Valls said he recently found a racial covenant in the original deed for his 1949 home that stated that the home was 'not to be sold to blacks or Asians.'"
Among other privileges enjoyed by whites were that they could live in whatever neighborhood they could afford. They could get the loans they qualified for in order to buy homes or open businesses.
Race matters à ‚¬" speaking truth to power
Although Barack Obama is no longer speaking about raceà ‚¬"in his acclaimed speech on race in the city of Philadelphia on March 18, 2008: "Senator Obama grounded his examination of the "complexities of race" on an analysis of the historical legacy of discrimination faced by African Americans. After invoking the words of William Faulkner for the proposition that "'The past isn't' dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past,"' he proceeded to explain that "... many of the disparities that exist in the African American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow." He proceeded to elaborate on some of the specific historical reasons behind racial inequalities, explaining:"
Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.
That speech was remarkable and timely. In March 2009 of this year, the NAACP accused Wells Fargo and HSBC of forcing black people into subprime mortgages. The New York Times has mapped out the subprime mortgage crisis and black and minority neighborhoods were the most targeted areas. Even when they qualified for better loans blacks and hispanics were forced into subprime loans. The subprime crisis is the greatest loss of wealth suffered by blacks in U.S. history. "The Boston-based social advocacy organization United for a Fair Economy has released a study which estimates minority Americans lost up to $213 billion in wealth during the eight years of the Bush administration due to the so-called sub-prime mortgage crisis... Meanwhile, data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act suggest roughly 40 percent of the Blacks given expensive sub-prime housing loans could have qualified for cheaper mainstream mortgages."
Fox News, Republicans and other right-wing elements often point the finger at minorities for the subprime crisis--saying that Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac and Democrats are the culprits for giving unqualified minorities loans---rather than taking to task Wall Street and the banks, but Aaron Pressman of BusinessWeek points out that, "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were victims, not culprits."
"Start with the most basic fact of all: virtually none of the $1.5 trillion of cratering subprime mortgages were backed by Fannie or Freddie. That's right à ‚¬" most subprime loans? All the loans made without checking a borrower's income or employment history? All made in the private sector, without any support from Fannie and Freddie." mortgages did not meet Fannie or Freddie's strict lending standards. All those no money down, no interest for a year, low teaser rate
What if only one race rioted?
History tells that even when blacks were able to reside in their own communities and own their own businesses, there have been documented cases here, here and here of entire communities being burned out and their residents displaced or killed. One example was The Rosewood Massacres of 1923. The spin that history gives on these violent racist incidents is to call them "race riots." The fact is that the Memphis Race Riots were whites rioting. The New Orleans Race Riot were white former confederates and their allies in the New Orleans police.
Some 72 years later some survivors of Rosewood received "A Measure of Justice."
For 70 years, Florida tried to pretend the town never existed. But last May [1994], in what might fairly be called a delayed reaction, the state legislature passed a bill awarding more than $2 million in compensation to the nine survivors of the massacre... and to the descendants of the victims. It marked the first time in U.S. history that a state has compensated citizens for the inadequacy with which it defended them. "Had this been a white community," says Steve Hanlon, the attorney who led a two-year fight for the suit, "the state would have used all its police power. You can't condition police protection on race, which is what happened here."
A two tier-justice system
For years after slavery, in America, violence against blacks by whites went unpunished. Violence, murder, Jim Crow and other atrocities were legitimized by "law enforcement," who were often leaders in the KKK in Southern states like Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee...etc. Then there was the resurgence of the Klan in the 1920s "in response to urbanization and industrialization."
"'By mid-1949, there were so many charred house carcasses that the area [College Hills] was informally named Dynamite Hill." Independent Klan groups remained active in Birmingham and were deeply engaged in violent opposition to the Civil Rights Movement.
The Klan had major political influence in several states and was influential mostly in the center of the country. The Klan spread from the South into the Midwest and Northern states, and into Canada where there was a large movement against Catholic immigrants. At its peak, Klan membership exceeded four million and comprised 20% of the adult white male population in many broad geographic regions, with 40% in some areas. Most of the membership resided in Midwestern states.
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