Friday is the 70th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott, which began because Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat to a white person, as required by law. While her brave act brought national attention to the civil rights movement and triggered student sit-ins to end segregation across the south, it also subjected her and her husband, Raymond, to constant death threats. Consequently, like many other Black families fleeing Jim Crow south’s racial violence, in August 1957, Rosa and Raymond moved up north to Detroit.
When the Parks arrived in Detroit, they and other Black people did not have to sit at the back of the bus. Nonetheless, the city was permeated by a quieter but no less pernicious type of racism: racist policies, which are any written or unwritten laws and processes that produce or sustain racial inequity. In my book Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America, I demonstrate how racial covenants, redlining, urban renewal, blockbusting, predatory mortgage lending and racialized property tax administration have stymied the Black community.
With access to the nation’s most lucrative blue-collar jobs, Black people in Detroit were thriving. By 1950, the median Black household income in Detroit had reached $2,298, whereas the national median for Black households was $952. Most Black families could not, however, translate this triumph into better housing because of racist policies.
For instance, racial covenants – private legal agreements that prevented Black people from residing in certain neighborhoods – kept them confined to ghettos. These covenants also prevented Black people from moving to the suburbs where the schools and other amenities were superior and the homes were cheaper, bigger and higher quality.
Beginning in the 1930s, the Federal Housing Administration drew a red line around the neighborhoods where racial covenants corralled Black people, depriving these areas of mortgages, home repair loans and other valuable investment. Redlining turned Black people into pariahs, their very presence diminishing housing prices.
In a practice known as blockbusting, real estate agents advised white homeowners that the arrival of Black residents would cause their home values to plummet, inducing panic sales throughout the neighborhood. After purchasing the homes at fire sale prices, the agent would then resell them to Black families at much higher prices, reaping morally dubious profits.
Urban renewal programs, prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, demolished entire communities in an attempt to erase the blight and disorder manufactured by redlining. But alongside the dilapidated buildings, these programs also demolished lucrative Black businesses, intact properties, cultural institutions and most importantly, the social ties that held the communities together. Because displaced Black families could only relocate to a limited number of Black neighborhoods, these spaces became crowded with strangers suffering from “root shock”, a term Dr Mindy Fullilove created to describe “the traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional eco-system”. Unsurprisingly, crime and disorder thrived in these newly reconfigured communities.
Rosa and Raymond Parks were able to rent a home in Detroit at 3201 Virginia Park Street, where they resided from 1961 to 1988. But because of racist policies, today, the home is vacant and worth less than $50,000. It is surrounded by vacant lots and other homes in equally bad shape.
Even worse, the City of Detroit is overvaluing the former Parks home along with many others. How did this happen? Due in large part to predatory lending by banks, which spurred the Great Recession and the mortgage foreclosure crisis in 2008, housing prices in Detroit and other majority Black cities dropped precipitously and did not quickly recover. In the midst of the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history, the City of Detroit did not have the capacity to reduce the value of its homes, leading to systematic overvaluation.
The City of Detroit proceeded to overtax up to 84% of its homes in violation of the Michigan constitution, which states that no home can be assessed at more than 50% of its market value. As a result, a Detroit News exposé found, the City of Detroit overtaxed Detroit homeowners by at least $600m. The Parkses’ former home on Virginia Park Street was overtaxed by $2,058.
More importantly, Detroit is not alone. Recent research has found that, on average, Black and Hispanic people pay a 10% to 13% higher property tax rate than white people for the same bundle of goods, which equals about $300 to $400 more a year.
On this 70th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott, we should indeed memorialize the heroic work of civil rights leaders like Parks, but we should also expand our notions of racism beyond the cross burnings and segregated lunch counters and buses they faced in the Jim Crow south. We need to focus on the racist policies, hiding in plain sight, that continue to ravage the Black community today.
Bernadette Atuahene is the Duggan professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, the executive director of the Institute for Law and Organizing, and the author of Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America