White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality

By Sheryll Cashin

A 2021 C. Wright Mills Award Finalist

Shows how government created “ghettos” and affluent white space and entrenched a system of American residential caste that is the linchpin of US inequality—and issues a call for abolition.

The iconic Black hood, like slavery and Jim Crow, is a peculiar American institution animated by the ideology of white supremacy. Politicians and people of all colors propagated “ghetto” myths to justify racist policies that concentrated poverty in the hood and created high-opportunity white spaces. In White Space, Black Hood, Sheryll Cashin traces the history of anti-Black residential caste—boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance—and unpacks its current legacy so we can begin the work to dismantle the structures and policies that undermine Black lives.

Drawing on nearly 2 decades of research in cities including Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cleveland, Cashin traces the processes of residential caste as it relates to housing, policing, schools, and transportation. She contends that geography is now central to American caste. Poverty-free havens and poverty-dense hoods would not exist if the state had not designed, constructed, and maintained this physical racial order.

Cashin calls for abolition of these state-sanctioned processes. The ultimate goal is to change the lens through which society sees residents of poor Black neighborhoods from presumed thug to presumed citizen, and to transform the relationship of the state with these neighborhoods from punitive to caring. She calls for investment in a new infrastructure of opportunity in poor Black neighborhoods, including richly resourced schools and neighborhood centers, public transit, Peacemaker Fellowships, universal basic incomes, housing choice vouchers for residents, and mandatory inclusive housing elsewhere.


Deeply researched and sharply written, White Space, Black Hood is a call to action for repairing what white supremacy still breaks.

Includes historical photos, maps, and charts that illuminate the history of residential segregation as an institution and a tactic of racial oppression.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Release date: Sep 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9780807000373

Book preview

OTHER BOOKS BY SHERYLL CASHIN

Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy

Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America

The Agitator’s Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African-American Family

The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream

For descendants, with love

CONTENTS

Prologue: Stories They Told Themselves and a Nation

Introduction

CHAPTER 1      Baltimore: A study in American Caste

CHAPTER 2      White Supremacy Begat the Ghetto

CHAPTER 3      Segregation Now: The Past Is Not Past

CHAPTER 4      Ghetto Myths and the Lies They Told a Nation

CHAPTER 5      Opportunity Hoarding: Overinvest and Exclude, Disinvest and Contain

CHAPTER 6      More Opportunity Hoarding: Separate and Unequal Schools

CHAPTER 7      Neighborhood Effects: What the Hood and America Demand of Descendants

CHAPTER 8      Surveillance: Black Lives Matter

CHAPTER 9      Abolition and Repair

Acknowledgments

Notes

Image Credits

Index

About the Author

Images

PROLOGUE

STORIES THEY TOLD THEMSELVES AND A NATION

Why not . . . incorporate the blacks into the state . . .? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained [and] the real distinctions which nature has made . . . This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.

—THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1788¹

Two totally different races, as we have before seen, cannot easily harmonize together, and although we have no idea that any organized plan of insurrection or rebellion can ever secure for the black the superiority, even when free, yet his idleness will produce want and worthlessness, and his very worthlessness and degradation will stimulate him to deeds of rapine and vengeance; he will oftener engage in plots and massacres, and thereby draw down on his devoted head, the vengeance of the provoked whites.

—THOMAS R. DEW, professor of history, metaphysics and political law, William & Mary College, 1832²

Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually. It came among us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions, reviled as they have been, to its present comparatively civilized condition. This, with the rapid increase of numbers, is conclusive proof of the general happiness of the race, in spite of all the exaggerated tales to the contrary.

—JOHN C. CALHOUN, US senator, 1837³

We hear much of the civilization and christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa. In my judgment, those ends will never be attained, but by first teaching them the lesson taught to Adam, that in the sweat of his brow he should eat his bread, and teaching them to work, and feed, and clothe themselves.

—ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS, vice president of the Confederacy, 1861⁴

There are eight millions of white people and four millions of negroes in juxtaposition. The latter are, in domestic subordination and social adaptation, corresponding with their wants, their instincts, their faculties, the nature with which God has endowed them. They are different and subordinate creatures, and they are in a different and subordinate social position, harmonizing with their natural relations to the superior race, and therefore they are in their normal condition.

—J. H. VAN EVRIE, doctor and author, 1861⁵

[T]he common white people of the country are at times very much enraged against the negro population. They think that this universal political and civil equality will finally bring about social equality . . . There are already instances . . . in which poor white girls are having negro children.

—WHITE NORTH CAROLINA MAN, 1871⁶

[P]utting colored men into office, in positions of prominence, will gradually lead them to demand social equality, and to intermingle by marriage with the whites.

—WHITE MISSISSIPPI POSTMASTER, 1871⁷

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it. . . . If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.

—HENRY BROWN, Supreme Court Justice, majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896

The white people of the country, as well as I, wish to see the colored people progress . . . Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen. If your organization goes out and tells the colored people of the country that it is a humiliation, they will so regard it, but if you do not tell them so, and regard it rather as a benefit, they will regard it the same. The only harm that will come will be if you cause them to think it is a humiliation.

—WOODROW WILSON, 1914⁸

The sun is never allowed to set on any niggers in Glendive.

—GLENDIVE (MONTANA) INDEPENDENT, 1915⁹

The general objectives of . . . planning are to conserve human resources and maintain the nation and the race . . .

—ALFRED BETTMAN, director of the National Conference on City Planning, 1933¹⁰

I’m not prejudiced, but I’d burn this building down before I’d sell it to any damned nigger.

—WHITE CHICAGO MAN, 1945¹¹

Today in the urban slums, the limits of responsible action are all but invisible.

—RICHARD NIXON, 1967¹²

We don’t mind being accused of police brutality. They haven’t seen anything yet. . . . [W]hen the looting starts, the shooting starts.

—WALTER E. HEADLEY, police chief, Miami, Florida, 1967¹³

There’s a woman in Chicago. . . . She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands. And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.

—RONALD REAGAN, 1976¹⁴

Today I reject United States Sentencing Commission proposals that would equalize penalties for crack and powder cocaine distribution by dramatically reducing the penalties for crack. . . . Trafficking in crack, and the violence it fosters, has a devastating impact on communities across America, especially inner-city communities. Tough penalties for crack trafficking are required because of the effect on individuals and families, related gang activity, turf battles, and other violence.

—WILLIAM J. CLINTON, 1995¹⁵

A new generation of street criminals is upon us—the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known.

—WILLIAM J. BENNETT, JOHN J. DIIULIO, AND JOHN P. WALTERS, 1996¹⁶

He was acting like a thug, not like a gentle giant. He certainly didn’t deserve to be shot for it.

—BILL MAHER, 2014¹⁷

We need law and order. If we don’t have it, we’re not going to have a country. . . . Our inner cities, African Americans, Hispanics are living in hell because it’s so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot.

—DONALD J. TRUMP, 2016¹⁸

These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd. . . . Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.

—DONALD J. TRUMP, 2020¹⁹

INTRODUCTION

On Memorial Day 2020, New Yorkers headed outdoors, emerging after months of COVID-19 isolation. Two of them encountered each other in the Ramble, a woodland of Central Park that attracts hundreds of bird species and people devoted to watching them. Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper (no relation) were both graduates of elite universities; she from the University of Chicago, he from Harvard. They both used civil language as their encounter descended. Amy, wearing a standard white PPE mask, said: Sir, I am asking you to stop recording me. Christian said: Please don’t come close to me. More than forty million people watched the viral video of an ancient and dangerous American script.

