On the Building of Long Island
"White tenants seeking to prevent Blacks from moving into the Sojourner Truth Housing Project erected this sign in Detroit, 1942. Source: Wikimedia Commons."
And, here's the author's bio: "Willie Mack is a Ph. D student at SUNY-Stony Brook. His research interests include 20th century U.S. history, race, radicalism, and carceral studies."
Willie Mack
Willie Mack is a Ph. D student at SUNY-Stony Brook. His research interests include 20th century U.S. history, race, radicalism, and carceral studies.
On November 17, 2019, Newsday released the findings of a three-year undercover investigation that detailed the prevalence of racial discrimination in the Long Island real estate market. The report noted that “house hunting in one of the nation’s most segregated suburbs poses substantial risks of discrimination, with black buyers chancing disadvantages almost half the time they enlist with brokers.” The report also noted how real estate agents actively “directed white customers towards areas with the highest white representations and minority buyers to more integrated neighborhoods” while they “also avoided business in communities with overwhelmingly minority populations.”[1] Historians have done well in documenting the prevalence of the practice of redlining, the financial discrimination against people of certain communities usually based on race, throughout twentieth-century United States history, so it should come as no surprise that the practice still exists today.[2] On Long Island in particular, the desire to create racially homogenous white communities has driven up land values for white people while real estate agents have profited off of attempts by people of color to partake in the American dream of owning their own home in an affluent suburb.
Historically, as Cedric J. Robinson argues in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983), capitalism and race go hand in hand. Robinson argues that racialism, “the legitimation and corroboration of social organization as natural by reference to the ‘racial’ components of its elements,” is embedded in capitalist societies. (2) Racialism defines “capitalist social structures, forms of property, and modes of production” as well as “the very values and traditions of consciousness through which peoples…understand their worlds and experiences.” (66) Robinson uses the term “racial capitalism” to define how the “development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions.” (2) Capitalists have used racial distinctions, or racialism, to create racial hierarchies in society in order to exploit labor and accumulate capital. The redlining on Long Island has worked in a similar fashion as real estate agents have used race to inflate property values in primarily white areas by segregating them from non-white areas. At the same time, this practice has alienated people of color and perpetuated white supremacy at the community level, effectively lowering the value of black neighborhoods, businesses and, more broadly, blackness.
Long Island has always had small enclaves of African Americans dating back to the nineteenth century. These communities were usually agricultural in nature or were made up of local domestic workers who lived near the Long Island Railroad and commuted to the large homes and estates of their white employers.[3] Beginning with the outbreak of World War I, African Americans from the southern states began migrating to northern cities in search of work and to escape the oppressive Jim Crow policies of the South. Between 1916 and 1970, over six million African Americans migrated from the South to the North. The Great Migration, as it is now known, exacerbated the racism and racial tensions within northern cities that had, for the most part, been seen as particular to the South. Douglass S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton note in their seminal work American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993), that “Northern whites viewed this rising tide of black migration with increasing hostility and considerable alarm.” (29) White northern homeowners, many of whom were just recently stripped of the ethnicity and initiated into the American ideal of whiteness, were determined to keep their neighborhoods racially homogenized.[4] Black people, particularly those from the South, were seen as invaders who would bring crime, poverty and decadence to their communities.
On Long Island between 1940 and 1960, Nassau and Suffolk Counties’ populations exploded from 604,000 to 1,961,000 as working-class New Yorkers moved from New York City to the suburbs. Of these migrants, 50,000 were African Americans who were either attempting to find their place in the middleclass American dream of homeownership or migrant laborers who were looking for work on the Island.[5] Regardless of their motivation to move to Long Island, many African Americans were victims of blockbusting as real estate agents would use the prospect of blacks moving into white neighborhoods to scare white homeowners into selling their homes at a cheaper than market price; the real estate agents would then resell the homes to African Americans at a much higher value, thus profiting on the racial fears of white homeowners and the desperation of Black buyers. This practice allowed communities to stay segregated while also helping real estate agents profit.
