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TedTalk over the history of geographical segregation that occurred in Minneapolis and how that was not always the case but through De Jure segregation this changed.

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In the fall of 1909, W.H. Simpson and his wife Daisy purchased a lot in the Prospect Park neighborhood of Minneapolis. They would be the second black family to move into the neighborhood. But before they could even begin construction on their new home, they were confronted by a white mob. The mob spokesperson told the family, in no uncertain terms, that their new neighbors would take any means necessary to secure the Simpsons' removal. This confrontation, which the Minneapolis Tribune referred to as a "Race War," failed to terrorize the Simpsons into submission. They did continue to live in the neighborhood. But it did mark a turning point in the history of Minneapolis. You see, Minneapolis, like many northern cities, actually, wasn't always segregated. And this may come as a surprise to some of you, but in the early 20th century, The City of Lakes was actually a fairly integrated place. In 1910, the part of the city with the highest percentage of black residents is Near North Minneapolis, and it's only about 15% African American. And in addition, there are actually emerging integrated communities in places like the south shores of Lake Harriet, around Lake Nokomis, along the Mississippi River corridor, and sprinkled throughout Northeast Minneapolis. But by mid-century, this picture looks radically different. Those black families, down by Lake Harriet and Lake Nokomis? All gone. Same story with the black families who were living along the Mississippi River. In fact, by 1940, there is no census district in Northeast Minneapolis containing multiple black families. And it's important to note that during this period, the overall number of African Americans is actually staying fairly consistent. In 1910, one percent of the city is black. By 1950, it's increased, but only slightly, to 1.5 percent. So this concentration that you see if you look at this 1940 map, we actually have majority of minority neighborhoods by 1940. This concentration is not the result of an influx of new African Americans into the city. Rather, this is the result of taking an existing integrated city and forcing African American families out of these integrated neighborhoods and concentrating them into small pockets of Minneapolis. Minneapolis simply was not always segregated. And when the Simpsons moved in to the Prospect Park neighborhood, they had no idea of knowing that the city was on the cusp of a massive racial reordering. In the early 20th century, racist ideas are beginning to be deployed in new ways. And this notion that the quality of a neighborhood depends on the racial category of that neighborhood's occupants, this idea begins to spread like wildfire throughout the country. It's embraced by virtually all white people. White homeowners, politicians, bankers, real estate developers, you name it. They came up with all kinds of new ways to inscribe this racist idea into the built environment. To put it simply, racial residential segregation was becoming the new normal. And this profoundly altered the urban landscape. Some of you might have heard of "redlining," the federal practice of denying conventional mortgages to non-white neighborhoods. And some of you might have also heard of discriminatory lending or real estate steering. But decades before the federal government began redlining American cities, and long before the real estate industry formally adopted racism and put it in its code of ethics, which did happen, something called the racial covenant was already remaking cities across the country. Now, let me explain. Racial covenants are legal tools that were used by real estate developers in the 19th and 20th century to prevent people of color from owning or even occupying property. Often just a few lines of text, these restrictions were inserted into warranty deeds across the country. This is what they sound like: "No persons of any race other than the Aryan race shall use or occupy any building or any lot." "... neither shall said property be transferred or leased to a colored person." "The said premises shall not at any time be sold, conveyed, leased, or sublet, or occupied by any person or persons who are not full bloods of the so-called Caucasian or White race." And just to point out, these examples I just read, are all from right here, in Minneapolis, and the rest of Hennepin County. This language is incredibly racist, shockingly racist, but it's also incredibly powerful. It determined where people could live. You see, when a racial covenant is added to a warranty deed, when it's attached to a piece of property, this restriction tracks with the land indefinitely. So what this means in practice? For example, say I buy a house in, I don't know, South Minneapolis, in 1910, and I throw one of these racial covenants onto it. Ten years later, I sell this house to another white person. Ten years after that, they sell it to another white person. Ten years after that, they sell it to somebody who isn't white. This person, even though I've never met them, has breached the covenant. They lose the house, any equity they've accumulated, and the property reverts to me, the initial granting party, the person who first attached the covenant to this particular piece of land. If I'm dead at this point, the property would revert to my heirs or assigns. So once one of these restrictions gets into the property record, it's effectively there forever. Now, in the 20th century, civil rights advocates and leaders rightly saw racial covenants as one of the biggest barriers to black stability and prosperity in the United States. In fact, the NAACP made fighting racial covenants one of its top priorities. But mapping racial covenants, figuring out exactly where these things are located, has proven remarkably challenging. Nobody has ever built a comprehensive map or list or database of racial covenants for an urban area in the country, at least until now. I'm one of the co-founders of the Mapping Prejudice Project, located at the Borchert Map Library at the University of Minnesota. And we are building the first comprehensive spatial database of racial covenants for an American city. This is the result of our work so far. This is a time-enabled map that shows the spread of racial covenants throughout Minneapolis and the rest of Hennepin County in the first half of the 20th century. Each one of these blue dots denotes an individual piece of property that was reserved exclusively for the use of white people. And while there's already a lot of blue on this map, if anything, this is grossly underestimating the total amount of restricted land in Minneapolis and the surrounding suburbs. We've mapped over 15,000 racial covenants so far, and we expect to add at least 15,000 more by the time our project is completed. So if any of you live in Hennepin County and you don't see a blue dot on your house, you cannot assume that your neighborhood was free from these racial restrictions. We do know that racial covenants first came to Minneapolis in 1910, just a few months after the Simpsons moved in to Prospect Park. By the 1930s, they're standard practice. The majority of new developments after 1930 do contain these racial restrictions. They were finally made illegal, and these are illegal now, as part of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Although, there was a separate Minnesota law in the mid '50s that made them illegal locally slightly earlier. But for the majority of the 20th century, racial covenants were utilized across the United States. And they were