. Its homicide rate is 45 per 100,000-triple the rate of the city as a whole. The infant-mortality rate is 14 per 1,000-more than twice the national average. Forty-three percent of the people in North Lawndale live below the poverty line-double Chicago's overall rate. Forty-five percent of all households are on food stamps-nearly three times the rate of the city at large. Sears, Roebuck left the neighborhood in 1987, taking 1,800 jobs with it. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood.

North Lawndale is an extreme portrait of the trends that ail black Chicago. Such is the magnitude of these ailments that it can be said that blacks and whites do not inhabit the same city. The average per capita income of Chicago's white neighborhoods is almost three times that of its black neighborhoods. When the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson examined incarceration rates in Chicago in his 2012 book, Great American City, he found that a black neighborhood with one of the highest incarceration rates (West Garfield Park) had a rate more than 40 times as high as the white neighborhood with the highest rate (Clearing). "This is a staggering differential, even for community-level comparisons," Sampson writes. "A difference of kind, not degree."

In other words, Chicago's impoverished black neighborhoods-characterized by high unemployment and households headed by single parents-are not simply poor; they are "ecologically distinct." This "is not simply the same thing as low economic status," writes Sampson. "In this pattern Chicago is not alone."

The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago. The humiliation of Whites Only signs are gone. Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows-and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed. And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them.

This is not surprising. Black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity strikes-a medical emergency, divorce, job loss-the fall is precipitous.

And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey's research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. "Blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods," Sharkey writes, "that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children."

A national real-estate association advised not to sell to "a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education."

The implications are chilling. As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto-and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.

Even seeming evidence of progress withers under harsh light. In 2012, the Manhattan Institute cheerily noted that segregation had declined since the 1960s. And yet African Americans still remained-by far-the most segregated ethnic group in the country.

With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration has been devastating.

One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among young black males, put the blame on the family: "Too many men making too many babies they don't want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children." Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless babies: "Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.") The thread is as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance.

The Contract Buyers League's suit brought by Clyde Ross and his allies took direct aim at this inheritance. The suit was rooted in Chicago's long history of segregation, which had created two housing markets-one legitimate and backed by the government, the other lawless and patrolled by predators. The suit dragged on until 1976, when the league lost a jury trial. Securing the equal protection of the law proved hard; securing reparations proved impossible. If there were any doubts about the mood of the jury, the foreman removed them by saying, when asked about the verdict, that he hoped it would help end "the mess Earl Warren made with Brown v. Board of Education and all that nonsense."
An unsegregated America might see poverty spread across the country, with no particular bias toward skin color.
The Supreme Court seems to share that sentiment. The past two decades have witnessed a rollback of the progressive legislation of the 1960s. Liberals have found themselves on the defensive. In 2008, when Barack Obama was a candidate for president, he was asked whether his daughters-Malia and Sasha-should benefit from affirmative action. He answered in the negative.

The exchange rested upon an erroneous comparison of the average American white family and the exceptional first family. In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they've won by being twice as good-and enduring twice as much. Malia and Sasha Obama enjoy privileges beyond the average white child's dreams. But that comparison is incomplete. The more telling question is how they compare with Jenna and Barbara Bush-the products of many generations of privilege, not just one. Whatever the Obama children achieve, it will be evidence of their family's singular perseverance, not of broad equality.

III. "We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony"

In 1783, the freedwoman Belinda Royall petitioned the commonwealth of Massachusetts for reparations. Belinda had been born in modern-day Ghana. She was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery. She endured the Middle Passage and 50 years of enslavement at the hands of Isaac Royall and his son. But the junior Royall, a British loyalist, fled the country during the Revolution. Belinda, now free after half a century of labor, beseeched the nascent Massachusetts legislature:

The face of your Petitioner, is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the Laws of the Land, is denied the employment of one morsel of that immense wealth, apart whereof hath been accumilated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude.

WHEREFORE, casting herself at your feet if your honours, as to a body of men, formed for the extirpation of vassalage, for the reward of Virtue, and the just return of honest industry-she prays, that such allowance may be made her out of the Estate of Colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their lives.

Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings, to be paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall-one of the earliest successful attempts to petition for reparations. At the time, black people in America had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and the idea that they might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous.

"A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us," wrote the Quaker John Woolman in 1769, "and that if the particular case of many individuals were fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to them."

As the historian Roy E. Finkenbine has documented, at the dawn of this country, black reparations were actively considered and often effected. Quakers in New York, New England, and Baltimore went so far as to make "membership contingent upon compensating one's former slaves." In 1782, the Quaker Robert Pleasants emancipated his 78 slaves, granted them 350 acres, and later built a school on their property and provided for their education. "The doing of this justice to the injured Africans," wrote Pleasants, "would be an acceptable offering to him who 'Rules in the kingdom of men.' "

Edward Coles, a protégé of Thomas Jefferson who became a slaveholder through inheritance, took many of his slaves north and granted them a plot of land in Illinois. John Randolph, a cousin of Jefferson's, willed that all his slaves be emancipated upon his death, and that all those older than 40 be given 10 acres of land. "I give and bequeath to all my slaves their freedom," Randolph wrote, "heartily regretting that I have been the owner of one."

In his book Forever Free, Eric Foner recounts the story of a disgruntled planter reprimanding a freedman loafing on the job:

Planter: "You lazy nigger, I am losing a whole day's labor by you."

Freedman: "Massa, how many days' labor have I lost by you?"

In the 20th century, the cause of reparations was taken up by a diverse cast that included the Confederate veteran Walter R. Vaughan, who believed that reparations would be a stimulus for the South; the black activist Callie House; black-nationalist leaders like "Queen Mother" Audley Moore; and the civil-rights activist James Forman. The movement coalesced in 1987 under an umbrella organization called the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA). The NAACP endorsed reparations in 1993. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School, has pursued reparations claims in court.

But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. "They have been taught to labor," the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. "They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex‑slaves."

Not exactly. Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, "Never again." But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.

Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for "appropriate remedies."

A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers's bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.

"It's because it's black folks making the claim," Nkechi Taifa, who helped found N'COBRA, says. "People who talk about reparations are considered left lunatics. But all we are talking about is studying [reparations]. As John Conyers has said, we study everything. We study the water, the air. We can't even study the issue? This bill does not authorize one red cent to anyone."

That HR 40 has never-under either Democrats or Republicans-made it to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you'd expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America's crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world's oldest democracy?

One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one's ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson's genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings's body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

Black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000.

In 1909, President William Howard Taft told the country that "intelligent" white southerners were ready to see blacks as "useful members of the community." A week later Joseph Gordon, a black man, was lynched outside Greenwood, Mississippi. The high point of the lynching era has passed. But the memories of those robbed of their lives still live on in the lingering effects. Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don't look.

There has always been another way. "It is in vain to alledge, that our ancestors brought them hither, and not we," Yale President Timothy Dwight said in 1810.

We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors. This debt, particularly, we are bound to discharge: and, when the righteous Judge of the Universe comes to reckon with his servants, he will rigidly exact the payment at our hands. To give them liberty, and stop here, is to entail upon them a curse.

IV. "The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From"

America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary. "The men who came together to found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did," the historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote. "None of them felt entirely comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel responsible for it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not unconnected."

When enslaved Africans, plundered of their bodies, plundered of their families, and plundered of their labor, were brought to the colony of Virginia in 1619, they did not initially endure the naked racism that would engulf their progeny. Some of them were freed. Some of them intermarried. Still others escaped with the white indentured servants who had suffered as they had. Some even rebelled together, allying under Nathaniel Bacon to torch Jamestown in 1676.

