Transcript Racial Equity Institute

The Racial Equity Institute, LLC
History of White Affirmative
Action & the Legacy of Racism
1705-50 Acres, 30 shillings, 10, bushels of corn and a musket.
1776- Declaration of Independence declares…..All “Men” created equal.
1785 Land Ordinance Act-640 Acres of Land @ $1 per acre.
1790-Naturalization Act-This law limited naturalization to immigrants who
were "free white persons" of "good moral character. Could Own Land and
Vote….
1800-Land/Homestead Acts- 320 acres, payable in 4 installments @ $1.25
an acre.
1848-Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo- 55%of Mexican land made available to
US, included, ca.,az,nm,nv, small parts of co, wy,ks,ok.
1862-Homestead Act- !60 acres of land, Crops, 12x14 ft dwelling on land
1863-Emanicipation Proclamation (re-enslavement of African Am.”RECONSTUCTION)
1922-Alien/Citizens Land Acts-Stripped thousands of aces of land from
Asians after Thind case.
1933 –HOLC-Home Owners Loan Corporation
1934-Federal Housing Administration FHA-120 Billion in loans-98% to
whites.
1935-Social Security Act-Initially omitted Agricultural and Domestic Workers
1944-GI Bill-Education, Employment, Mortgages/Home Loans
1978-Proposition 13-18-California People Initiative for Tax Relief
40 Acres & a Mule
•
As Union soldiers advanced through the South, tens of thousands of freed slaves left
their plantations to follow Union general William Tecumseh Sherman's army.
•
To solve problems caused by the mass of refugees, Sherman issued Special Field
Orders, No. 15, a temporary plan granting each freed family forty acres of tillable
land on islands and the coast of Georgia. The army had a number of unneeded mules
which were also granted to settlers.
•
News of "forty acres and a mule" spread quickly; freed slaves welcomed it as proof
that emancipation would finally give them a stake in the land they had worked as
slaves for so long.
•
The orders were in effect for only one year. By June 1865, around 10,000 freed
slaves were settled on 400,000 acres (160,000 ha) in Georgia and South Carolina.
Soon after, President Andrew Johnson reversed the order and returned the land to its
white former owners
•
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_acres_and_a_mule & www.pbs.org
50 acres, 30 shillings, 10 bushels of
corn and a musket
Virginia, in 1705, passed a law “requiring masters to provide white
servants whose indenture time was up with ten bushels of corn, thirty
shillings, and a gun… Also, freed servants were to get 50 acres of
land.” Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The
Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, NY: WW Norton, 1975.
Freedom dues given on completion of servitude were fixed at "10 bushels
Indian corn, 30 shillings in money or goods, one well fixed musket or fusee
of the value of at least 20 shillings". Women were to receive 15 bushels of
corn and 40 shillings.
 Source:http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~jcat2/18centvalaw.html
http://pages.suddenlink.net/phelpsdna/Southern_Phelps_Research/Nonstate/Was%20Your%20Ancestor%20an%20Indentured%20Servant.htm
Land Ordinance Act of 1785
 Congress set the minimum amount of land that could be
purchased at one section—640 acres—and the purchase
price at one dollar per acre.
 Small purchases on credit were not allowed.
 The $640 minimum purchase placed the cost of western
lands far outside the budget of most U.S. citizens.
 Most of the lands went instead to wealthy land speculators,
who were also given the option of buying on credit. The
speculators bought lands from the government, divided
them up, and then resold them to small farmers at a profit.
1848-Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago
 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the U.S.-Mexican War. Signed on 2
February 1848, it is the oldest treaty still in force between the United States and
Mexico. As a result of the treaty, the United States acquired more than 500,000
square miles of valuable territory and emerged as a world power in the late
nineteenth century. Resulted in a massive transfer of land, 55% of Mexico’s land
base, including California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada….. Within a generation
the Mexican-Americans became a disenfranchised, poverty-stricken minority.
 The US assumed an attitude of moral superiority in their negotiations of the treaty.
They viewed the forcible incorporation of almost one-half of Mexico's national
territory as an event foreordained by providence, fulfilling Manifest Destiny to
spread the benefits of U.S. democracy to the lesser peoples of the continent. Because
of its military victory the United States virtually dictated the terms of settlement.
The treaty established a pattern of political and military inequality between the two
countries, and this lopsided relationship has stalked Mexican and US relations ever
since.
 Source: http://www.pbs.org/kera/usmexicanwar/war/wars_end_guadalupe.html
Homestead Acts
1862
1800
 By 1800, the minimum lot was halved to
 In 1862, the Homestead Act was
320 acres, and settlers were allowed to
pay in 4 installments, but prices remained
fixed at $1.25 an acre until 1854. That
year, federal legislation was enacted
establishing a graduated scale that
adjusted land prices to reflect the
desirability of the lot. Lots that had been
on the market for 30 years, for example,
were reduced to 12 ½ cents per acre.
Source:
http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/ho
mestead-act/
passed and signed into law. The new
law established a three-fold
homestead process: filing an
application, improving the land, and
filing for deed of title. Any U.S.
citizen, or intended citizen, who had
never borne arms against the U.S.
Government could file an application
and lay claim to 160 acres of
surveyed Government land. For the
next 5 years, the homesteader had
to live on the land and improve it by
building a 12-by-14 dwelling and
growing crops.
1863-Emanicipation Proclamation and the
Re-Enslavement of African Americans
 A cynical new form of slavery was resurrected from the ashes of the Civil War and
re-imposed on hundreds of thousands of African-Americans until the dawn of World
War II.
 Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African
Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the
costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners
were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads,
quarries and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply
seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude.
Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs,
provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel Corp.—
looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of "free" black men labored without
compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings
and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official
abolition of American slavery.
 Source:http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/the-book/
1920 ‘s Alien Land Acts - The OZAWA Case
 Whiteness was key to citizenship. In 1790 Congress had passed
an act declaring that only "free white" immigrants could
become naturalized citizens.
 By 1920, a series of alien land acts prohibited many noncitizens from owning or leasing land. Takao Ozawa came from
Japan, went to the University of California at Berkeley, uh, for
a few years, then moved to Hawaii, where he had, um, a family.
And he applied to become a naturalized citizen in 1915.
 The Court ruled that according to the best known science
Ozawa was not Caucasian, but of the Mongolian race. But the
Court would not be bound by science in policing the
boundaries of whiteness.
1920’s Alien Land Acts- The Thind Case
 Only three months after Ozawa, the Court took up the case of Bhagat Singh