devastatingly effective. Now, people of color have long known that racial segregation is a defining feature of urban America. I mean, this is not exactly a ground-breaking insight on my part. But what we're doing with Mapping Prejudice is determining and figuring out exactly how our cities became segregated in the first place and how racist ideas became spatial practice. So why is this happening? Why do covenants start taking over in Minneapolis and really, the rest of the country, in the early 20th century? A lot of it has to do with how real-estate developers start using racism to sell land. Racial covenants spoke to white homeowners' fears about their property values. And developers were quick to capitalize this, and used racial covenants as promotional tools. For example, the Delphian Heights addition to Minneapolis touted its lots as being both "beautiful" and "highly restricted." This addition in the Lake of the Isles neighborhood of Minneapolis actually printed the language of the covenant right in the newspaper ad. "... shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged, or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian, Semetic, or African blood or descent." And these restrictions aren't just being used to keep existing white neighborhoods white, although that's certainly part of it. They're also being used to ensure that all new development is reserved, exclusively really, for the use of white people. Consider this photograph. It's an aerial photograph of South Minneapolis from 1938. And each one of these red polygons denotes an individual lot that was racially covenanted prior to this photo being taken. And as you can see, land is being racially restricted before any other development takes place. These covenants are going in before the roads, before the construction of new houses. They even predate the sewers in some parts of the city. The first thing developers are thinking about during this period is race. And this practice ensured that Minneapolis and other cities across the country, as they expanded in the 20th century, this expansion was solely to the benefit of white people. Racial covenants aren't just determining where people can and cannot live, they're also determining who can accumulate wealth through home ownership. Racial covenants took an integrated city and turned it into a highly segregated one, by forcing African Americans out of integrated communities, and concentrating them in a few pockets of the city. Well, those pockets, they were then red-lined by the federal government beginning in the late 1930s. Once an area is red-lined, this means that there is no bank in the country that will give you a conventional mortgage if you attempt to purchase in that area. Pretty much your only option to buy in a red-lined community is predatory lending. So if you're black in the first half of the 20th century here in Hennepin County, buying a house is almost impossible, right? Large sections of the city are covenanted. It's against the law for you to live there. Other sections of the city have been red-lined. It's impossible for you to get a good financial package to buy into that area. And when black families are able to surmount these obstacles, which are pretty big obstacles, they're often met with white violence. This is what happened to the Lee family, a black family, in 1931, when they purchased a house in South Minneapolis. Within days of moving in, thousands and thousands of white neighbors surrounded the home. They vandalized the house, they killed the family's pets. It became violent enough that their daughter, Mary, required a police escort just to safely get to kindergarten. In fact, Mr. Lee, who was a World War One veteran, had to call in his army buddies to form an armed perimeter around the home just to keep this surging white mob at bay. So when you consider the severity of the barriers to African Americans purchasing homes during this period, it's not surprising that a massive gap has emerged between white and black homeownership rates in the city of Minneapolis. In fact, a recent study by the Star Tribune, using the 2010 census, found that of the hundred largest metropolitan areas in the country, Minneapolis has the largest gap between black and white homeownership rates. Over 75% of white families in the city: they own the home that they occupy. Less than 25% of black families own the home that they live in. While racial covenants themselves have been illegal now for decades, we are still very much living with the legacies of these historic practices. This is a map that shows where African Americans are living in Minneapolis today. Again, this one's based off of the 2010 census data, and I've overlaid historically covenanted lots in red. And as you can see, the areas of the city that were historically covenanted, these are still by far the whitest parts of the city today, and they're also some of the wealthiest. Black neighborhoods, on the other hand, have been subjected to systematic disinvestment. They weren't just ignored or passed over. They were actively destroyed by things like urban renewal, infrastructure projects, heavy industry, and Superfund sites. One of the ways these historic black communities were destroyed specifically was through the use of freeways. So we're going back in time now. This is 1940, showing where African Americans were living, and I've overlaid subsequent freeway projects on top. And, as you can see, some of the - Now I need to explain this slide, right? (Laughter) Historic black communities were obliterated by freeway projects. Black neighborhoods in Near North, Minneapolis, the east end of downtown, along the Hiawatha corridor in South Minneapolis, they're all devastated by these freeway projects. In fact, you might notice how 35W makes a small jog before linking up with 94, right there in the middle of the map. You can see where this is going. In the original planning documents, 35 was actually supposed to go straight here, but they realized, kind of at the last minute, "Well, if we go straight, we're gonna hit the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and that's something worth protecting." So at the last moment city planners decided to reroute the freeway several blocks east, right through a black neighborhood. Racial covenants show us how structural racism was baked into the fabric of Minneapolis. But what are we supposed to do with this knowledge? Well, the first thing is we - and this is a collective "we" - have to confront and acknowledge the legacy of racial covenants and redlining, really a history that's been intentionally forgotten. (Applause) Minneapolis, like many American cities, was not always segregated. And our contemporary racial disparities are not rooted in poor individual choices, or cultural differences, or individual pathologies. They're rooted in structural racism - (Applause) And that racism was made material through instruments like racial covenants. These historic wrongs demand restitution. But the details of these remedies should be left to the people who have been living with the consequences of racial covenants for decades. They should be determined by the people who live today in neighborhoods with high asthma rates, food deserts, and elevated levels of police violence. And in order to turn these community-derived remedies into political action, we - again, collectively "we" - need to acknowledge and confront the full extent of the problem. So think about your own role in all of this. Do you live in a covenanted neighborhood? Did you grow up in one? Who are your neighbors? Who's missing? Who owns and who rents? Does your neighborhood today reflect the diversity of the city? And if it doesn't, what are you going to do about it? Thank you. (Applause and cheering)