The video opened with the tension between characters already heated. Christian, a board member of the New York City Audubon Society, had asked Amy to leash her dog, which was the park rule and of particular concern in the Ramble to avid birders like him. When Amy declined to comply, Christian admitted later that he told her, Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it. He attempted to lure the dog to him with a treat.¹ Amy was incensed. Christian refused to stop recording her. She could have leashed her dog and walked away. Instead, she warned him that she would call the police. I am going to tell them there is an African American man threatening my life, she said, after Christian had asked her three times not to approach him.

Amy Cooper was a finance professional, donated to Democrats, and used the phrase African American man twice, rather than nigger or thug. She followed through on her threat, called 911, and worked herself into hysteria as Christian continued to film her from a social distance. She preferred to struggle and yank her beloved cocker spaniel by the collar—making dog lovers wince—rather than surrender her power to weaponize her status. Her advance warning suggested she knew that police were primed to hear a fake distress call from a white female that tapped hoary stereotypes of Black men as predators.

Multiply this interaction and other macroaggressions each day, all day, across the land, and you will begin to understand why being Black in America is exhausting. Amy operated as if the Ramble was her space in which she could choose who belonged and whether to comply with posted rules. A Black man, telling her what to do, was threatening and needed to be expelled. Later, Amy apologized, and Christian, though resolutely opposed to racism, expressed concern and reservations about the swift, mob-like destruction of Amy’s life as she became a social media example.² Christian also refused to participate in a prosecutor’s investigation of a misdemeanor charge against Amy for filing a false report, and the charge was dropped after she completed a therapeutic program with instruction on racial bias.³ In a fantasy version of the story, the Ramble could have been a public commons for easier talk, even disagreement, among equals—a space not for white power but dialogue, more than once, maybe daily, as citizens tried to build a new, transformative American community. Not then, not yet.

The same Memorial Day, in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, a white officer kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd was handcuffed, lying facedown, begging, Please . . . I can’t breathe. Bystanders beseeched the four officers, including Chauvin, to relent, to get off his back and neck. Chauvin was impassive, nonchalant, hands in his pockets, so determined, it seemed, to show citizens who was in power that he remained on Floyd’s neck after Floyd had stopped moving, with no pulse.

Floyd had called out: Mama, mama, mama, mama. . . . I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I’m dead. He was polite to the end. His last words showed up on protest signs, including in Lafayette Square—a park in Washington, DC, named for a key French ally of the American Revolution, and once the grounds of a slave market. Citizens reinvigorated it as a space for free expression before a barricaded White House.⁴ Before death, Floyd spoke, though, like Christ crucified, asking God why he was forsaken, his pleas were not answered:

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Ah! I’ll probably just die this way.

I can’t breathe my face.

I can’t breathe. Please, [inaudible]

I can’t breathe. Shit.

I will, I can’t move.

My knee. My neck.

I’m through, I’m through. I’m claustrophobic. My stomach hurts.

My neck hurts.

Everything hurts. I need some water or something, please. Please?

I can’t breathe, officer.

You’re going to kill me, man.

Come on, man. Oh, oh.

I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe. Ah! They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe! Oh!

Ah! Ah! Please. Please. Please.⁵

Chauvin, who had eighteen previous misconduct complaints, could not muster any empathy or surrender his learned power to dehumanize. The nation and world convulsed in protests because seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier recorded the entirety of Floyd’s execution for all to see. It felt biblical, a sacrifice of a beloved Black son and father, to expose truth. Millions rose up across the globe. With a new lens for systemic racism, they began to see it everywhere.

Floyd was killed after allegedly using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill he may not have even known about. Forgery for what? For what? he had said at the beginning of his encounter with the police.⁶ Christian Cooper was surveilled, perhaps, for being an uppity Black man. The twin viral episodes of Memorial Day 2020 converged, and a battle for narrative about Black Lives ensued over a summer thick with Black deaths—from COVID-19, police shootings, and yes, a seasonal rise in Black-on-Black homicides. It was #BlackLivesMatter versus law and order. An indecent president tried to distract the country from his failed response to COVID-19 and the nearly two hundred thousand people who had died from the virus on his watch by then. President Trump followed an old playbook of American politics, invoking myths that cast himself as defender of white Americans and their suburban way of life. He was honest and transparent in his pro-segregation leanings. White space was meant to be protected. The infested cities, particularly inner cities, rioters, and looters were meant to be policed.