Thind, a South Asian immigrant and U.S. Army veteran, who petitioned for
citizenship on the grounds that Indians were of the Aryan or Caucasian race,
and therefore white.
The same court that used science to determine whiteness in Ozawa three
months before, now refuted its own reasoning in Thind. Thind might well be
Caucasian, the high court said, but he was not white. The justices never said
what whiteness was, only what it wasn't. Their implied logic was a circular
one: Whiteness was what the common white man said it was.
The consequences of the unanimous verdict in U.S. vs. Thind were
catastrophic for the Indian community. South Asians who had naturalized
before the verdict were stripped of their citizenship and property.
Now, as "aliens ineligible for citizenship," many growers were unable to
purchase or even lease land to stay in business. Thousands of acres were
seized from Japanese immigrants and sold to white farmers.
Source: http://newsreel.org/transcripts/race3.htm
Roosevelt’s - NEW DEAL
1933-Home Owner’s
Loan Corporation
 The New Deal's Home Owners' Loan
Corporation (HOLC) instituted a
redlining policy by developing colorcoded maps of American cities that
used racial criteria to categorize
lending and insurance risks. New,
affluent, racially homogeneous
housing areas received green lines
while black and poor white
neighborhoods were often
circumscribed by red lines denoting
their undesirability. Banks and
insurers soon adopted the HOLC's
maps and practices to guide lending
and underwriting decisions.
1934 FHA
The Federal Housing
Administration, created in 1934,
also used the HOLC's methods
to assess locations for federally
insured new housing
construction.
 Like other forms of
discrimination, redlining had
pernicious and damaging effects.
Without bank loans and
insurance, redlined areas lacked
the capital essential for
investment and redevelopment.
As a result, after World War II,
suburban areas received
preference for residential
investment at the expense of
poor and minority neighborhoods
in major cities .
REDLINING MAP
1935-SOCIAL SECURITY ACT
 In the 1930s with Roosevelt's New Deal, aimed to
protect the working class but revised by Congress to
safeguard racial segregation as well.
 The Social Security Act excluded domestic and
agricultural workers from old-age pension and
unemployment compensation. Three-quarters of the
black population, from domestics to self-employed
sharecroppers, fell through the net.
 Similarly the Wagner Act, which empowered unions,
also allowed labor to shut black workers out from
closed shops.
 Source:http://www.justicejournalism.org/projects/lehrman_sally/lehrman_colorblind
.pdf
1944-THE G. I. BILL