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Transcript of "The geography of inequality | Kevin Ehrman-Solberg | TEDxMinneapolis"

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TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: American cities were not always racially segregated. Minneapolis is no exception. But in the early 20th century, something called the 'racial covenant' began remaking the geography of cities across the country. These covenants were legal clauses that prevented people of color from owning or occupying property.

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A Raisin in the Sun Movie 2008, this will be shown to students concluding the reading of the novel.

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Article detailing a recent discrimination in housing practices in Dubuque Iowa in which the city was found to be racial discriminating in housing application

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A recent press release at the FHA/HUD official site announced a settlement in a racial discrimination complaint brought by HUD against the city of Dubuque, Iowa. The FHA/HUD press release HUDNo.14-034 says HUD and the city of Dubuque have reached an agreement to end a practice which HUD alleged discriminated against people based on race.

"The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced today an agreement with the city of Dubuque, Iowa, settling allegations that the City discriminated against African Americans in the administration of its Housing Choice Voucher Program...The agreement announced today is the result of a review HUD conducted in June 2011, which found that Dubuque imposed policies that discriminated against housing choice voucher applicants based on their race."

What were those policies? According to the press release, "Specifically, the review found that, in response to racial tensions and concerns about crime, the City established a residency preference point system that effectively imposed a residency requirement, putting those from predominantly African American areas at a disadvantage."

As the press release points out, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance" and while this specific case doesn't have much to do with a typical borrower's FHA loan application process, this case is a good example of how filing complaints about discriminatory behavior can and does result in corrections being made.

"Under the terms of the agreement, Dubuque eliminated its residency preference system, and will submit any future changes to its Housing Choice Voucher distribution to HUD for review and approval. In addition, the City agreed to undertake outreach activities to underserved populations, meet increased and expanded reporting requirements, comply with additional oversight from HUD, and obtain fair housing training for core city employees."

