“Broken Home”: (De)constructing the Moral Standards of Mobility for Atlanta’s Early Black Public Housing Families

Abstract

The public housing program was designed as a stepping-stone into upward socioeconomic mobility when the first developments were constructed for White and Black households in the 1930s. White residents were able to save and move into private housing with greater speed than Black residents, who faced both external and internal constraints on their socioeconomic status. As a result of this decreased mobility, scholars and policymakers soon associated public housing developments with impoverished Black containment, categorizing it as the home of the underclass and those who are stuck in place. This article employs a Du Boisian approach to understand the categorical differences and political economic conditions shaping mobility rates among Atlanta’s early Black public housing families. Using historical documents and approximately 40 years of administrative data collected from the first Black public housing development in Atlanta, Georgia by housing managers, Du Bois, and a group of research assistants from Atlanta University, this article examines how internal and external constraints shaped Black tenant mobility. It demonstrates how housing administrators and their actions shaped eviction rates—and by default, public housing’s ability to advance Black tenant mobility—through elite housing managers’ moral judgments of impoverished Black families.