Trump’s desperate weaponization of racial justice uprisings, his defense of white space and white nationalism, mirror a tension that has been at the center of American politics since the nation’s founding. Each time the United States seems to dismantle a peculiar Black-subordinating institution, it constructs a new one and attendant myths to justify the racial order. Thomas Jefferson agonized in Notes on the State of Virginia about whether and how to incorporate sable Africans into the polity. Early generations of white property-owning men, those allowed to be leaders, told stories of Black inferiority to justify slavery. Later generations alleged sexual predation of white women by Black men to justify Jim Crow and residential segregation. Men and women of the so-called greatest and silent generations, as well as baby boomers from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump, fabulized about the people in the hood. Always and forever, anti-Black rhetoric was critical to uniting whites in politics.

This book aims to make processes of American residential caste transparent. A basic move, of creating and maintaining Black-subordinating institutions to confer value on affluent whites, has not changed, though the mechanics and propaganda have metastasized. I argue that policy decisions made in the early twentieth century, to construct ghettos, have profound consequences for producing current inequality. I also contend that geography is now central to American caste, a mechanism for overinvesting in affluent white space and disinvesting and plundering elsewhere. Geography helps to construct social and racial distinctions that justify the way things are.

I call the Black people trapped in high-poverty neighborhoods descendants, in recognition of an unbroken continuum from slavery. Occasionally, I also use this honorific to describe Black Americans like myself, who do not live in the hood but descend from the long legacy of slavery. Descendants are typecast and consigned to the bottom of the social order. Denizens of poverty-free, very-white spaces enjoy entrenched advantages, and everyone else struggles to access opportunity in real estate markets premised on exclusion begun a century before to contain descendants. The residential caste system I describe is not only about the iconic hood. It is about power, politics, and distribution of resources away from those who most need public goods to people and communities with more than enough.

Non-descendants should care, because exclusion and opportunity hoarding harm the vast majority of people who cannot buy their way into bastions of affluence, and because geography as caste is destroying America. Physical segregation, constructed at the outset to contain then-Negroes, is the progenitor of our broken, gerrymandered politics. Descendants were powerless to change their reality in large part because of myths told about them. Mythologizing about pathological Black people helped perfect broad skepticism about government and anti-tax fanaticism.

Of course, there are other strains of American oppression and dog-whistling rhetoric. Pervasive contemporary stereotypes of immigrants and Americans of color, of Muslims, and of Black Americans imply divergence from a presumed norm of American Christian whiteness. That norm, sometimes stated plainly by avowed white nationalists, was the organizing plank for regimes of oppression essential to American capitalism and expansion—from the conquest of Indigenous and Mexican people to slavery to the exclusion of Asian and other immigrants and, later, to Jim Crow. Ancient and current stories of oppression along myriad dimensions need to be told and retold to hasten the day when a critical mass of whites rejects the idea of white dominance and joins an ascending coalition to dismantle regimes borne of supremacy.⁷

I am writing about the geography and dogma of anti-Black oppression because I care about descendants and because geography as caste ensnares us all. Under the old Jim Crow, Blackness was the primary marker for discrimination and exclusion. American caste now exists at the intersection of race, economic status, and geography, and this system of sorting and exclusion has been hardening. It thrives on certain cultural assumptions—that affluent space is earned and hood living is the deserved consequence of individual behavior.

Like race, ghetto is a social construct. At some point, this word used to describe high-poverty neighborhoods became pejorative, as powerful as the N-word. To paraphrase sociologist Elijah Anderson, American society is very invested in the ghetto as a dangerous place, where people at the bottom of the social order live.⁸ Our words and mechanisms for subordination have changed. The problem of Black belonging continues, but it is most felt by descendants in the hood.

