BACK TO THE DOLLARWAY SYNDROME: A WORK IN PROGRESS

In 2019, Rob began previewing the book he’s writing about what he calls “The Dollarway Syndrome” – the proclivity white Americans have for treating individual black Americans with kindness, civility, and compassion while, at the same time, supporting and espousing political and social policies that retard black progress. In this post, he relates more about how The Dollarway Syndrome works.

I’ve organized the book into three parts. The first three chapters comprise a memoir in which I relate basic facts about me and report incidents and stories that describe the Dollarway  Syndrome. These incidents and

stories mostly occurred during my time at Dollarway, the small, Pine Bluff, Arkansas high school from which I graduated in 1969. Part two explores the connection between geography and race in America and some basic human behavior concepts. It serves as a bridge between the memoir section and part three, the portion of the book in which I offer explanations for the Dollarway Syndrome, what it means in our broader racial context, and how we might minimize its negative effects. Part three connects the Dollarway Syndrome with ideas about race discrimination offered by scholars, journalists, and others who focus on racial issues.

Today, I relate part of a story from the memoir chapters that harkens back to a political campaign in which Henry, Woodson, and I all took great interest – the 1966 Arkansas governor’s race between moderate

Republican Winthrop Rockefeller and the Democratic nominee, arch segregationist state supreme court Justice Jim Johnson. Rockefeller, who won and for whom Henry later worked, vigorously courted black voters

while Johnson reportedly regularly tossed round the n-word.  The encounter I describe with one of my white classmates left a lasting impression because it shook me and represented my first experience with the duality of the Dollarway Syndrome.

Reading Partners

I arrived at Dollarway as a sophomore in 1966, attending under a freedom-of-choice desegregation plan that lets students pick their school. Only a handful of blacks (three in my class) elected Dollarway. Most remained at all-black Townsend Park High.

One of my white classmates noticed I carried around paperback books that weren’t on our English class reading list. He shared with me that he was also an avid reader and fan of the Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason  novels

he’d noticed me reading (the popular television series starring Raymond Burr had just ended). For several weeks, this student and I cultivated a friendship based on our mutual affinity for those novels, whispering back and forth and passing notes in study hall about the latest one we’d started reading.

I felt this student and I developed a genuine friendship based on mutual respect and trust.

Unlike other white Dollarway students, he never used racial slurs. We interacted in a way that made me feel his equal. For a few weeks, I thought of him as the best friend I had at Dollarway, white or black. That’s why I felt betrayed by what happened a little later.

A Locker Room Conversation

Besides English class, this student and I took physical education together. One day in October, with the hot gubernatorial election nearing its climax, as we dressed after gym class, he asked me, “Hey, Wiley, you think ol’ Rockefeller’s gonna win the election?”

I hesitated. Should I make known my

intensely pro-  Rockefeller views? I wondered how being honest with him would affect our friendship, since I knew many white Dollarway students favored Johnson.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know who’ll win. I know who I hope wins.”

I hung back, acknowledging the first part of his statement, but ignoring the second part. “I can’t say now who’ll win. It’s close, real close from what I hear.”

“I don’t like Rockefeller.”

My heart sank a little with his words, but I only nodded and waited for his reason. I lifted my eyebrows but remained silent in the moment.

“Johnson will be stronger,” he continued. “You know, tougher. Rockefeller seems weak to me.”

“I don’t know,” I said, buttoning my shirt,

picking up my gym bag, and moving toward the door. “I guess we’ll just have to see how it turns out.” I left before he could say more. Later, I reflected on his last words. They nagged at me.

After thinking about it a long time, really until after things white people said during the 1968 elections two years later, I realized what my reading partner probably meant. He meant ‘stronger’ and ‘tougher’ on blacks. I’ve always believed he preferred not saying that to me, given the time we’d spent together and the decency he’d shown toward me. I assume he knew talking in overt racial terms would jeopardize the friendship. For his own reasons, I imagined he didn’t want that.

Far worse instances of white people engaging in racially insensitive behavior after befriending me occurred during my Dollarway years. This one stung so much because it was the first.

This student and I remained friends for most of the rest of that school year. We drifted apart over the remaining two years of high school. The relationship was never the same after what happened in the fall of ’66. As I saw it, being for Jim Johnson and recognizing racial equality wasn’t possible. By being friends with me and supporting Johnson, was he saying it was? I’d never considered such an idea and I’m still troubled by people who’d suggest that. One thing was clear after that locker room conversation. I’d seen something I never had before. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.  

