• DOI:10.1353/rah.2001.0008
• Corpus ID: 144583043

Race Matters: The Folks Next Door

@article{Henderson2001RaceMT,
  title={Race Matters: The Folks Next Door},
  author={A. Scott. Henderson},
  journal={Reviews in American History},
  year={2001},
  volume={29},
  pages={119 - 125}
}

• A. Henderson
• Published 1 March 2001
• History
• Reviews in American History

In 1953, a University of Chicago Law Review article concluded: "Of all discriminations encountered by the Negro and other minority groups, none has proved more difficult to overcome than exclusion from housing." Readers might have construed this statement to mean that housing discrimination was largely a thing of the past. Indeed, only a few years earlier the Supreme Court had declared that judicial enforcement of restrictive covenants was unconstitutional. This pronouncement capped a long struggle by civil rights activists to undermine the use of deed restrictions to maintain racially homogeneous neighborhoods. Celebrations, though, were premature. Housing discrimination, then and now, continues to be a significant problem. Furthermoreunlike open housing-other steps toward racial equality, even ones as controversial as affirmative action, have rarely provoked violence.1 It is this ongoing history of both the struggle to create, and the conflict over, open housing that Stephen Meyer chronicles in a well-written and exhaustively documented narrative. From the outset, Meyer notes that his purpose is to analyze, within a national context, the issue of race and housing. This, in turn, is the work's greatest strength: It is not limited by a regional or single-city focus. To achieve his objective, Meyer has detailed the events that occurred in more than a dozen cities over a span of seven decades. While Meyer understandably gives more attention to some cities (for example, Chicago and Detroit), he has nonetheless produced a representative study that encompasses all regions of the United States. Meyer structures his analysis chronologically, beginning with the first phase (1900 to 1916) of the Great Migration-the movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, Midwest, and West. During this initial period, as African Americans moved to cities such as Baltimore and Kansas City, municipal services were strained and housing shortages developed. When African Americans attempted to remedy the