One hundred years later, the idea of slaves and poor whites joining forces would shock the senses, but in the early days of the English colonies, the two groups had much in common. English visitors to Virginia found that its masters "abuse their servantes with intollerable oppression and hard usage." White servants were flogged, tricked into serving beyond their contracts, and traded in much the same manner as slaves.

This "hard usage" originated in a simple fact of the New World-land was boundless but cheap labor was limited. As life spans increased in the colony, the Virginia planters found in the enslaved Africans an even more efficient source of cheap labor. Whereas indentured servants were still legal subjects of the English crown and thus entitled to certain protections, African slaves entered the colonies as aliens. Exempted from the protections of the crown, they became early America's indispensable working class-fit for maximum exploitation, capable of only minimal resistance.

For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens. In 1650, Virginia mandated that "all persons except Negroes" were to carry arms. In 1664, Maryland mandated that any Englishwoman who married a slave must live as a slave of her husband's master. In 1705, the Virginia assembly passed a law allowing for the dismemberment of unruly slaves-but forbidding masters from whipping "a Christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace." In that same law, the colony mandated that "all horses, cattle, and hogs, now belonging, or that hereafter shall belong to any slave" be seized and sold off by the local church, the profits used to support "the poor of the said parish." At that time, there would have still been people alive who could remember blacks and whites joining to burn down Jamestown only 29 years before. But at the beginning of the 18th century, two primary classes were enshrined in America.

"The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black," John C. Calhoun, South Carolina's senior senator, declared on the Senate floor in 1848. "And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals."

In 1860, the majority of people living in South Carolina and Mississippi, almost half of those living in Georgia, and about one-third of all Southerners were on the wrong side of Calhoun's line. The state with the largest number of enslaved Americans was Virginia, where in certain counties some 70 percent of all people labored in chains. Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America-and much of the Atlantic world-was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country's exports. The web of this slave society extended north to the looms of New England, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. "Whoever says Industrial Revolution," wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, "says cotton."

The wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves. "In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America's manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together," the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. "Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy." The sale of these slaves-"in whose bodies that money congealed," writes Walter Johnson, a Harvard historian-generated even more ancillary wealth. Loans were taken out for purchase, to be repaid with interest. Insurance policies were drafted against the untimely death of a slave and the loss of potential profits. Slave sales were taxed and notarized. The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country.

Beneath the cold numbers lay lives divided. "I had a constant dread that Mrs. Moore, her mistress, would be in want of money and sell my dear wife," a freedman wrote, reflecting on his time in slavery. "We constantly dreaded a final separation. Our affection for each was very strong, and this made us always apprehensive of a cruel parting."

Forced partings were common in the antebellum South. A slave in some parts of the region stood a 30 percent chance of being sold in his or her lifetime. Twenty-five percent of interstate trades destroyed a first marriage and half of them destroyed a nuclear family.

When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who might buy his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed:

The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, "There's my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye." It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence.

In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy-in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America's rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that seeded Bacon's rebellion was suppressed. America's indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. Assessing antebellum democracy in Virginia, a visitor from England observed that the state's natives "can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves."

V. The Quiet Plunder

The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had journals such as De Bow's Review, which recommended the best practices for wringing profits from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the enslavement of black America was thought to be so foundational to the country that those who sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of death. Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all American homes from their owners: the reaction might well be violent.

"This country was formed for the white, not for the black man," John Wilkes Booth wrote, before killing Abraham Lincoln. "And looking upon African slavery from the same standpoint held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation."

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal equality-but they were beaten back by a campaign of "Redemption," led by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society "formed for the white, not for the black man." A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction, Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for "using insolent language"; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be "tied like a slave." Sometimes the attacks were intended simply to "thin out the niggers a little."

Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s-in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa's "Black Wall Street," and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida-and virtually no one was punished.

The work of mobs was a rabid and violent rendition of prejudices that extended even into the upper reaches of American government. The New Deal is today remembered as a model for what progressive government should do-cast a broad social safety net that protects the poor and the afflicted while building the middle class. When progressives wish to express their disappointment with Barack Obama, they point to the accomplishments of Franklin Roosevelt. But these progressives rarely note that Roosevelt's New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow.

"The Jim Crow South," writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political-science professor at Columbia, "was the one collaborator America's democracy could not do without." The marks of that collaboration are all over the New Deal. The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics-jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net "a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through."

The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country's insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits "that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title."

In Cold War America, homeownership was seen as a means of instilling patriotism, and as a civilizing and anti-radical force. "No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist," claimed William Levitt, who pioneered the modern suburb with the development of the various Levittowns, his famous planned communities. "He has too much to do."

But the Levittowns were, with Levitt's willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests and a burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill Myers was "probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house."

The neighbor had good reason to be afraid. Bill and Daisy Myers were from the other side of John C. Calhoun's dual society. If they moved next door, housing policy almost guaranteed that their neighbors' property values would decline.

Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. "Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible," writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. "In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship."

That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards' code of ethics warned that "a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood ... any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values." A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters-and "a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites."

The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant-a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.
One man said his black neighbor was "probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house."
"For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace," the historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote in his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier, a history of suburbanization. "Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees." Redlining was not officially outlawed until 1968, by the Fair Housing Act. By then the damage was done-and reports of redlining by banks have continued.

The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder-quiet, systemic, submerged-continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals.

VI. Making The Second Ghetto

Today Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country, a fact that reflects assiduous planning. In the effort to uphold white supremacy at every level down to the neighborhood, Chicago-a city founded by the black fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable-has long been a pioneer. The efforts began in earnest in 1917, when the Chicago Real Estate Board, horrified by the influx of southern blacks, lobbied to zone the entire city by race. But after the Supreme Court ruled against explicit racial zoning that year, the city was forced to pursue its agenda by more-discreet means.

Like the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration initially insisted on restrictive covenants, which helped bar blacks and other ethnic undesirables from receiving federally backed home loans. By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in the use of these restrictive covenants, and about half of all residential neighborhoods in the city were effectively off-limits to blacks.

It is common today to become misty-eyed about the old black ghetto, where doctors and lawyers lived next door to meatpackers and steelworkers, who themselves lived next door to prostitutes and the unemployed. This segregationist nostalgia ignores the actual conditions endured by the people living there-vermin and arson, for instance-and ignores the fact that the old ghetto was premised on denying black people privileges enjoyed by white Americans.

In 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants, while permissible, were not enforceable by judicial action, Chicago had other weapons at the ready. The Illinois state legislature had already given Chicago's city council the right to approve-and thus to veto-any public housing in the city's wards. This came in handy in 1949, when a new federal housing act sent millions of tax dollars into Chicago and other cities around the country. Beginning in 1950, site selection for public housing proceeded entirely on the grounds of segregation. By the 1960s, the city had created with its vast housing projects what the historian Arnold R. Hirsch calls a "second ghetto," one larger than the old Black Belt but just as impermeable. More than 98 percent of all the family public-housing units built in Chicago between 1950 and the mid‑1960s were built in all-black neighborhoods.

Governmental embrace of segregation was driven by the virulent racism of Chicago's white citizens. White neighborhoods vulnerable to black encroachment formed block associations for the sole purpose of enforcing segregation. They lobbied fellow whites not to sell. They lobbied those blacks who did manage to buy to sell back. In 1949, a group of Englewood Catholics formed block associations intended to "keep up the neighborhood." Translation: keep black people out. And when civic engagement was not enough, when government failed, when private banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old tool in the American repertoire-racial violence. "The pattern of terrorism is easily discernible," concluded a Chicago civic group in the 1940s. "It is at the seams of the black ghetto in all directions." On July 1 and 2 of 1946, a mob of thousands assembled in Chicago's Park Manor neighborhood, hoping to eject a black doctor who'd recently moved in. The mob pelted the house with rocks and set the garage on fire. The doctor moved away.