 

GETTING THE FACTS WRONG ABOUT HOUSING DISCRIMINATION

In January, we posted “A Little Light Reading: Our Top Three Books on Understanding Race in America.”  We identified three relatively recent works we consider essential for understanding America’s ongoing racial issues. The Warmth of Other Suns, The Half Has Never Been Told, and The Color of Law explore, respectively, the twentieth century black migration from the South, slavery, and housing discrimination.  We intend to return to those books from time to time, exploring their major points and examining their contributions on America’s racial issues.

  

We start with Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.  Rothstein proceeds from a simple point aimed at disabusing many Americans of a myth.  Housing segregation was not, he writes, “merely a project of southerners in the former slaveholding Confederacy.”  It was “a nationwide project of the federal government in the twentieth century, designed and implemented by its most liberal leaders.”  This contention leads to the major theme of The Color of Law – that Supreme Court justices, who’ve ducked imposing broad remedies for the consequences of housing discrimination on the ground government didn’t cause the problem, got their facts wrong.

Rothstein highlights two Supreme Court opinions, 33 years apart, in school desegregation cases in which the justices claimed governmental action wasn’t at fault.  In a 1974 Detroit area case, Justice Potter Stewart declined to include white students from suburban areas in a desegregation plan, concluding African American students were concentrated in the city, not spread throughout the suburbs, because of “unknown and perhaps unknowable factors such as in-migration, birth rates, economic changes, or cumulative acts of private racial fears.”  In 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected desegregation plans in Louisville and Seattle for the same reason.  Housing patterns, he determined, resulted from “private choices,” not governmental action, meaning no “constitutional obligation” required the proposed remedies.  Rothstein devotes the remaining 300 or so pages of Color of Law to proving just how wrong both justices got their facts.

Public Housing = Ghetto

Government policy, beginning with the Franklin Roosevelt administration, forced blacks into urban ghettos, “as big a factor as any” in promoting segregated housing.  As World War II approached, the federal government built housing units for workers

involved in defense-related industries.  Federal policy and practice provided this housing either for whites only or in segregated projects.  Despite the fact both blacks and whites worked in defense plants, nearby government subsidized or constructed housing either served only whites or separated black and white workers.

After the war, congressional Republicans opposed to any federal participation in the housing market, gave progressive legislators a choice – accept segregated housing or get no federal housing program at all.  GOP amendments to the housing bills required desegregation, when everyone knew southern Democrats would kill the legislation if it included such amendments.  Northern and eastern Democrats favoring a public housing program backed down and accepted segregated housing.

A little later, federal regulations set strict upper income limits for public housing residents.  These limits forced middle-income tenants out of most public housing, leaving projects poor and mostly African American.  Taken together, these policies assured segregation in public housing projects in the United States, a result that endures today.

Racial Zoning

Local government actions significantly contributed to America’s segregated housing patterns.  In cities like Baltimore, blatant zoning ordinances stopped the development of integrated neighborhoods.  Baltimore’s ordinance, enacted in 1910, forbade blacks from buying houses on blocks where whites constituted a majority of the residents and vice versa.  These ordinances spread to Atlanta, Miami, St. Louis, Richmond, and other places.  The Supreme Court struck them down in a 1917 case originating in Louisville, Kentucky but, as Rothstein shows, many cities ignored the ruling, claiming their laws differed in some way – usually minor – from the Louisville ordinance.  West Palm Beach, Florida, for example, adopted a racial zoning ordinance 12 years after the Supreme Court decision in the Louisville case and it remained in place until 1960.

Promoting the Suburbs

Public housing policy and local ordinances didn’t stop higher income African Americans from buying houses in certain places, given market forces.  The federal government, however, enforced policies that enticed white families to move to single family homes in suburbs and out of apartments located in cities.  The government then made it exceedingly difficult for blacks to follow suit by implementing blatantly

discriminatory Federal Housing Administration (FHA) lending rules.  The FHA underwriting  manual, first issued in 1935, said, “to retain stability [in a neighborhood] it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes” and “a change in…racial occupancy generally leads to instability and a reduction in values.” 

The FHA, therefore, in many instances, just wouldn’t approve loans to black buyers. In connection with a single family housing development in one New Jersey community in the early 1940s, the agency flatly stated “no loans will be given to [black] developments.”  The FHA would approve properties only in neighborhoods where “compatibility” existed among residents.  Generally, this meant whites only.  These discriminatory policies remained in effect well into the 1950s and, in some cases, beyond, locking in segregated housing patterns.

In coming posts, we will explore other ways government policies created segregated housing and examine solutions Rothstein proposes.  Many of those are controversial and we don’t agree among ourselves on the wisdom of many of them.  The problem remains though, and not talking about it or the ways of addressing it, won’t make it go away.