EDUCATION

EMPLOYMEN
T&
UNEMPLOYM
ENT
BENEFITS

LOW
INTEREST
EDUCATION & THE GI BILL
 The Black middle class failed to keep pace with the white middle
class because blacks had fewer opportunities to earn college
degrees.
 In addition to the other obstacles, gaining admission to
universities was no easy task for blacks on the G.I. Bill. Most
universities had strict segregationist principles underlying their
admissions policies.
 By 1946, only one fifth of the 100,000 blacks who had applied for educational
benefits had been registered in college. Furthermore, historically black
colleges and universities (HBCUs) came under increased pressure as rising
enrollments and strained resources forced them to turn away an estimated
20,000 veterans..
 As a result of racist practices in Southern states such as these, 55% of black
veterans who wanted to take advantage of the G.I. Bill's educational
opportunities were turned away from black institutions due to lack of space.
JOB TRAINING & THE GI BILL
 Job placement was no more equitable. Of the 28,000
veterans who received on-the-farm training in the
South thanks to the G.I. Bill, only 11% were black
veterans–representing only 1% of the black veterans
who were drafted from farms to go to war.
 The United States Employment Service (USES),
mandated by the G.I. Bill to place veterans in jobs that
matched their level of skill, placed 6,500 black
veterans who had once worked on farms in non-farm
jobs. 86% of skilled and semi-skilled positions were
filled by white veterans while 92% of the unskilled
positions were filled by black veterans.
HOUSING & THE GI BILL
 Banks and mortgage agencies refused loans to blacks, making the G.I. Bill even
less effective for blacks.
 Federal agencies "endorsed the use of race-restrictive covenants until
1950" and explicitly refused to underwrite loans that would introduce
"‘incompatible’ racial groups into White residential enclaves."[46] These
government policies were also adopted by the private sector. For example, from
the 1930s to the 1960s the National Association of Real Estate Boards issued
ethical guidelines that specified that a realtor "should never be instrumental in
introducing to a neighborhood a character or property or occupancy, members of
any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will be clearly
detrimental to property values in a neighborhood."[47]
 Together, these federal agencies financed almost half of all suburban homes in
the 1950s and 1960s, helping the American homeownership rate to increase
from 30 percent in 1930 to more than 60 percent by 1960.[48] However, these
discriminatory lending policies resulted in the widespread use of race to
determine eligibility for housing credit.[49] Consequently, Whites received
essentially all (98 percent) of the loans approved by the federal government
between 1934 and 1968.[50]
 Source: http://www.civilrights.org/publications/reports/fairhousing/historical.html
Proposition 13-1978 Tax Relief
Proposition 13 (officially named the People's Initiative to
Limit Property Taxation) was an amendment of the
Constitution of California enacted during 1978, by means of
the initiative process. It was approved by California voters on
June 6, 1978.
The most significant portion of the act is the first paragraph,
which limited the tax rate for real estate:
Section 1. (a) The maximum amount of any ad valorem tax on
real property shall not exceed one percent (1%) of the full
cash value of such property.