In 1947, after a few black veterans moved into the Fernwood section of Chicago, three nights of rioting broke out; gangs of whites yanked blacks off streetcars and beat them. Two years later, when a union meeting attended by blacks in Englewood triggered rumors that a home was being "sold to niggers," blacks (and whites thought to be sympathetic to them) were beaten in the streets. In 1951, thousands of whites in Cicero, 20 minutes or so west of downtown Chicago, attacked an apartment building that housed a single black family, throwing bricks and firebombs through the windows and setting the apartment on fire. A Cook County grand jury declined to charge the rioters-and instead indicted the family's NAACP attorney, the apartment's white owner, and the owner's attorney and rental agent, charging them with conspiring to lower property values. Two years after that, whites picketed and planted explosives in South Deering, about 30 minutes from downtown Chicago, to force blacks out.

When terrorism ultimately failed, white homeowners simply fled the neighborhood. The traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America's public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma-he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived.

VII. "A Lot Of People Fell By The Way"

Speculators in North Lawndale, and at the edge of the black ghettos, knew there was money to be made off white panic. They resorted to "block-busting"-spooking whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became black. They would hire a black woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller. Or they'd hire someone to call a number in the neighborhood looking for "Johnny Mae." Then they'd cajole whites into selling at low prices, informing them that the more blacks who moved in, the more the value of their homes would decline, so better to sell now. With these white-fled homes in hand, speculators then turned to the masses of black people who had streamed northward as part of the Great Migration, or who were desperate to escape the ghettos: the speculators would take the houses they'd just bought cheap through block-busting and sell them to blacks on contract.

To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, Clyde Ross took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza. His wife took a job working at Marshall Field. He had to take some of his children out of private school. He was not able to be at home to supervise his children or help them with their homework. Money and time that Ross wanted to give his children went instead to enrich white speculators.

"The problem was the money," Ross told me. "Without the money, you can't move. You can't educate your kids. You can't give them the right kind of food. Can't make the house look good. They think this neighborhood is where they supposed to be. It changes their outlook. My kids were going to the best schools in this neighborhood, and I couldn't keep them in there."

Mattie Lewis came to Chicago from her native Alabama in the mid-'40s, when she was 21, persuaded by a friend who told her she could get a job as a hairdresser. Instead she was hired by Western Electric, where she worked for 41 years. I met Lewis in the home of her neighbor Ethel Weatherspoon. Both had owned homes in North Lawndale for more than 50 years. Both had bought their houses on contract. Both had been active with Clyde Ross in the Contract Buyers League's effort to garner restitution from contract sellers who'd operated in North Lawndale, banks who'd backed the scheme, and even the Federal Housing Administration. We were joined by Jack Macnamara, who'd been an organizing force in the Contract Buyers League when it was founded, in 1968. Our gathering had the feel of a reunion, because the writer James Alan McPherson had profiled the Contract Buyers League for The Atlantic back in 1972.

Weatherspoon bought her home in 1957. "Most of the whites started moving out," she told me. "'The blacks are coming. The blacks are coming.' They actually said that. They had signs up: Don't sell to blacks."

Before moving to North Lawndale, Lewis and her husband tried moving to Cicero after seeing a house advertised for sale there. "Sorry, I just sold it today," the Realtor told Lewis's husband. "I told him, 'You know they don't want you in Cicero,' " Lewis recalls. " 'They ain't going to let nobody black in Cicero.' "

In 1958, the couple bought a home in North Lawndale on contract. They were not blind to the unfairness. But Lewis, born in the teeth of Jim Crow, considered American piracy-black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it-a fact of nature. "All I wanted was a house. And that was the only way I could get it. They weren't giving black people loans at that time," she said. "We thought, 'This is the way it is. We going to do it till we die, and they ain't never going to accept us. That's just the way it is.'

"The only way you were going to buy a home was to do it the way they wanted," she continued. "And I was determined to get me a house. If everybody else can have one, I want one too. I had worked for white people in the South. And I saw how these white people were living in the North and I thought, 'One day I'm going to live just like them.' I wanted cabinets and all these things these other people have."

White flight was not an accident-it was a triumph of racist social engineering.

Whenever she visited white co-workers at their homes, she saw the difference. "I could see we were just getting ripped off," she said. "I would see things and I would say, 'I'd like to do this at my house.' And they would say, 'Do it,' but I would think, 'I can't, because it costs us so much more.' "

I asked Lewis and Weatherspoon how they kept up on payments.

"You paid it and kept working," Lewis said of the contract. "When that payment came up, you knew you had to pay it."

"You cut down on the light bill. Cut down on your food bill," Weatherspoon interjected.

"You cut down on things for your child, that was the main thing," said Lewis. "My oldest wanted to be an artist and my other wanted to be a dancer and my other wanted to take music."

Lewis and Weatherspoon, like Ross, were able to keep their homes. The suit did not win them any remuneration. But it forced contract sellers to the table, where they allowed some members of the Contract Buyers League to move into regular mortgages or simply take over their houses outright. By then they'd been bilked for thousands. In talking with Lewis and Weatherspoon, I was seeing only part of the picture-the tiny minority who'd managed to hold on to their homes. But for all our exceptional ones, for every Barack and Michelle Obama, for every Ethel Weatherspoon or Clyde Ross, for every black survivor, there are so many thousands gone.

"A lot of people fell by the way," Lewis told me. "One woman asked me if I would keep all her china. She said, 'They ain't going to set you out.' "

VIII. "Negro Poverty is not White Poverty"

On a recent spring afternoon in North Lawndale, I visited Billy Lamar Brooks Sr. Brooks has been an activist since his youth in the Black Panther Party, when he aided the Contract Buyers League. I met him in his office at the Better Boys Foundation, a staple of North Lawndale whose mission is to direct local kids off the streets and into jobs and college. Brooks's work is personal. On June 14, 1991, his 19-year-old son, Billy Jr., was shot and killed. "These guys tried to stick him up," Brooks told me. "I suspect he could have been involved in some things ... He's always on my mind. Every day."

Brooks was not raised in the streets, though in such a neighborhood it is impossible to avoid the influence. "I was in church three or four times a week. That's where the girls were," he said, laughing. "The stark reality is still there. There's no shield from life. You got to go to school. I lived here. I went to Marshall High School. Over here were the Egyptian Cobras. Over there were the Vice Lords."

Brooks has since moved away from Chicago's West Side. But he is still working in North Lawndale. If "you got a nice house, you live in a nice neighborhood, then you are less prone to violence, because your space is not deprived," Brooks said. "You got a security point. You don't need no protection." But if "you grow up in a place like this, housing sucks. When they tore down the projects here, they left the high-rises and came to the neighborhood with that gang mentality. You don't have nothing, so you going to take something, even if it's not real. You don't have no street, but in your mind it's yours."

Video: The Guardian of North Lawndale

We walked over to a window behind his desk. A group of young black men were hanging out in front of a giant mural memorializing two black men: In Lovin Memory Quentin aka "Q," July 18, 1974 ❤ March 2, 2012. The name and face of the other man had been spray-painted over by a rival group. The men drank beer. Occasionally a car would cruise past, slow to a crawl, then stop. One of the men would approach the car and make an exchange, then the car would drive off. Brooks had known all of these young men as boys.

"That's their corner," he said.

We watched another car roll through, pause briefly, then drive off. "No respect, no shame," Brooks said. "That's what they do. From that alley to that corner. They don't go no farther than that. See the big brother there? He almost died a couple of years ago. The one drinking the beer back there ... I know all of them. And the reason they feel safe here is cause of this building, and because they too chickenshit to go anywhere. But that's their mentality. That's their block."