Many of the early Black communities that were established before the Great Migration on Long Island consisted of shacks and dilapidated homes and were occupied by the formerly enslaved and Native Americans. As Black migrants moved into these areas during the Great Migration, landlords sought to take advantage of their desperation and subdivided the already dilapidated homes leading to overcrowding and slum like conditions in Black communities.[6] At the same time, as more white New Yorkers moved into the area, these “slums” became blights that local governments sought to eliminate. Towns such as Port Jefferson, Glen Cove, Long Beach and Rockville Centre passed ordinances condemning many of the poor and dilapidated houses that Blacks lived in, forcing out many of the tenants who were too poor to find new accommodations in the area. Rather than providing decent and clean housing to the Black communities already there, these municipalities initiated racial cleansing under the guise of urban renewal. Through urban renewal efforts, these communities would remove substandard Black housing and replace it with commercial or light-industry in order to attract white and affluent business. The Black people who lived in these areas were typically forced to move to newly built low-income public housing, usually located a distance away from the more affluent white communities and lacking the social services that the more affluent communities possessed. Racial cleansing through urban renewal on Long Island created and protected affluent white communities while reinforcing racist stereotypes of poverty and Blackness.
Other communities on Long Island were more blatant in their racially exclusionary practices. The community of Levittown, built by developer William Levitt in 1947-1951, was a model for racial exclusion. Well into the 1960s, Levitt refused to sell any homes to Black homebuyers and up to today, the community is still primarily white.[7] And Robert Moses, known as the “master builder” of modern-day New York City, was notorious for his racism and his desire to keep Long Island segregated and affluent.[8] Sid Shapiro, Moses’ longtime aide, noted that Moses did not want to give poor people of color access to affluent communities and recreation areas on Long Island. He made access to eastern Long Island more difficult for poorer people by designing parkways that could only be traversed by car. The bridges that passed over the parkways are too small to allow large vehicles such as mass transit buses, which the poor and people of color use the most to travel, to pass under them, making the parkways inaccessible for those without cars. This allowed Moses to control who could access certain areas of eastern Long Island. If you are poor and could not afford a car, you could not gain access, and the majority of those who were poor were people of color.[9]
With the history of racial capitalism on Long Island, it is not surprising that in 2019 real estate agents are still practicing redlining. The suburbanization of Long Island during the twentieth century has been predicated on race and profit. Race has been the defining factor in determining what is desirable on Long Island and what is not. Creating communities and spaces only accessible to the affluent and white has worked to reinforce racists stereotypes of Black communities and business that the blacker a community, the less profitable it is. On the other hand, lack of access to decent housing allowed many real estate agents to profit from Black people’s desperation for housing. Racial capitalism is alive and well on Long Island and the Newsday article only highlights the need for society to develop solutions for equitable opportunities for all.
[1][1] “Undercover Investigation Reveals Evidence of Unequal Treatment by Long Island Real Estate Agents,” accessed November 22, 2019, https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/real-estate-agents-investigation/.
[2] For example, Keeanga-Yamahatta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996).
[3] Andrew Wiese, “Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century by Andrew Wiese,” accessed December 20, 2019, https://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/896412.html.
[4] David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, (London ; New York: Verso, 2007); Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, 2nd edition (Harvard University Press, 2019).
[5] Susan Hartigan, “Racism and the Opportunity Divide on Long Island,” ed. John Powell and Gavin Kearney, Institute on Race and Poverty, July 2002.
[6] Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
[7] Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 234-36.
[8] Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, later Printing edition (New York: Vintage, 1975).
[9] Christopher Robbins, “Robert Caro Wonders What New York Is Going To Become,” Gothamist, February 17, 2016, https://gothamist.com/news/robert-caro-wonders-what-new-york-is-going-to-become.