Descendants are the group least likely in American society to experience the accoutrements of citizenship. Exit from the hood and from the bottom of the social order is improbable. Among the modern state action designed to contain descendants are militaristic policing in which Blackness itself becomes the pretext for stopping people, mass incarceration, the criminalization of poverty, a school-to-prison pipeline, and housing and school policies that invest in, rather than discourage, poverty concentration.

Less understood is that concentrated Black poverty facilitates poverty-free affluent white space and habits of favor and disfavor by public and private actors. White space would not exist without the hood and government at all levels created and still reifies this racialized residential order. In particular, this book illuminates three anti-Black processes that undergird the entire system of American residential caste—boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance. Many people acquiesce in or participate in these processes. Yet the practices necessary to maintaining residential caste also undermine most non-Black people. The successful have seceded from the struggling. Highly educated and affluent people tend to live in their own neighborhoods and support policies like exclusionary zoning and neighborhood school assignments that lock others out and concentrate advantage.⁹

As with slavery and follow-on institutions like peonage and convict leasing, the hood is a source of wealth extraction and exploitation that benefits American capitalists—from the prison industrial complex to Opportunity Zones that enabled investors, through loopholes, to shelter 100 percent of capital gains in luxury properties rather than distressed hoods the program was marketed to help. In another example, in the 2000s, predatory lenders targeted segregated Black neighborhoods for their most usurious subprime mortgages. This predation culminated in a foreclosure crisis that eviscerated Black and Latinx wealth, reduced the Black homeownership rate to 1968 levels, and eliminated gains of the civil rights revolution in housing.¹⁰ White homeownership rebounded while the rate of Black homeownership continued to decline under unchecked financial processes that disparately harmed. By 2020, the Black-white homeownership gap had widened to a chasm not seen since 1890.¹¹ And yet we don’t tell stories that encourage the prosecution and jailing of white-collar criminals who steal Black wealth and create national financial crises. We have a pervasive narrative about Black thugs but no similar policydriving story about corporate criminals.

While state and private actors plunder, extract, surveil, and contain in the hood, they overinvest in and protect white space. Apologists have constructed many modern stereotypes to support the status quo and retain the benefits of exclusion and exclusivity—from golden schools, neighborhoods, and infrastructure to artisanal food. The idea that descendants belong apart from everyone else is the often-unspoken-but-sometimes-shouted-out-loud norm animating most fair housing and school integration debates. Stereotypes also hide the fact that concentrated poverty is by no means solely a Black problem. The footprint of concentrated poverty is expanding; the percentage of Blacks, Latinx, and whites who live in such conditions is rising. Concentrated poverty grows fastest in the suburbs.¹² Yet it is far easier for politicians and media figures to stoke division among those mutually locked out of opportunity than to build multiracial coalitions that transcend division and demand fairness from elites.

Ultimately, I argue for abolition of the processes of anti-Black residential caste and repair, the building of new institutions of opportunity for descendants, and the nation. The goal should be to transform the lens through which society sees residents of poor Black neighborhoods, from presumed thug to presumed citizen, and to alter the relationship of the state with these neighborhoods, from punitive to caring. I offer positive examples of places that are beginning to do this. I also call on the state at all levels to cease and desist from habits borne of white supremacy. This work will be difficult, perhaps as arduous and long-arced as the movements for abolition of slavery and modern civil rights. There is cause for hope. Black voters mattered in 2020. Joe Biden centered racial equity and justice in his presidential campaign and won decisively. Black voters mobilized in Georgia for Senate runoff races and helped clinch a governing, though bare, majority for Democrats in Congress, with the tie-breaking privileges of the first Black, South Asian, and woman to be vice president, Kamala Harris. A plurality of whites and sizeable majorities of Asian, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people prevailed in politics. This coalition can grow and pursue saner, just policies both nationally and locally. Despite backlash and fatigue, Black Americans have more allies than they have ever had in US history. Together, we must first understand the processes of residential caste, then dismantle them.