Brooks showed me a picture of a Little League team he had coached. He went down the row of kids, pointing out which ones were in jail, which ones were dead, and which ones were doing all right. And then he pointed out his son-"That's my boy, Billy," Brooks said. Then he wondered aloud if keeping his son with him while working in North Lawndale had hastened his death. "It's a definite connection, because he was part of what I did here. And I think maybe I shouldn't have exposed him. But then, I had to," he said, "because I wanted him with me."

From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship-homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross's back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for "the thrill of the chase and the kill." Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.
Is affirmative action meant to increase "diversity"? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people.
Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success-and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that "Negro poverty is not white poverty." But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference.

After his speech, Johnson convened a group of civil-rights leaders, including the esteemed A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, to address the "ancient brutality." In a strategy paper, they agreed with the president that "Negro poverty is a special, and particularly destructive, form of American poverty." But when it came to specifically addressing the "particularly destructive," Rustin's group demurred, preferring to advance programs that addressed "all the poor, black and white."

The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action's precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court rejected "societal discrimination" as "an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past." Is affirmative action meant to increase "diversity"? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people-the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries.

This confusion about affirmative action's aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy's origins. "There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action," an appointee in Johnson's Department of Labor declared. "Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment."

Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people-395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this.

Today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything. On a practical level, the hesitation comes from the dim view the Supreme Court has taken of the reforms of the 1960s. The Voting Rights Act has been gutted. The Fair Housing Act might well be next. Affirmative action is on its last legs. In substituting a broad class struggle for an anti-racist struggle, progressives hope to assemble a coalition by changing the subject.

The politics of racial evasion are seductive. But the record is mixed. Aid to Families With Dependent Children was originally written largely to exclude blacks-yet by the 1990s it was perceived as a giveaway to blacks. The Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, but this did not keep Rush Limbaugh from denouncing it as reparations. Moreover, the act's expansion of Medicaid was effectively made optional, meaning that many poor blacks in the former Confederate states do not benefit from it. The Affordable Care Act, like Social Security, will eventually expand its reach to those left out; in the meantime, black people will be injured.

"All that it would take to sink a new WPA program would be some skillfully packaged footage of black men leaning on shovels smoking cigarettes," the sociologist Douglas S. Massey writes. "Papering over the issue of race makes for bad social theory, bad research, and bad public policy." To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the "achievement gap" will do nothing to close the "injury gap," in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.

Chicago, like the country at large, embraced policies that placed black America's most energetic, ambitious, and thrifty countrymen beyond the pale of society and marked them as rightful targets for legal theft. The effects reverberate beyond the families who were robbed to the community that beholds the spectacle. Don't just picture Clyde Ross working three jobs so he could hold on to his home. Think of his North Lawndale neighbors-their children, their nephews and nieces-and consider how watching this affects them. Imagine yourself as a young black child watching your elders play by all the rules only to have their possessions tossed out in the street and to have their most sacred possession-their home-taken from them.

The message the young black boy receives from his country, Billy Brooks says, is " 'You ain't shit. You not no good. The only thing you are worth is working for us. You will never own anything. You not going to get an education. We are sending your ass to the penitentiary.' They're telling you no matter how hard you struggle, no matter what you put down, you ain't shit. 'We're going to take what you got. You will never own anything, nigger.' "

IX. Toward A New Country

When Clyde Ross was a child, his older brother Winter had a seizure. He was picked up by the authorities and delivered to Parchman Farm, a 20,000-acre state prison in the Mississippi Delta region.

"He was a gentle person," Clyde Ross says of his brother. "You know, he was good to everybody. And he started having spells, and he couldn't control himself. And they had him picked up, because they thought he was dangerous."

Built at the turn of the century, Parchman was supposed to be a progressive and reformist response to the problem of "Negro crime." In fact it was the gulag of Mississippi, an object of terror to African Americans in the Delta. In the early years of the 20th century, Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman used to amuse himself by releasing black convicts into the surrounding wilderness and hunting them down with bloodhounds. "Throughout the American South," writes David M. Oshinsky in his book Worse Than Slavery, "Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and brutality, as well it should be ... Parchman is the quintessential penal farm, the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War."

When the Ross family went to retrieve Winter, the authorities told them that Winter had died. When the Ross family asked for his body, the authorities at Parchman said they had buried him. The family never saw Winter's body.

And this was just one of their losses.

Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number-$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book-could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.

To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America's origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.

Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country's shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same.
When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate-the kind that HR 40 proposes-we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion-and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper-America's heritage, history, and standing in the world.

The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about "black pathology," the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America's relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.

And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government-through housing policies-engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.

On some level, we have always grasped this.

"Negro poverty is not white poverty," President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech.

Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences-deep, corrosive, obstinate differences-radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past-at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge-that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.

And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations-by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences-is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is-the work of fallible humans.

Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say-that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I'm talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I'm talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling "patriotism" while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

X. "There Will Be No 'Reparations' From Germany"

We are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge.

In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.

"The rest," the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, "were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people 'who really committed something' were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought 'that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.' "

Germany's unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls. Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. "The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland," claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, "Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly punished."

Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition.
"If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns," said David Ben-Gurion, "I would do that."
Among the Jews of Israel, reparations provoked violent and venomous reactions ranging from denunciation to assassination plots. On January 7, 1952, as the Knesset-the Israeli parliament-convened to discuss the prospect of a reparations agreement with West Germany, Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, stood in front of a large crowd, inveighing against the country that had plundered the lives, labor, and property of his people. Begin claimed that all Germans were Nazis and guilty of murder. His condemnations then spread to his own young state. He urged the crowd to stop paying taxes and claimed that the nascent Israeli nation characterized the fight over whether or not to accept reparations as a "war to the death." When alerted that the police watching the gathering were carrying tear gas, allegedly of German manufacture, Begin yelled, "The same gases that asphyxiated our parents!"

Begin then led the crowd in an oath to never forget the victims of the Shoah, lest "my right hand lose its cunning" and "my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth." He took the crowd through the streets toward the Knesset. From the rooftops, police repelled the crowd with tear gas and smoke bombs. But the wind shifted, and the gas blew back toward the Knesset, billowing through windows shattered by rocks. In the chaos, Begin and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion exchanged insults. Two hundred civilians and 140 police officers were wounded. Nearly 400 people were arrested. Knesset business was halted.

Begin then addressed the chamber with a fiery speech condemning the actions the legislature was about to take. "Today you arrested hundreds," he said. "Tomorrow you may arrest thousands. No matter, they will go, they will sit in prison. We will sit there with them. If necessary, we will be killed with them. But there will be no 'reparations' from Germany."

Survivors of the Holocaust feared laundering the reputation of Germany with money, and mortgaging the memory of their dead. Beyond that, there was a taste for revenge. "My soul would be at rest if I knew there would be 6 million German dead to match the 6 million Jews," said Meir Dworzecki, who'd survived the concentration camps of Estonia.

Ben-Gurion countered this sentiment, not by repudiating vengeance but with cold calculation: "If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns to the warehouses and take it, I would do that-if, for instance, we had the ability to send a hundred divisions and tell them, 'Take it.' But we can't do that."

The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today's dollars. Individual reparations claims followed-for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. "By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet," writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. "From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total investment in Israel's electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in the railways."

Israel's GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the impact went far beyond that. Reparations "had indisputable psychological and political importance," he writes.

Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany's reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.

Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said:

For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses.

Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. "The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now," Clyde Ross told me. "It's because of then." In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated "Black Wall Street." The past was not the past to them. "It was amazing seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs," Ogletree told me. "I had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, 'We want you to represent us in this lawsuit.' "

A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for years, had happened. But the lawsuit ultimately failed, in 2004. Similar suits pushed against corporations such as Aetna (which insured slaves) and Lehman Brothers (whose co-founding partner owned them) also have thus far failed. These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

John Conyers's HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can't be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as-if not more than-the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America's maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.

In 2010, Jacob S. Rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe: segregation. Black home buyers-even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness-were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in the same neighborhoods. As in North Lawndale half a century earlier, these neighborhoods were filled with people who had been cut off from mainstream financial institutions. When subprime lenders went looking for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen.
"Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches."
"High levels of segregation create a natural market for subprime lending," Rugh and Massey write, "and cause riskier mortgages, and thus foreclosures, to accumulate disproportionately in racially segregated cities' minority neighborhoods."

Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of America understood this. In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself "the nation's leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers," the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building "generational wealth." But the "wealth building" seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as "mud people" and to their subprime products as "ghetto loans."

"We just went right after them," Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan officer, told The Times. "Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans."

In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008 were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods.
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products of many generations of privilege

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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

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WATCH: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ full opening statement on reparations at House hearing

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In the latter years of the 19th century, Joseph Pulitzer stood out as the very embodiment of American journalism. Hungarian-born, an intense indomitable figure, Pulitzer was the most skillful of newspaper publishers, a passionate crusader against dishonest government, a fierce, hawk-like competitor who did not shrink from sensationalism in circulation struggles, and a visionary who richly endowed his profession.

His innovative New York World and St. Louis Post-Dispatch reshaped newspaper journalism. Pulitzer was the first to call for the training of journalists at the university level in a school of journalism. And certainly, the lasting influence of the Pulitzer Prizes on journalism, literature, music, and drama is to be attributed to his visionary acumen.

Pulitzer's Flexible Will

In writing his 1904 will, which made provision for the establishment of the Pulitzer Prizes as an incentive to excellence, Pulitzer specified solely four awards in journalism, four in letters and drama, one for education, and five traveling scholarships. Initally, three of the scholarships were awarded on the recommendation of the Faculty of Journalism at Columbia to graduating students; two of the scholarships-in art and music, respectively-were administered externally by a jury comprised of faculty from the Columbia Department of Music and the Institute of Musical Art (music) and the National Academy of Design (art). Like the other awards, the latter two scholarships were open to all music and art students in America. (Currently, five scholarships of $7,500 are awarded to graduating students from the School of Journalism.)

In journalism, prizes were to recognize "the most disinterested and meritorious public service rendered by any American newspaper during the preceding year" (a gold medal worth $500 with no monetary component); "the best editorial article written during the year, the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in the right direction" ($500); and "the best example of a reporter's work during the year, the test being strict accuracy, terseness, the accomplishment of some public good commanding public attention and respect" ($1,000). (A $1,000 prize for the best history of services rendered to the public by the American press in the preceding year was only awarded once; similarly, a $1,000 prize for a paper on the development of the School of Journalism was never awarded due to a dearth of competitors.) In letters, prizes were to go to an American novel ($1,000), an original American play performed in New York ($1,000), a book on the history of the United States ($2,000) and an American biography ($1,000).

But, sensitive to the dynamic progression of his society, Pulitzer made provision for broad changes in the system of awards. He established an overseer advisory board and willed it "power in its discretion to suspend or to change any subject or subjects, substituting, however, others in their places, if in the judgment of the board such suspension, changes, or substitutions shall be conducive to the public good or rendered advisable by public necessities, or by reason of change of time." He also empowered the board to withhold any award where entries fell below its standards of excellence. The assignment of power to the board was such that it could also overrule the recommendations for awards made by the juries subsequently set up in each of the categories.

Thus, the Plan of Award, which has governed the prizes since their inception in 1917, has been revised frequently. The Board, later renamed the Pulitzer Prize Board, has increased the number of awards to 21 and introduced poetry, music, and photography as subjects, while adhering to the spirit of the founder's will and its intent.

Award changes beginning in 1997

The board typically exercised its broad discretion in 1997, the 150th anniversary of Pulitzer's birth, in two fundamental respects. It took a significant step in recognition of the growing importance of work being done by newspapers in online journalism. Beginning with the 1999 competition, the board sanctioned the submission by newspapers of online presentations as supplements to print exhibits in the Public Service category. The board left open the distinct possibility of further inclusions in the Pulitzer process of online journalism as the electronic medium developed. Thus, with the 2006 competition, the Board allowed online content in all 14 of its journalism categories. For 2009, the competition was expanded to include online-only news organizations. For 2011, the Plan of Award was revised to encourage more explicitly the entry of online and multimedia material, with the board seeking to honor the best work in whatever form is the most effective. And for 2012, the board adopted an all-digital entry and judging system, replacing the historic reliance on submission of scrapbooks.

The other major change was in music, a category that was added to the Plan of Award for prizes in 1943. The prize always had gone to composers of classical music. The definition and entry requirements of the music category beginning with the 1998 competition were broadened to attract a wider range of American music. In an indication of the trend toward bringing mainstream music into the Pulitzer process, the 1997 prize went to Wynton Marsalis's "Blood on the Fields," which has strong jazz elements, the first such award. In music, the board also took tacit note of the criticism leveled at its predecessors for failure to cite two of the country's foremost jazz composers. It bestowed a Special Citation on George Gershwin marking the 1998 centennial celebration of his birth and Duke Ellington on his 1999 centennial year. In 2004, the Board further broadened the definition of the prize and the makeup of its music juries, resulting in a greater diversity of entries. In 2007, the music prize went to Ornette Coleman for "Sound Grammar," the first live jazz recording to win the award. The Board also awarded posthumous Special Citations to jazz composers Thelonious Monk in 2006 and John Coltrane in 2007.

Award Controversies

Over the years the Pulitzer board has at times been targeted by critics for awards made or not made. Controversies also have arisen over decisions made by the board counter to the advice of juries. Given the subjective nature of the award process, this was inevitable. The board has not been captive to popular inclinations. Many, if not most, of the honored books have not been on bestseller lists, and many of the winning plays have been staged off-Broadway or in regional theaters.

In journalism the major newspapers, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, have harvested many of the awards, but the board also has often reached out to work done by small, little-known papers. The Public Service award in 1995 went to The Virgin Islands Daily News, St. Thomas, for its disclosure of the links between the region's rampant crime rate and corruption in the local criminal justice system. In 2005, the investigative reporting award went to Willamette Week, an alternative newspaper in Portland, Oregon, for its exposure of a former governor's long concealed sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl. In 2008, the feature photography prize was captured by the Concord (N.H.) Monitor for its portrayal of a family coping with a parent's terminal illness. In 2010, the Public Service prize went to the Bristol, Va., Herald Courier, a small daily, for exposing the mismanagement of natural gas royalties owed to thousands of landowners. And in 2013, the National Reporting prize was won by InsideClimate News, a small online news organization.

In letters, the board has grown less conservative over the years in matters of taste. In 1963 the drama jury nominated Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," but the board found the script insufficiently "uplifting," a complaint that related to arguments over sexual permissiveness and rough dialogue. In 1993 the prize went to Tony Kushner's "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches," a play that explores homosexuality in the early days of the AIDS crisis, before transmission was widely understood or effective treatment was available. Kushner doesn't shy from strong language, a change from earlier playwrights whose cursing could have cost them an award. On the same debated issue of taste, the board in 1941 denied the fiction prize to Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls," but gave him the award in 1953 for "The Old Man and the Sea," a lesser work.

