BOOK REVIEW: "The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America" Examines Baltimore's Segregation

The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America by Lawrence T. Brown. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. 384 pages. Paperback. $19.95.

This best-selling book looks at how American cities can promote racial equity, end redlining, and reverse the damaging health- and wealth-related effects of segregation. It was the winner of the IPPY Book Award Current Events II by the Independent Publisher, and a Finalist for the Pattis Family Foundation Global Cities by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Amazon.com's description:

"The world gasped in April 2015 as Baltimore erupted and Black Lives Matter activists, incensed by Freddie Gray's brutal death in police custody, shut down highways and marched on city streets. In The Black Butterfly - a reference to the fact that Baltimore's majority-Black population spreads out like a butterfly's wings on both sides of the coveted strip of real estate running down the center of the city - Lawrence T. Brown reveals that ongoing historical trauma caused by a combination of policies, practices, systems, and budgets is at the root of uprisings and crises in hypersegregated cities around the country.

Putting Baltimore under a microscope, Brown looks closely at the causes of segregation, many of which exist in current legislation and regulatory policy despite the common belief that overtly racist policies are a thing of the past. Drawing on social science research, policy analysis, and archival materials, Brown reveals the long history of racial segregation's impact on health, from toxic pollution to police brutality. Beginning with an analysis of the current political moment, Brown delves into how Baltimore's history influenced actions in sister cities such as St. Louis and Cleveland, as well as Baltimore's adoption of increasingly oppressive techniques from cities such as Chicago. But there is reason to hope. Throughout the book, Brown offers a clear five-step plan for activists, nonprofits, and public officials to achieve racial equity. Not content to simply describe and decry urban problems, Brown offers up a wide range of innovative solutions to help heal and restore redlined Black neighborhoods, including municipal reparations. Persuasively arguing that, since urban apartheid was intentionally erected, it can be intentionally dismantled, The Black Butterfly demonstrates that America cannot reflect that Black lives matter until we see how Black neighborhoods matter."

Go to The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America book's website.

Listen to a 2020 America Walks interview/webinar with Lawrence T. Brown.

Book Review: "Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap"

Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap by Tanya Maria Golash-Boza. University of California Press, 2023. 311 pages. Paperback. $27.95.

Amazon.com's description: 

"Before Gentrification shows how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrification in Washington, DC. Golash-Boza tracks the cycles of state abandonment and punishment that have shaped the city, revealing how policies and policing work to displace and decimate the Black middle class.

Through the stories of those who have lost their homes and livelihoods, she explores how DC's "troubling history makes clear that the choice to use prisons and policing to solve problems faced by Black communities in the twentieth century—instead of investing in schools, community centers, social services, health care, and violence prevention—is what made gentrification possible in the twenty-first. Before Gentrification unveils a pattern of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in DC that has implications for all US cities."

This book is a personal project: as Golash-Boza states, “I have a personal investment in understanding how and why my neighborhood became plagued by violence, why so many of my childhood friends were murdered, why a generation of Black boys and men was put behind bars, and why so few of my childhood friends can afford to live in the neighborhood where we were raised” (p. 24). 

Regarding the book's reception, Golash-Boza posted in her Twitter (X) account: "I just read the first published review of Before Gentrification and it's a good reminder my book is not for everyone. The book clearly generates a different response in different readers - and that's fine. So far, the audience I most wanted to reach has responded positively."

Read the abstract of the book review in the December 2024 Social Forces. 

Read the December 2023 Twitter (X) post.

New Book "Slow and Sudden Violence" Treats Baltimore's Real Estate History

Derek Hyra, Slow and Sudden Violence: Why and When Uprisings Occur. University of California Press, 2024. 365 pages. Paperback. $29.95.

To Hyra in his new book, "equitable development involving residents of affected communities is essential to avoid continual displacement, increasing segregation, and social unrest." The Amazon.com description: 

"In Slow and Sudden Violence, Derek Hyra links police violence to an ongoing cycle of racial and spatial urban redevelopment repression. By delving into the real estate histories of St. Louis and Baltimore, he shows how housing and community development policies advance neighborhood inequality by segregating, gentrifying, and displacing Black communities. Repeated decisions to “upgrade” the urban fabric and uproot low-income Black populations have resulted in pockets of poverty inhabited by people experiencing displacement trauma and police surveillance. These interconnected sets of divestments and accumulated frustrations have contributed to eruptions of violence in response to tragic, unjust police killings. To confront American unrest, Hyra urges that we end racialized policing, stop Black community destruction and displacement, and reduce neighborhood inequality."

