The CRA Blood Libel

This post has been hard to write. I'm getting to it after the longest possible day of procrastination. That's because it's about why we needed a Community Redevelopment Act in the first place. And, more importantly, why we still need one now.

This is a photograph of community organizer Martin Luther King being hit by a rock while marching for the open housing on the segregated Southwest Side neighborhood of Gage Park in Chicago. (He also had a knife thrown at him, but it missed; this was the march of which he intoned, "I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.")

I wrote about this march once before, in my most-widely read post—one that took several months of procrastination to accomplish. It was the one where I quoted all the letters Illinois liberal senator Paul Douglas received from the white homeowners of Gage Park after that march. They wrote things like:

As a citzen and a taxpayer I was very upset to hear about 'TITLE IV' of the so-called civil rights Bill S. 3296. This is not Civil Rights. This takes away a person's rights. We too are people and need someone to protect us. We designed and built our own home and I would hate too think of being forced to sell my lovely home to anyone just because they had the money.

It is safe to say that not a single white person has ever moved into a negro neighorhood yet there has been over a million white people dumped, shoved, or pushed out of their homes by expansion of negroes.... NEGROES HAVE BEEN MADE THE BOSS OF THE UNITED STATES.

Note the bottom line: "I would hate too think of being forced to sell my lovely home to anyone just because they had the money." People were not throwing rocks because folks with less money wanted to move into their neighborhood. They were throwing rocks because people with a different colored skin wanted to move into their neighborhood.

Clearly, anti-discrimination legislation was necessary then. Why is it necessary now?

Well, I get letters. I got one a couple of weeks ago from a reader. It went like this:

Dear Mr. Perlstein:

I read your book this past weekend. Being 55, I was around and aware of the period described in your book, and related to it. You got the details right but you got the overriding story wrong: Nixon was not the cause of the great shift to the right; he was pulled along by the rushing tide.

It is now 40 years later. I live in central NJ, a nice progressive town. The South Side is where the black people live, where the little crime we have comes from. The public schools are 50%+ black because most white parents who can afford it send their kids to private schools. We work together but we don't play together (contrary to what we are told in Lite Beer commercials). We are all quite gentile about it relative to 1968, but we will not tolerate the lowering of standards and standards of living that come with the influx of blacks.

Let me leave you with something I learned in Yeshiva: You know that the Israelites spent 40 years in the desert after leaving Egypt. But, even walking with long rest breaks, the trip might take months, not 40 years. The commentaries tell us that the Israelites with instructed to take the long way to Palestine, through Jordan, thus the 40 years. G-d knew that people who have only known slavery would not know how to behave as free people, so
the generation that knew slavery died out during the march, and a new generation of free Israelites entered the land.

We freed the slaves before they ever learned to be free. And we have pandered and held them to lower standards for these 40 years so they STILL don't know how to behave. Maybe in 100 years or so - maybe - they will be civilized enough to live on the North Side with us.

A--- K------
Highland Park, NJ

Now, as it happens, by an extraordinary coincidence, when I opened this email I had just returned from the following event:

That's me after a speech to Victor Harbison's social studies class and school newspaper staff at...Gage Park High School, only blocks from where Martin Luther King was hit by that rock. Yes, thanks to legislation like the CRA, Dr. King earned at least a partial housing victory for his martyrdom; for all of our profound social problems that still remain, at least the families of those kids have a reasonably fair chance to live in those same fine bungalows that white Gage Park residents defended with rocks, knives, their very bodies, and letters like these:

It is my firm belief, and of all my neighbors, that King should be taken into custody, charged with fomenting civil disorder and anarchy.... Today, the insufferable arrogance of this character places him on a pedestal as a dark-skinned Hitler.

And despite men like Mr. K------ who still write letters like this:

We freed the slaves before they ever learned to be free. And we have pandered and held them to lower standards for these 40 years so they STILL don't know how to behave. Maybe in 100 years or so - maybe - they will be civilized enough to live on the North Side with us.

Well, guess what? I showed that letter to Mr. Harbison, and he read it aloud to his class. Just so they could be more realistic about what they're up against; just so they could get a better grasp of the struggles that still remain to be fought. I can't imagine what it would be like to be one of those kids, knowing that no matter how hard I work, no matter how much money I make—and no matter how much, respectful rapt attention I pay to a guest speaker like Rick Perlstein telling stories about things that happened 25 years before I was born—there will still be soul-sick folks like Mr. K------ who could never believe I rightfully earned what I have.

I explained all that in a return letter to Mr. K-----, in fact, enclosing the photograph above. You know what he wrote in response?

Too many of those students in the picture have Rev. Wright attitudes, and most of us simply won't deal with them. Now that's a lesson worth teaching them.

Look at that picture, dammit. Which of those kids "have Rev. Wright attitudes"? The one who's now doggedly working through my 900-page book? The one who earnestly asked me why people didn't understand that if black people were discriminated against by forcing them to live in dirty housing, it didn't make sense for white people to write letters to their senator about how they refused to live among people who'd live in dirty housing?

This is the level to which conservatives have driven our political discourse: to win an election, to keep power, they are stooping Mr. K------'s arguments, if you can call lies with all the moral heft of the ancient blood libel against Europe's Jews—blaming a despised, outcast social group for a financial crisis they had nothing to do with, in order to aggrandize the ability of the dominant group to hate and oppress—"arguments."

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