Notwithstanding these contretemps, from its earliest days, the board has in general stood firmly by a policy of secrecy in its deliberations and refusal to publicly debate or defend its decisions. The challenges have not lessened the reputation of the Pulitzer Prizes as the country's most prestigious awards and as the most sought-after accolades in journalism, letters, and music. The Prizes are perceived as a major incentive for high-quality journalism and have focused worldwide attention on American achievements in letters and music.

Announcements

The formal announcement of the prizes, made each April, states that the awards are made by the president of Columbia University on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize board. This formulation is derived from the Pulitzer will, which established Columbia as the seat of the administration of the prizes. Today, in fact, the independent board makes all the decisions relative to the prizes. In his will Pulitzer bestowed an endowment on Columbia of $2,000,000 for the establishment of a School of Journalism, one-fourth of which was to be "applied to prizes or scholarships for the encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education."

In doing so, he stated: "I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people. I desire to assist in attracting to this profession young men of character and ability, also to help those already engaged in the profession to acquire the highest moral and intellectual training." In his ascent to the summit of American journalism, Pulitzer himself received little or no assistance. He prided himself on being a self-made man, but it may have been his struggles as a young journalist that imbued him with the desire to foster professional training.

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In the latter years of the 19th century, Joseph Pulitzer stood out as the very embodiment of American journalism. Hungarian-born, an intense indomitable figure, Pulitzer was the most skillful of newspaper publishers, a passionate crusader against dishonest government, a fierce, hawk-like competitor who did not shrink from sensationalism in circulation struggles, and a visionary who richly endowed his profession.

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"Ultimately, this year's prize for music has sparked a vibrant conversation about aesthetics, class, the division between so-called high and low art and whether giving one of the most esteemed prizes in American music to one of its most popular musicians represents a long-overdue corrective or an insult to non-commercial, so-called serious music." - Randall Roberts, L.A. Times

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Cultural and Political Forces Behind Lamar's Win

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Cultural and Political Forces Behind Lamar's Win

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When Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for music, on Monday, he also became the first non-jazz or classical artist to collect that honor in its seventy-five-year existence. ("There's a Pulitzer for music?" was, unfortunately, the early refrain on social media.) That Lamar was born and raised in Compton, California, and writes deft and nimble rap songs about systemic injustice, made the announcement especially thrilling. It felt like a decisive dismantling of fusty ideas about high and low art and, especially, who gets to claim genius as his own. As my colleague Doreen St. Félix wrote, "The Pulitzers got it right."

Following the announcement, the Pulitzer board was immediately hoorayed for its "relevance," as if relevance itself is a virtue. Perhaps it is. But I fear that calling Lamar simply a relevant choice comes too close to diminishing his deep expertise.

It wasn't so much the board's recognition of Lamar's Zeitgeist-consistent insurgency that got everyone riled up; the organization has honored subversive artists before, including some who have adroitly (though perhaps not quite as explicitly) captured " the complexity of modern African-American life." But this time, the board also chose to commend a musician working in a popular, vital idiom, and not just any idiom, but hip-hop, a genre that has been unapologetic if not brazen about its own profitability. Disruptive genres are often only retroactively acknowledged, usually decades after their commercial and creative zenith. But Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize in an era in which rap music is as alive and as pervasive as it's ever been.

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2016, his detractors settled on two routes of credible dissent: they either believed that Dylan's work had been mischaracterized as literature, or that it would have more beneficial, in the most expansive sense possible, for the award to have been given to a less commercially established artist. I am sympathetic to the latter group (whose argument applies to Lamar, too), though merit-based awards of this stature aren't supposed to function as boosters, exactly-the idea is to laud genius. Did Bob Dylan need another institution corroborating his talent? Does Kendrick Lamar? (I presume neither was especially desperate for the cash.) They've both won and lost major awards before. At the 1965 Grammys, Dylan's " The Times They Are A-Changin' " was defeated, in the Best Folk Recording category, by Gale Garnett's " We'll Sing in the Sunshine," a trifling, sentimental ballad that also made it to No. 1 on the adult-contemporary chart; more recently, Lamar lost the Grammy for Album of the Year to Bruno Mars 's "24K Magic," a more approachable and infinitely less antagonized work.

The Nobel in Literature reflects a kind of accrued esteem-older works can be considered outside of the year they were published "if their significance has not become apparent until recently." But the Pulitzer is given to a single, new work. "It's a prize for achievement and excellence," the critic, author, and professor David Hajdu explained to me recently. Hajdu was a member of the five-person jury that reviewed the possible entries and presented three finalists to the Pulitzer board for consideration. "The jury listened to over a hundred and eighty pieces of music, and we deliberated, and there were a fair number of choices that could have justifiably been honored this way, but we all thought this was the best piece of music. It's not to discount the value of anything else," he said. He described "" as "complex, rich, full of surprise and invention. Sonically, it's highly sophisticated and original. It brings together melody, harmony, counterpoint, texture-all those elements, in a fresh way. And lyrically, it's very powerful."

Hajdu supported " DAMN. " because of its ingenuity and beauty, though he admitted its modernity also felt germane to the discussion. (He suggested that legacy institutions such as the Pulitzer Prize are often "better at recognizing vernacular or disreputable forms in reflection.") He also pointed out that the jury was exploring "superb pieces of contemporary classical music that drew from hip-hop. It reminded me of the early days of jazz, when Stravinsky was incorporating jazz into his work, or Bartók was incorporating folk music." It makes sense that a more categorical recognition of that source material felt due. (Lamar has, interestingly, also brought elements of jazz into his own work-that cross-pollination is especially present on his 2015 album "To Pimp a Butterfly.")

The Pulitzer board, like most award-granting institutions, still needs to be mindful of the cultural and political forces that inevitably inform its choices-of the seventy-one Pulitzer Prizes presented in Music, somehow only seven (!) have gone to women. (The first woman to garner one, Ellen Zwilich, received it in 1983-a staggering forty years after William Schuman collected the début Pulitzer in music.) Genius, of course, still has its invisible boundaries. But Lamar's win nonetheless feels like a victory of sorts for everyone, a promise that true excellence is-as it should be-very difficult to ignore.

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The Cultural and Political Forces Behind Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer

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When Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for music, on Monday, he also became the first non-jazz or classical artist to collect that honor in its seventy-five-year existence. ("There's a Pulitzer for music?" was, unfortunately, the early refrain on social media.)

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Mr. Lamar, a 30-year-old from Compton, Calif., is the first winner who did not produce classical or jazz music — and certainly the first rapper. 

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Out of more than 2,400 submissions, distinguished projects in just 21 categories earned gold Monday as winners of the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes.

"They include books, music and drama that inform us, that challenge our conventional notions of creative expression and that push us to consider and embrace new ideas and perspectives," Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy said during the announcement at Columbia University in New York City.

"In the journalism categories, yet again this year, winners uphold the highest purpose of a free and independent press," she added. "Even in the most trying of times, these courageous inspiring and committed journalists and their news organizations are undaunted in their mission in support of the Fourth Estate."

Among the winners are photographers and investigators, commentators and cartoonists, authors and scholars. Watch the announcement at the link above, and find the winners - together with judges' explanation about why they won - in the list below.

Journalism

Public Service: jointly awarded to The New York Times, for reporting led by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, and The New Yorker, for reporting by Ronan Farrow.
"For explosive, impactful journalism that exposed powerful and wealthy sexual predators - including allegations against one of Hollywood's most influential producers - bringing them to account for long-suppressed claims of coercion, brutality and victim-silencing, thus spurring a worldwide reckoning about sexual abuse of women."

National Reporting: Jointly awarded to the staffs of The New York Times and The Washington Post.
"For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 election and its connections to the Trump campaign. The president-elect's transition team and his eventual administration."