Hyra is Professor of Public Administration and Policy and founding director of the Metropolitan Policy Center at American University.

Read the December 12, 2024 NCRC article.

Thelma Jean Mothershed Wair, One of the Little Rock Nine, 83.

Thelma Jean Mothershed Wair was a member of the Little Rock Nine, the African-American students involved in the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The world watched as they braved constant intimidation and threats from those who opposed desegregation of the formerly all-white high school. Mothershed was a junior when she entered Central. Despite the fact that she had a cardiac condition since birth, she had a near perfect record for attendance.

Mothershed attended Dunbar Junior High School and Horace Mann High School before transferring to Central High. Despite daily tormenting from some white students at Central High, she completed her junior year at the formerly all-white high school during the 1957-58 year. The students who integrated Central High School were known as the Little Rock Nine.

For three weeks in September 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to block the Black students from enrolling in Central High. This was three years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated classrooms were unconstitutional. In response to Faubus' actions, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent members of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into school on September 25, 1957.

Because the city’s high schools were closed the following year, Mothershed earned the necessary credits for graduation through correspondence courses and by attending summer school in St. Louis, Missouri. She received her diploma from Central High by mail. Mothershed graduated from Southern Illinois University at Cabondale in 1964 with a BA in home economics and earned her MS in Guidance and Counseling Education in 1970; in 1985, she received an administrative certificate in education from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. She taught home economics in the East St. Louis school system for twenty-eight years.

Mothershed Wair also worked at the Juvenile Detention Center of the St. Clair County Jail in St. Clair County, Illinois, and as an instructor of survival skills for women at the American Red Cross Shelter for the homeless. During the 1989-90 school year, the East St. Louis chapter of the Top Ladies of Distinction and the early childhood/pre-kindergarten staff of District 189 honored her as an Outstanding Role Model.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) awarded her and the other Little Rock Nine, along with Daisy Bates, the prestigious Spingarn Medal in 1958. In 1999, President Bill Clinton presented the nation’s highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal, to the members of the Little Rock Nine.

Image Credit: Office of U.S. Rep Vic Snyder (D-Arkansas), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Read the October 28, 2024 Encyclopedia of Arkansas article.

Read the October 21, 2024 Associated Press (AP) article.

HUD Study Finds "White Flight" Continues to Worsen Residential Segregation

HUD's research publication PD&R Edge has just published the results of two surveys examining recent White Flight migration. “Validating the White Flight Hypothesis: Neighborhood Racial Composition and Out-Migration in Two Longitudinal Surveys” uses data from two longitudinal surveys, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), to compare probabilities of neighborhood out-migration for Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians by neighborhood racial and ethnic composition. “White flight,” or the tendency of White households to move out of neighborhoods as the proportion of racial and ethnic minorities living in the neighborhood increases, is a basic assumption of theories of racial and ethnic residential segregation. Few studies, however, have empirically tested this assumption, with those that have relying almost entirely on PSID. Although PSID is a rich source of longitudinal data on the sociodemographic and economic characteristics of U.S. households, it is based largely on a sample of households originally drawn in the 1960s and their descendants. While research using PSID data has consistently confirmed that White households frequently move out as the number of minorities in a neighborhood increases, these studies examine the post-1960s period of increasing racial and ethnic diversity.

Findings

The researchers found that, for White households, the likelihood of out-migration increases as neighborhood minority shares grow. The trend is most apparent in predominantly White neighborhoods  - that is, when the percentage of minorities (non-White residents) in a neighborhood increases from 0-20%. Because most White households live in neighborhoods with few minorities, this finding suggests that in predominantly White neighborhoods, small increases in the share of minority residents can spur out-migration for some White households. In neighborhoods in which the minority share exceeds 20%, the rate of out-migration was slower. When the researchers examined Whites' responses to neighborhood proportions of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians alone rather than the minority population as a whole, the results were similar: as neighborhood shares of each group increased from 0 to 20%, White households were more likely to out-migrate.

