PRESTON H. SMITH II. Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago.

Abstract

Preston H. Smith II accepts conventional wisdom that a white business class and a compliant state created a “second ghetto” in postwar Chicago that restricted African Americans to segregated inner-city neighborhoods. In contrast to earlier studies, however, Smith downplays the role of white power and examines African American support for class-stratified housing. He argues that privileged African Americans were complicit junior partners in the housing crisis because they shared with whites an assumption that economic inequalities were normal in a capitalist society. This assumption led middle-class blacks to accept the rationale for a private real estate market while rejecting the right to decent housing regardless of the ability to pay. Smith locates the origins of conservative housing policies in the period after World War II when African American elites endorsed scholarly prescriptions about urban pathologies. These theories claimed that social disorganization in urban communities generated a need for a strong local middle class capable of encouraging better behaviors within their ethnic or racial subgroup. Drawing upon these theories, experts like Robert Taylor argued that racial progress depended upon providing modern accommodations for African Americans that could prepare increasing numbers of poor blacks for first-class citizenship. Taylor recognized that private capital was unlikely to build such housing given prevailing stereotypes about the incompetency of the black population. Consequently, he called upon the federal government to construct public housing run by African American middle-class managers with responsibility for promoting habits that made residents more desirable tenants in the private market. Previously, historians characterized such policies as a civil rights issue pitting the united interests of African Americans against white politicians and property owners who resisted racial integration. While Smith's narrative recognizes the importance of whites, it adopts a different perspective to show that systemic class interests created cleavages among African Americans that prevented consideration of the economic factors that produced housing inequalities for poor and working-class blacks.