International Reporting: Claire Baldwin, Andrew R.C. Marshall and Manuel Mogato of Reuters.
"For relentless reporting that exposed the brutal killing campaign behind Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs."

Commentary: John Archibald of the Alabama Media Group.
"For lyrical and courageous commentary that is rooted in Alabama but has a national resonance, in scrutinizing corrupt politicians, championing the rights of women and calling out hypocrisy for criticism."

Feature Photography: The photography staff of Reuters.
"For shocking photos that expose the world to the violence Rohingya refugees face in fleeing Myanmar."

Letters, Drama and Music

Biography: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser.
"A deeply resourced and elegantly written portrait of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of The Little House on the Prairie series, that describes how Wilder transfers transformed her family's story of poverty, failure and struggle into an uplifting tale of self-reliance, familial love and perseverance."

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Kendrick Lamar, 'Press Democrat' Claim Pulitzers. Here's The Full List Of Winners

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Out of more than 2,400 submissions, distinguished projects in just 21 categories earned gold Monday as winners of the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes. "They include books, music and drama that inform us, that challenge our conventional notions of creative expression and that push us to consider and embrace new ideas and perspectives," Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy said during the announcement at Columbia University in New York City.

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Baltimore rowhouses in 1938. (John Vachon/Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)

Racial discrimination in mortgage lending in the 1930s shaped the demographic and wealth patterns of American communities today, a new study shows, with 3 out of 4 neighborhoods "redlined" on government maps 80 years ago continuing to struggle economically .

The study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, released Wednesday, shows that the vast majority of neighborhoods marked "hazardous" in red ink on maps drawn by the federal Home Owners' Loan Corp. from 1935 to 1939 are today much more likely than other areas to comprise lower-income, minority residents.

"It's as if some of these places have been trapped in the past, locking neighborhoods into concentrated poverty," said Jason Richardson, director of research at the NCRC, a consumer advocacy group.

The Senate rolls back rules meant to root out discrimination by mortgage lenders

Researchers compared the HOLC maps, the most comprehensive documentation of discriminatory lending practices, with modern-day census data to determine how much neighborhood demographics have changed in 80 years. The findings have implications for today's po litical debates over housing, banking and financial regulation, as well as civil rights, as Congress seeks to weaken the government's ability to enforce fair-lending requirements. Policies that influence access to capital and credit have long-lasting effects on residential patterns, neighborhoods' economic health and household accumulation of wealth, the report said.

In the 1930s, government surveyors graded neighborhoods in 239 cities, color-coding them green for "best," blue for "still desirable," yellow for "definitely declining" and red for "hazardous." The "redlined" areas were the ones local lenders discounted as credit risks, in large part because of the residents' racial and ethnic demographics. They also took into account local amenities and home prices.

Neighborhoods that were predominantly made up of African Americans, as well as Catholics, Jews and immigrants from Asia and southern Europe, were deemed undesirable. "Anyone who was not northern-European white was considered to be a detraction from the value of the area," said Bruce Mitchell, a senior researcher at the NCRC and one of the study's authors.

White families have nearly 10 times the net worth of black families. And the gap is growing.

Loans in these neighborhoods were unavailable or very expensive, making it more difficult for low-income minorities to buy homes and setting the stage for the country's persistent racial wealth gap. (White families today have nearly 10 times the net worth of black families and more than eight times that of Hispanic families, according to the Federal Reserve.)

"Homeownership is the number-one method of accumulating wealth, but the effect of these policies that create more hurdles for the poor is a permanent underclass that's disproportionately minority," said John Taylor, president and chief executive of the NCRC. "I think most people believe the problem is not with the rules but with the people. Most middle-class whites in America don't have empirical observations of what happens in underserved neighborhoods or understand the historical treatment of poor and minority communities."

The Federal Housing Administration institutionalized the system of discriminatory lending in government-backed mortgages, reflecting local race-based criteria in their underwriting practices and reinforcing residential segregation in American cities. The discriminatory practices captured by the HOLC maps continued until 1968, when the Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in housing.

Could the #BankBlack movement help African Americans close the wealth gap?

But 50 years after that law passed, the lingering effects of redlining are clear, with the pattern of economic and racial residential segregation still evident in many U.S. cities - from Montgomery, Ala., to Flint, Mich., to Denver.

Nationally, nearly two-thirds of neighborhoods deemed "hazardous" are inhabited by mostly minority residents, typically black and Latino, researchers found. Cities with more such neighborhoods have significantly greater economic inequality. On the flip side, 91 percent of areas classified as "best" in the 1930s remain middle-to-upper-income today, and 85 percent of them are still predominantly white.

Researchers found that redlined neighborhoods in the South and the West are more likely today to be home to a largely minority population. Neighborhoods in the South and Midwest display the most persistent economic inequality.

In Macon, Ga., 65 percent of neighborhoods were marked "hazardous" in the 1930s, making it the most redlined city in the United States, followed closely by Birmingham, Ala., and Wichita, Kan.

Here are the 10 U.S. cities with the highest percentages of neighborhoods marked "hazardous" in the 1930s:

The racial disparity is reflected in the city's poverty statistics. Nearly 35 percent of blacks in Macon live in poverty today, compared with less than 13 percent of whites, according to 2012 to 2016 census data.

In Baltimore, one of the earliest cities to officially adopt restrictive covenants limiting African Americans and Jews to certain neighborhoods, nearly every census tract labeled "hazardous" in the 1930s remains low-to-moderate income today, researchers found. The only exceptions are the areas surrounding Baltimore's harbor, a former industrial front that's been redeveloped to attract businesses and tourism.

Nearly 70 percent of formerly redlined communities in Baltimore remain predominantly minority, as well as lower income. Even neighborhoods in western Baltimore that had been rated as "desirable" subsequently became populated with minority, low-income residents as middle-class whites fled to the suburbs, researchers said.

A 2015 study of home mortgage and small-business lending in Baltimore by the NCRC found that race, more than income, affected mortgage lending in the city. Lending is greater in neighborhoods with larger white populations, with banks making more than twice as many mortgage loans to whites as they did to blacks.

Interactive: View and download NCRC maps for 114 metropolitan areas

A February report by the Center for Investigative Reporting showed that redlining persists in 61 metro areas - from Detroit and Philadelphia to Little Rock and Tacoma, Wash. - even when controlling for applicants' income, loan amount and neighborhood, according to its analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records.

Banks have largely blamed the racial lending discrepancies on borrowers' credit scores. Lenders were supposed to soon start reporting extra information about credit scores and other loan-pricing features. But the Senate recently voted to roll back the new reporting requirements for small lenders.

The researchers also analyzed 30 cities for patterns of gentrification, where once-redlined neighborhoods showed an increase in median home values and educational attainment between 2000 and 2010. They found that in cities with higher levels of gentrification, more redlined neighborhoods had become middle-to-upper-income neighborhoods. These areas saw a greater influx in economic activity and changes to their downtowns. They also now have lower levels of segregation, with more interaction between blacks and whites, as well as greater economic inequality between newcomers and those who have historically lived there.

Researchers ranked Portland, Ore., which has seen an influx of financial investment from the tech sector, as the most gentrified American city, with 58 percent of its census tracts having gentrified. It is followed by Minneapolis, Seattle, Atlanta and Denver.

Detroit was the least gentrified city, the research showed, with less than 3 percent of its census tracts having gentrified, and only around the downtown core. But artists and other "urban pioneers" have in recent years begun moving into more pockets of the city, researchers said.

Longtime residents of formerly redlined neighborhoods are often pushed out when the areas' economic fortunes are reversed, researchers said. Many can no longer afford the rising rents. Homeowners often can't afford the increases in property taxes, and as their home values rise, many are tempted to sell and cash out.

