Suburban Segregation in The North

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States signaled a new era in race relations.  Race or minority status is no longer an insuperable barrier to holding higher office—or achieving other kinds of success—in American society.  However, it is important that this country’s pride in its first African-American president does not obscure the long, tortured history of racism and minority oppression that marred much of the twentieth century.  Although Obama’s election is an incredible achievement, for himself, for African-Americans, and for the nation in general, it was not long ago that racial minorities were effectively shut out of the American dream.  One need only look at the history of housing segregation in this country to understand how far we have come in such a short time.

     Anecdotes about racism in the 1960s and 1970s tend to center on the South.  But prejudice was just as prevalent in many northern states as well, although it was expressed in a more subtle, and thus potentially more treacherous, way.  Most people think of segregation as an exclusively Southern phenomenon epitomized by the relegation of African-Americans to the back of the bus.  But segregation made its effects felt in the North as well.  Even though segregation in the North was not openly advocated and legally mandated as it was in the South, it was just as insidious because it operated on deep-seated prejudices.  These prejudices were difficult, even impossible, to eradicate through legal means simply because they were not overt.  

     Many do not realize that housing segregation endured well into the twentieth century in suburban communities in the northern United States.  Examples of model-American communities that subtly excluded African-Americans include Freeport, Roosevelt, and Levittown on Long Island in New York State.  An understanding of what happened in these northern communities demonstrates the genesis of those inner-city neighborhoods known as “slums” and reveals how and why they were allowed to persist.  

     For African-Americans who moved north in order to escape the overt, legalized racism prevalent throughout the South, housing segregation in northern suburban communities frustrated the realization of the American dream.  Traditionally, part of the American dream is owning a home; but many African-Americans found it difficult to buy a house even when they had the financial resources to do so.  Although segregation was not explicitly authorized by law as it was in the South, the more subtle racism of the North was just as effective in preventing African-Americans from achieving a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.  Even when the applicable legal bodies, for instance the court system and the state and federal legislatures, acted to diminish the direct effects of racism on blacks, private actors still found ways to stymie the progress of African-Americans.