CHAPTER 1

BALTIMORE

A Study in American Caste

The Black Butterfly and the White L. A public health researcher coined these monikers for distinct cultural spaces in the city that invented racial zoning but also inspired descendants like Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall to chart paths for justice. ¹ Baltimore is illustrative of a wider pattern, of a past and present of investing in exclusionary areas and disinvesting in Black neighborhoods. Other metropolitan regions with large populations of descendants are caught in the same vicious cycle.

At the onset of the Civil War, Baltimore was home to the nation’s largest free urban Black population. About 90 percent of its twenty-seven thousand Blacks were free in 1860. Like other strains of humanity that found their way to Baltimore—Jewish, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Italian, Irish—African Americans lived in small enclaves adjacent to other groups. Public places, including parks, theaters, hotels, restaurants, and department stores, were open to Blacks as late as 1905, though attitudes were changing. White Baltimoreans who had lived with a sizeable population of Negroes for generations suddenly could no longer tolerate proximity to them in any realm. With the rise of eugenics, there was a growing intolerance among the wealthy for anyone who diverged from affluent protestant whiteness. Exclusion and exclusivity secured property values and social status.²

The movement for racial zoning began when Blacks moved to McCulloh Street, two blocks from the graceful mansions of Eutaw Place. A prominent Black lawyer, W. Ashbie Hawkins, purchased a house at 1834 McCulloh and rented it to his brother-in-law and law partner, George W. F. McMechen. McMechen had graduated from what is now Morgan State University and Yale Law School. Other Blacks with solid incomes, including a postal clerk and school teachers, rented houses on McCulloh. Blacks occupied the west side of the block and whites remained on the east side.

White residents took umbrage at their new neighbors. They formed the McCulloh Street–Madison Avenue Protective Association, resolving: The colored people should not be allowed to encroach on some of the best residential streets in the city and force white people to vacate their homes. Whites threw stones and bricks into the McMechens’ new home and dumped tar on their steps. One particularly incensed white neighbor campaigned for a new city ordinance that would criminalize Blacks moving to a majority-white block and vice versa and the city council embraced it.³

Mayor J. Barry Mahool, known nationally as a progressive social-justice reformer signed the law. Baltimore Tries Drastic Plan of Race Segregation, a New York Times headline hollered on Christmas Day 1910. The mayor, interviewed at length for the article, bemoaned that Baltimore had about one hundred thousand colored people or one-sixth of the city’s population, and that well-to-do Blacks were buying property in white neighborhoods, unlike their allegedly more deferential brethren in the Deep South, who knew their place. On many blocks, Mahool complained, whites were forced to live with Blacks, and panicked whites often sold. Elsewhere, Mahool made his position and racial ideology clear: Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidents of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority.⁴ The Times featured an image of the handsome, dapper, and presumably disease-free McMechen.⁵

Racial zoning was born, and numerous southern and midwestern cities followed suit. W. Ashbie Hawkins fought Baltimore’s law for the next seven years. He, too, was a descendant. His father, up from slavery, had served as a reverend. Hawkins became an advocate for racial equality. An alumnus of historically Black Morgan State, he had enrolled at the University of Maryland School of Law in 1889. A year later, the school succumbed to demands from white students, forcing him and another Black student to leave. After completing his legal education at Howard University, Hawkins immediately began to agitate.