Sometimes the person or persons being discriminated against are the only defense against illegal practices that discriminate against people on the basis of race, religion, national origin, family status, sexual preference or gender identity or any other prohibited criteria. Federal fair housing laws can only be enforced when complaints are lodged and the problems are brought to the attention of the proper authorities.

If you believe you have experienced discrimination at any stage in the FHA loan process or in your efforts to find housing in general, report the incident to the FHA/HUD at (800) 955-2232.

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HUD and the City of Dubuque, Iowa Settle Discrimination Case

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A recent press release at the FHA/HUD official site announced a settlement in a racial discrimination complaint brought by HUD against the city of Dubuque, Iowa. The FHA/HUD press release HUDNo.14-034 says HUD and the city of Dubuque have reached an agreement to end a practice which HUD alleged discriminated against people based on race.

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Interview excerpts of A Crisis in Levittown. Interviews of residents of Levittown when a Black family moved into the suburb. Mirrors the book convos.

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Excerpt from Lorraine Hansberry biography detailing her own families experience with moving into a White neighborhood

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Lorraine Hansberry was born at Provident Hospital on the South Side of Chicago on May 19, 1930. She was the youngest of Nannie Perry Hansberry and Carl Augustus Hansberry's four children. Her father founded Lake Street Bank, one of the first banks for blacks in Chicago, and ran a successful real estate business. Her uncle was William Leo Hansberry, a scholar of African studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

Many prominent African American social and political leaders visited the Hansberry household during Lorraine's childhood including sociology professor W.E.B. DuBois, poet Langston Hughes, actor and political activist Paul Robeson, musician Duke Ellington and Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens.

Despite their middle-class status, the Hansberrys were subject to segregation. When she was 8 years old, Hansberry's family deliberately attempted to move into a restricted neighborhood. Restrictive covenants, in which white property owners agreed not to sell to blacks, created a ghetto known as the "Black Belt" on Chicago's South Side. Carl Hansberry, with the help of Harry H. Pace, president of the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company and several white realtors, secretly bought property at 413 E. 60th Street and 6140 S. Rhodes Avenue. The Hansberrys moved into the house on Rhodes Avenue in May 1937. The family was threatened by a white mob, which threw a brick through a window, narrowly missing Lorraine. The Supreme Court of Illinois upheld the legality of the restrictive covenant and forced the family to leave the house. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decision on a legal technicality. The result was the opening of 30 blocks of South Side Chicago to African Americans. Although the case did not argue that racially restrict covenants were unlawful, it marked the beginning of their end.

Lorraine graduated from Englewood High School in Chicago, where she first became interested in theater. She enrolled in the University of Wisconsin but left before completing her degree. After studying painting in Chicago and Mexico, Hansberry moved to New York in 1950 to begin her career as a writer. She wrote for Paul Robeson's Freedom, a progressive publication, which put her in contact with other literary and political mentors such as W.E.B. DuBois and Freedom editor Louis Burnham. During a protest against racial discrimination at New York University, she met Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish writer who shared her political views. They married on June 20, 1953 at the Hansberrys' home in Chicago.

In 1956, her husband and Burt D'Lugoff wrote the hit song, "Cindy, Oh Cindy." Its profits allowed Hansberry to quit working and devote herself to writing. She then began a play she called The Crystal Stair, from Langston Hughes' poem "Mother to Son." She later retitled it A Raisin in the Sun from Hughes' poem, "Harlem: A Dream Deferred."

In A Raisin in the Sun, the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway, she drew upon the lives of the working-class black people who rented from her father and who went to school with her on Chicago's South Side. She also used members of her family as inspiration for her characters. Hansberry noted similarities between Nannie Hansberry and Mama Younger and between Carl Hansberry and Big Walter. Walter Lee, Jr. and Ruth are composites of Hansberry's brothers, their wives and her sister, Mamie. In an interview, Hansberry laughingly said "Beneatha is me, eight years ago."

Her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, about a Jewish intellectual, ran on Broadway for 101 performances. It received mixed reviews. Her friends rallied to keep the play running. It closed on January 12, 1965, the day Hansberry died of cancer at 34.

