Containment on the Home Front

Abstract

As Americans took their leave of 1938, before the full horror of Germany's Nazi regime became widely known, the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black newspa- per, sounded a disturbing note. In an editorial titled Ghettoes, American Style, the paper warned that those who have been protesting Hitler's despi- cable plan to herd German Jews into ghettoes will be surprised to learn that their own government has been busily planning ghettoes for American Negroes through the Federal Housing Authority (sic). American plan lacks the forthright and brutal frankness of Hitler's plan, the editors con- cluded, but in the long run it is calculated to be as effective. 1 Twenty years later, an agency of the government itself, the United States Commission on Civil Rights, could not entirely dismiss the Sentinel's hyper- bolic allegations. Examining the policies and practices of the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) and its constituent bodies—the Public Hous- ing Administration (PHA), the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and the Urban Renewal Administration (URA)—the commission asserted that the agency had not moved very far or very fast in eliminating segregation. 2 The commission also made it clear that the government and its minions were more contributing architects than passive bystanders in the residential isolation of African Americans. The PHA, in giving carte blanche to local authorities, affirmatively sup - ported explicit policies of racial separation in the South and accepted its rein - forcement elsewhere through tightly controlled site- and tenant-selection practices. 3 In complementary fashion, the FHA's mortgage insurance program largely denied its benefits to blacks. With the help of FHA financing, the commission reported, all-white suburbs have been constructed in recent years around almost every large city. Huge FHA-insured projects that became