The studies' research also found that out-migration of Black households increases as the neighborhood share of Hispanic residents rises from 0 to 20%. Also, there was increasing out-migration of Hispanic households as Black neighborhood shares increased. Finally, it was found that the mobility behaviors of Asian households are largely indifferent to neighborhood racial composition.

Conclusions

The research highlights the continued important determining role of race in the migration decision making process and the broader spatial foundations that shape inequality and mobility. 

Earlier work appearing in PD&R Edge documented the difficulties HUD’s housing assistance programs have encountered in reducing racial and ethnic segregation. While housing assistance programs have successfully improved neighborhoods and the lives of individuals receiving assistance, these programs have not significantly reduced racial and ethnic segregation. 

This research found that additional barriers to efforts to reduce residential segregation are:

(1) The active resistance of some White households, who may resort to moving to new neighborhoods to avoid living with minorities. 

(2)  The tendency for minorities to  avoid neighborhoods predominantly occupied by other minorities. 

Therefore, "White flight” and minority neighborhood avoidance combined with discrimination in the search for housing, differential access to credit, and restrictive zoning laws are significant obstacles for HUD to achieve the stated goals of the AFFH, namely reduced racial and ethnic residential segregation. 

Read the May 14, 2024 HUD User article.

Bazelon Center Celebrates Critical Civil Rights Protections for People with Disabilities in New HHS Rule

 

The Bazelon Center commends the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) for issuing the new Section 504 Final Rule, Discrimination on the Basis of Disability in Health and Human Service Programs or Activities.   The rule updates and strengthens the lead regulation implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a federal law that prohibits disability-based discrimination in federally funded health and human service programs and activities, including in healthcare and child welfare programs. The HHS Section 504 rule incorporates the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Olmstead v. L.C. (Lois Curtis) that people with disabilities have a right to live and receive services in their homes and community and to be free from segregation and unnecessary institutionalization. It also explains how this mandate applies in the child welfare system.   “HHS’ new Section 504 rule updates and clarifies federal disability rights regulations that had not been updated since the 1970s,” explained Bazelon Legal Director Megan Schuller. “The new rule is an important step towards realizing the promise of these laws to eradicate disability discrimination in all its forms, including the continued isolation and unnecessary institutionalization of people with mental disabilities.”   Last fall, the Bazelon Center co-authored coalition comments with members of the Consortium for Constituents with Disabilities (CCD) that responded to HHS’ then-proposed Section 504 rule. The comments included key Bazelon Center priorities. Bazelon led coalition efforts to ensure the full integration of people with disabilities in the community and to advance the rights of children and parents with disabilities in the child welfare system. We are pleased to see our recommendations reflected in the rule.   Responsive to feedback from Bazelon and partners, the rule defines “most integrated setting” broadly. This updated definition aligns with longstanding Department of Justice Olmstead guidance, as well as widely accepted Key Principles for Community Integration for People with Disabilities. The rule also recognizes that an entity’s practices, as well as its policies, can result in segregation, and that settings like group homes that are located in the community can still be segregated and discriminatory.   The rule also requires child welfare agencies to place children with disabilities in the most integrated setting and prohibits “the unnecessary or unjustified segregation of children with disabilities, such as default placement in institutional or other congregate care,” which “should never be considered the most appropriate long-term placement for children.” Children with disabilities must be supported to live in the most integrated setting, which “is almost always the family home or a foster care setting.”   In response to our comments, HHS also made explicit that Section 504 applies to family preservation services and reunification efforts and that parenting assessments must be individualized and measure parenting ability, not a parent’s disability. The final rule was officially published today.   Please join us in sharing this critical information, and in ensuring that the promise of Section 504 and the ADA is fully realized.   Read the Bazelon Center’s summary and analysis of key provisions. Read the Final Rule, which will take effect on July 8, 2024. Read the Final Rule Fact Sheet, which summarizes key updates. Learn more about the protections of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.