Although Hansberry and Nemiroff divorced before her death, he remained dedicated to her work. As literary executor, he edited and published her three unfinished plays: Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers? He also collected Hansberry's unpublished writings, speeches and journal entries and presented them in the autobiographical montage To Be Young, Gifted and Black. The title is taken from a speech given by Hansberry in May 1964 to winners of a United Negro Fund writing competition: "...though it be thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic, to be young, gifted and black!"

Sources

McKissack, Patricia C. and Fredrick L. Young, Black and Determined: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Holiday House, 1998.

Wilkerson, Margaret B. "Lorraine Hansberry." African American Writers 2. 2001.

Content last updated: May 4, 2021

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Lorraine Hansberry was born at Provident Hospital on the South Side of Chicago on May 19, 1930. She was the youngest of Nannie Perry Hansberry and Carl Augustus Hansberry's four children. Her father founded Lake Street Bank, one of the first banks for blacks in Chicago, and ran a successful real estate business.

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Core Text

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A PBS video talking about why Lorraine H. wrote A Raisin in the Sun as well as direct quotes from her regarding the creation of the novel

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Lorraine Hansberry drew inspiration from personal experience when she sat down to write a play about a working class family on the South Side of Chicago. See how she worked to find the words to describe their hopes and struggles, and how she pressed on to complete "A Raisin in the Sun."

Funding for Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Major support is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford Foundation/JustFilms, National Endowment for the Arts, LEF Foundation, Peter G. Peterson & Joan Ganz Cooney Fund.

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Lorraine Hansberry's Inspiration for "A Raisin in the Sun" | American Masters | PBS

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Lorraine Hansberry drew inspiration from personal experience when she sat down to write a play about a working class family on the South Side of Chicago. See how she worked to find the words to describe their hopes and struggles, and how she pressed on to complete "A Raisin in the Sun."

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Understanding of L. Hansberry as an author

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Students will look at a redlining map of Davenport Iowa, comparing notes in redlined areas versus blue and green coded areas. other maps for Iowa will be viewed

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Excerpts from The Color of Law a book specifically about the type of housing discrimination mentioned in A Raisin in the Sun with emphasis on FHA policies

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Past Housing Policies, Practices Contribute To Iowa's Racial Homeownership, Wealth Gaps. This article details specific historic and contemporary issues.

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White Iowans own their homes at nearly three times the rate of Black Iowans, one of the biggest racial homeownership gaps in the country. Nationally, this gap is wider than it was 50 years ago, because discriminatory housing policies and practices of the past and present are still hurting Black families and their ability to build generational wealth.

Bobbretta Brewton remembers when the city of Des Moines bought her family's house to destroy it.

"I was born and raised here. And when I was 8 years old, our family was impacted by urban renewal," Brewton said. "And it was a home that my grandmother worked really hard to buy and own, and then share with my father's family, which included me."

Urban renewal programs and the construction of Interstate 235 in the 1950s and 1960s cleared what city officials considered to be blighted areas or slums. But they were also neighborhoods that were home to a large share of Des Moines' non-white residents and Black-owned businesses.

Center Street, a hub of economic activity and entertainment for Black Des Moines residents, was wiped out by highway construction. The Oakridge and River Hills urban renewal projects, as well as I-235, displaced about 1,700 families, many of them Black.

"And then when they took the houses, you didn't necessarily get what your house was worth," Brewton said. "So you didn't really get a comparable one."

The Polk County Housing Trust Fund, for its "Undesign the Redline: DSM" project, dug up past newspaper reports of Black Des Moines homeowners being forced to settle for a much smaller house or to start renting. Racial restrictions in real estate and renting made it even harder for Black families to find a new place to live.

After the move, Brewton had to go to a new school, where the teachers wrongly assumed she didn't know how to read and put her in a lower level class. Brewton said this also broke up her close-knit neighborhood.

"There was no sensitivity to try to get give people the option of going together and remaining neighbors in some way," Brewton said. "So everybody scattered, and we lost that feeling of connectedness."
How discriminatory policies and practices led to disinvestment and decline
Before these areas were cleared for urban renewal and the highway, federal policies and local real estate practices set Black and low-income neighborhoods up for disinvestment and decline.

Race-restrictive covenants written into deeds of houses in the early 1900s forbade homeowners from selling or renting to various minority groups, keeping some neighborhoods all white. When the federal government started subsidizing home loans in the 1930s, it created maps for cities-six in Iowa- that said lenders shouldn't approve mortgages in certain areas, especially those with more non-white, immigrant and low-income residents.

"Virtually all African-American neighborhoods, regardless of their socioeconomic status, were designated red," said Julian Maxwell Hayter, a professor and historian at the University of Richmond who also grew up in Des Moines.