"Is gentrification promoting sustainable desegregation?" Mitchell said. "Or is it just a movement towards increased segregation in the next census period?"
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Analysis | Redlining was banned 50 years ago. It's still hurting minorities today.

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These government maps documented racist lending practices that gave rise to today's segregated neighborhoods.

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How the United States Government Segregated America

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How the United States Government Segregated America

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A ‘Forgotten History’ Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America

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Author Richard Rothstein says the housing programs begun under the New Deal were tantamount to a “state-sponsored system of segregation,” in which people of color were purposely excluded from suburbs.

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What Are Gentrification and Displacement – Urban Displacement

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Introduction to Redlining - warning: profanity used in first part of video

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Introduction to Redlining - warning: profanity used in first part of video

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Why racial segregation is a design feature, not a bug, of US cities | Aeon Videos

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The National Housing Act of 1934, part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 'New Deal' following the Great Depression, was aimed at making home ownership affordable for lower-income Americans. However, the maps that were drawn up by the government-sponsored Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), which was intended to prevent new homeowners from defaulting on their loans, in fact targeted minorities by making race and country of birth important zoning categories.

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Introduction

While Fresno is ranked among the poorest in many regards, many have perceived this be the overall plagues of the city: low air quality, little green space, poor health, low education and poverty. Decades of policies and neglect have created these conditions, but not for all. While some neighborhoods experienced neglect, other neighborhoods had opportunities created for them through forward-thinking vision and policies. However, these policies were creating inequality in Fresno and were historically opposed by many groups of concerned citizens. This pattern created a multifaceted situation of opportunity for some, while furthering the gap between the poor and upper middle class in Fresno. The concept of Unequal Neighborhoods is a framework that sees Fresno beyond one data point. Rather, Fresno is a sum of consequences of policies and exceptions to policies that shaped the city to have some neighborhoods sharing outcomes with some of the best places to live in California and others that are among the most dangerous, unhealthy, and polluted.

Since this inequality was created, we present ways in which groups of people and equitable policies can also help reverse this trend, and thus, positively change the social, economic, and health outcomes for all Fresnans. Advocates, decision-makers, academics, and citizens can learn from the history and consequences of policies to help model potential consequences of proposed initiatives.

Policy Timeline

View the Fresno Historical Policy Timeline
Click here for timeline
Neighborhood Infographics

Neighborhood Inequality is Shaped by Policies

Living conditions greatly affect health outcomes in communities. People who have assets in their neighborhood like green space, well-resourced schools, access to healthy food, safe places to play, and plenty of economic opportunities nearby have better outcomes than those who do not have the same surroundings. When one city sees drastic differences in these different assets by neighborhood, this creates health inequalities.
Click here for Inequality infographic
Unequal Neighborhoods: Neighborhood

Assets in neighborhoods like transportation options, affordable housing, and economic opportunities can help shape educational and health outcomes. Therefore, knowledge and access greatly varies between communities in Fresno.

Click here for Unequal Neighborhoods infographic

Unequal Neighborhoods: Demographics

Health outcomes are different across the historically segregated communities in Fresno. As segregation became outlawed, we see other factors that have contributed to the segregation we see today. This segregation has an impact in the health and longevity of a neighborhood.

Click here for full Demographics infographic

Unequal Neighborhoods: Health Inequalities

Where we live in Fresno makes a difference in living outcomes. Part of this is due to a long history of city planning agendas that focused health resources in the north side of town while resources were taken out of other areas. As such, quality and distribution of resources and care remain unequal.

Click here for full Health Inequalities infographic

Unequal Neighborhoods: The Environment, Health and Place

When there is investment in a healthy environment, this can have a positive effect on health. When people have access to green space and plenty of trees and plant diversity, this can help them get healthy and stay healthy. Access to this type of environment takes investment in infrastructure, and in Fresno, not all neighborhoods have the same access to these important environmental assets.

Click here for full Environment, Health and Place infographic

Unequal Neighborhoods: Education

Access to education and resources for student success are crucial for prosperity. In Fresno, not everyone has the same access to the resources they need to be proficient and ready to achieve social mobility while others in Fresno are thriving.

Click here for full Education infographic

Unequal Neighborhoods: Civics

When some neighborhoods have more people able to vote than others, it puts the disadvantaged neighborhoods at risk for disenfranchisement. This leads to people in advantaged neighborhoods to have easier access to decision-makers than other neighborhoods in Fresno.

Click here for full Civics infographic

Webinar, August 13th, 2018, Unequal Neighborhoods: Fresno

Suggested Citation

Pacheco-Werner, T. L., Corona, K., Corona, G., Chan, S., Conley, A., & Dhillon, H. (2018). Unequal Neighborhoods. Central Valley Health Policy Institute. California State University, Fresno.

For more information contact:

Funded by:

This report series was made possible by a grant from The California Endowment in collaboration with Fresno Building Healthy Communities.

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While Fresno is ranked among the poorest in many regards, many have perceived this be the overall plagues of the city: low air quality, little green space, poor health, low education and poverty. Decades of policies and neglect have created these conditions, but not for all.

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What was the Mason-Dixon Line? Why would a street in Fresno in the 21st century be compared to the Mason-Dixon Line?

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These policies, and the redlining that cemented them, made it virtually impossible for black Americans, who came to Fresno in greater numbers after World War II, to move in anywhere but the city's southwest. One report estimated that, by the 1950s, nearly 100 percent of black Fresnans lived on the west side. Another found that in 1960 Fresno had the highest degree of black-white segregation in California.

In the '50s, the construction of Highway 99, which today runs north and south through the Central Valley, created another physical barrier between the west side and the rest of Fresno and destroyed more than 20 blocks of existing housing. Later, at the height of the Cold War, a former member of the Fresno County Board of Supervisors would refer to Highway 99 and the railroad tracks as "Fresno's Berlin Wall."

The city's schools were as divided as its neighborhoods. In 1973, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare found that Fresno Unified School District was in violation of the Civil Rights Act. Not only did the district have heavily segregated schools (Edison High School, in the city's southwest, had a population that was 99.6 percent minority students) but school administrators were assigning black and Hispanic students to "mentally retarded classes," Chacón found during the course of his research.

In the decades that followed, city plans and zoning ordinances kept the southwest isolated. Fresno's leaders concentrated the city's wealth and development farther north, catering to its affluent white neighborhoods. There, the city built shopping malls, hospitals and college campuses. The southwest got slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants. In Fresno, segregation that began with Chinese immigrants evolved over time to target Hispanic and, most explicitly and acutely, black residents.

The geographic, economic, and racial isolation of a city's black and brown residents is a pattern duplicated across the country, said Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, which details government policies that segregated U.S. neighborhoods.

"Fresno is no different than any other place in this respect," Rothstein said in an interview. "You wouldn't have the kinds of conflicts that existed in Ferguson or Baltimore, Milwaukee or St. Paul, or any of the hundreds of others over the years if you weren't concentrating low-income young African American men in single neighborhoods where there's little hope."

Today, some argue that Shaw Avenue, an east-west thoroughfare that's one of the city's busiest, has replaced the railroad tracks as the city's dividing line. White and wealthy above it, poor, black, and Hispanic below. A 1970s-era city planning document actually refers to the street as Fresno's Mason-Dixon Line.

There are exceptions, and pockets of prosperity and poverty exist above and below Shaw, but still, the side of the street a person lives on matters.
Margaret Katcher contributed to this report.

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Reis Thebault is a local politics reporter at the Washington Post.

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These policies, and the redlining that cemented them, made it virtually impossible for black Americans, who came to Fresno in greater numbers after World War II, to move in anywhere but the city's southwest. One report estimated that, by the 1950s, nearly 100 percent of black Fresnans lived on the west side.