On August 20, 1892, the 273rd anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown, Hawkins wrote a column for a new Black-owned paper, The Afro-American, under the headline An Alarming Condition. He decried the very poor facilities provided . . . for the education of colored children. Their schoolhouses and equipment were a disgrace, their school terms too short. And the state showed reckless disregard of the character and professional training of their teachers. He wrote a few years before the US Supreme Court endorsed the fiction in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate could be equal for Black people. Hawkins anticipated the Negro’s fraught legal position: We have a right to every facility offered others, but unfortunately for us we do not seem to have the power to enforce it.⁶

This did not stop Hawkins from trying. He was a leader in the Niagara Movement, founded by W. E. B. Du Bois and others. Hawkins filed lawsuits challenging residential segregation, unequal pay for Negro teachers, and segregation and unequal conditions on trains and boats. In one case, a Negro woman, Dr. Julia P. H. Coleman, wrote the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, headquarters in New York in 1918, reporting that she had attempted to enter the ladies’ car of a train in Baltimore, bound for Washington, DC. Conductors had barred her and pushed her to the pavement. I went to the nearest telephone and called up Mr. Ashby [sic] Hawkins, she wrote. She insisted on bringing a test case for the benefit of the race and asked the NAACP to lend its support.

Together, she and Hawkins prevailed. Hawkins explained in a letter to the NAACP that they had won an initial judgment and one cent in damages, but he appealed and won additional damages and reaffirmation from the Baltimore courts that this railroad had no authority to segregate interstate passengers. He vowed to keep filing cases against the railroad predicting it would get tired of undertaking to keep up this segregation. Hawkins became Thurgood Marshall’s hero and a model for the NAACP’s new legal department.⁷

Hawkins also challenged the racial zoning ordinance that was enacted in Baltimore. He filed a lawsuit and succeeded in having early versions set aside, though a fourth version of the law survived. Hawkins was undeterred. As lawyer for the NAACP, he filed a brief opposing a racial zoning ordinance in Louisville, Kentucky, in Buchanan v. Warley, in which the Supreme Court struck down all racial zoning, in 1917. The posture of that case surely helped. A white property owner who wished to sell to a Negro succeeded, with the assistance of the NAACP, in convincing the Court that this violated his property rights. Hawkins continued to fight residential restrictions for Black Americans until he died in 1941. He also agitated through politics, running as an independent for US Senate in 1920. It was a protest campaign for race representation, he said, to force the Republican Party of Lincoln to which Blacks hewed to support Negro candidates in local and legislative races and respond to Black community interests.⁸ In his final campaign plea to Black voters, published in 1920, again in an opinion piece in The Afro-American, Hawkins articulated inequities endured by descendants:

For fifty years we have religiously supported the candidates of the Republican Party . . . and it is an open secret that our reward for this loyalty is nothing more nor

[lostinalibrary · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Intentional segregation of Blacks in the twentieth century shaped development of living patterns for everyone and put in place an infrastructure for promoting and maintaining segregation. The past is not past

White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality by Georgetown University law professor Sheryll Cashin looks at how the idea of Black inferiority as far back as Thomas Jefferson to justify enslavement led to segregation after the Civil War. This, in turn, led to practices in the twentieth century like redlining, racial zoning, and the refusal of banks to loan to Descendants over decades and how these exclusionary practices still resonate today in Black communities in US cities.

As whites first began moving to segregated neighbourhoods at the turn of the twentieth century and later, as Black neighbourhoods began to spread because of the Great Migration, to the suburbs, more resources were allotted to these wealthier white neighbourhoods, leaving Descendants trapped in what became known as ghettos. Since most government resources and services are tied to taxes, Black neighbourhoods continue to lack, for example, reliable transportation, health services, as well as public schools which as Cashin shows, 'are more segregated than they have been at any point in the last 50 years', resulting in an inferior education for Black children. All of this has meant little opportunity for change for Descendants today. Yet, despite the lack of needed services, there is always government money enough for constant policing and surveillance in Black neighbourhoods,

White Space, Black Hood is an important book, well-written and well-researched but Cashin's ability to avoid academic language makes it a very compelling and highly readable book, one that anyone who cares at all about continuing inequality should read - I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Thanks to Edelweiss+ and Beacon Press for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an opportunity to read this book