Red areas were considered "hazardous" for making home loans, and the description for why downtown Des Moines was marked red included the phrase, "there are many colored people" (these documents and maps were digitized by the Mapping Inequality project).

Hayter said redlining led to systematic disinvestment in these neighborhoods in the 1940s and 50s.

"It's not just that people weren't able to get mortgages. It's that those who were upwardly mobile were disallowed from moving into neighborhoods like their white or immigrant counterparts. So they are in many ways compressed into smaller and smaller enclaves."

This cemented the racial and economic segregation of cities across the Midwest, including Des Moines.

Hayter said at the same time, white families fled cities for the expanding suburbs, and wealth and jobs followed. Black families were mostly denied the opportunity to move to the suburbs, even when they could afford it.

"So by the 1960s, redlining, urban renewal, slum clearance and freeway construction begin to bring together what we now know as the inner city," Hayter said. "It wasn't created by choice. It was created by design."

The federal government outlawed redlining in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act but didn't fix the problems it created.

Hayter, born in 1975, said he grew up in a redlined neighborhood in Des Moines even though his parents had good jobs working for John Deere and Blue Cross Blue Shield.

"We were a solid middle class family," Hayter said. "And I had to live in proximity to poverty, in large part because of these longstanding policies."
Impact of discriminatory housing policies still clear today
The effects of these policies are clear around Good Park, just north of downtown Des Moines. That's according to Kendyl Larson, the director of research and planning at the Polk County Housing Trust Fund, who said the area was redlined and affected by highway construction.

"We see that today in the impact of the property conditions and the property values," Larson said. "They're much lower in this general area because of that continued disinvestment over time in the specific neighborhoods that were once redlined."

Nearly a century after redlining began, the areas in Des Moines with the lowest property values today mostly line up with the "hazardous" areas of the risk assessment maps of the 1930s. The exceptions are areas like the Sherman Hill and the East Village neighborhoods that are undergoing gentrification.

The persistent segregation and lower property values mean Black homeowners often can't build as much wealth as white homeowners.

Larson said racial discrimination is still happening in housing, but more at the personal rather than the policy level. She said some realtors still steer people of different races to see houses in different parts of Des Moines, and there is racial discrimination in renting as well.

And in Polk County, Black mortgage applicants are denied loans at more than twice the rate of the county average.

"If you can't get a mortgage for a home, then you're not able to buy a home, which means you're unable to build that wealth," Larson said.
Racial homeownership gap and wealth gap persist
Nationally, the average white family has 10 times the wealth of the average Black family.

"One of the major ways in the US to generate what we would call generational wealth is through homeownership," Hayter said. "Well, programs precluded racial minorities from homeownership, at least in any viable way, in the mid-20 th century."

Homeownership isn't the only factor that contributes to this massive racial wealth gap. Other factors include disparities in education, employment and wages.

But Hayter said families that own a home are typically in a better position to get through hard times. And it helps them build wealth that they can help pass down to their kids, such as helping them pay for college or a down payment for a house of their own.

"I think even myself and my Black friends, we have not had generational wealth built for us where you can see with a lot of white families in Iowa," said Zakariyah Hill, co-founder of The Supply Hive and a student at Iowa State University.

Hill said white families in Iowa are more likely to pass down farmland or houses.

"However my family, other families, start just working from a young age, and that's all they know how to do," Hill said. "People are really living paycheck to paycheck so they can survive to see another day."

She said there are a lot of barriers to starting to build that generational wealth.

"It's hard to start that cycle for Black families because it was never meant for us to see the cycle or to start at all," Hill said.

She hopes to own a home in the future. And Hill said there should be more government support for people to get into housing and stay there, and to ensure they can pay their utilities.

Those who want to work to shrink the racial homeownership and wealth gaps say understanding this history is an important first step, but it will take targeted policies and investment to fix decades of damage.

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Past Housing Policies, Practices Contribute To Iowa's Racial Homeownership, Wealth Gaps

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White Iowans own their homes at nearly three times the rate of Black Iowans, one of the biggest racial homeownership gaps in the country. Nationally, this gap is wider than it was 50 years ago, because discriminatory housing policies and practices of the past and present are still hurting Black families and their ability to build generational wealth.

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Housing Inequality in the Iowa using A Raisin in the Sun as A framework

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Students will read a Raisin in the sun throughout with these linked texts supporting themes and topics