1944: The GI Bill and Urban Spaces
Big Idea
African American heroes of World War II returned from the battlefields in Europe and Asia to be confronted with the ongoing struggle for freedom at home. Most Black veterans were denied benefits offered to White veterans through the GI bill and as a result African American families continued to struggle to survive in an economic landscape determined to keep them impoverished.
GI Bill and African Americans
One benefit of serving in WWII was the promise of the GI Bill, which provided veterans with assistance in education, job training, and low-cost mortgages. However, as with the New Deal, African Americans were often excluded from these benefits. The justification used was because their military service was limited to “mostly menial and low-paying” military roles (Feagin, 2014, p. 59). Of course, those limitations had been placed on them by the military, thus leaving Black families in a no-win situation. Political scientist Ira Katznelson (2005) found that Black veterans “were refused loans for nakedly racist reasons, targeted as being high-risk candidates… in New York and the northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill supported home purchases by non-whites” (p. 140). Katznelson also found that the GI Bill “produced practices that were more racially distinct and arguably more cruel than any other New Deal-era program. The performance of the GI Bill mocked the promise of fair treatment” (p. 141). When discussing the African American experience with Title III of the GI Bill, which covered property loans, historian Kathleen Frydl (2009) wrote “it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title” (as cited in Coates, 2014). The battle for the Double V (Double Victory = freedom abroad and freedom at home) would prove to be just as terribly hard on the home front as it was overseas.
“The performance of the GI Bill mocked the promise of fair treatment.”
Ongoing Housing Crises
With few options for mortgage assistance and the limitations of a meager income from low-paying jobs, thousands of African American veterans had little choice but to move to - or remain in - segregated urban neighborhoods, most of which had been yellowlined or redlined by the HOLC and FHA.
Public housing was available, but “black families remained in dire need of low-rent housing” (Lang, 2009, p. 73). Lang noted that
The Federal Housing and Veterans administrations, which subsidized homeownership at low interest rates, favored detached, single-family dwellings in newer, ‘racially homogenous’ white communities west of central city. Private lenders, realtors, and the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation also institutionalized neighborhood rating systems that excluded black applicants, and facilitated the decay of older communities…thus, the fact that a development like Carr Square Village was located in the business district’s declining northern fringe only compounded black residents’ lack of opportunities for independent homeownership and decent surroundings (p. 73).
As a result of these racist policies, African American populations remained concentrated in socio-economically challenged areas. In St. Louis, these were sections of town such as Carr Square Village, Mill Creek Valley, and The Ville.
As the United States and St. Louis emerged from the Great Depression and World War II, underlying structural inequalities and racial tensions remained. In many ways, cities replaced the plantation as the visual depictions of racial inequality in America.
Think about It!
Urban “Blight”Frequently, Black communities are blamed for allowing the environment to become run-down and bleak. Racism throughout the twentieth-century fed lie upon lie to the public about how the African American was weak, in ill health, and below the White population in intelligence and lifestyle. They would then point to Black urban environments as proof of this. What was not often said or heard, was the fact that by segregating, isolating, and depriving Black communities of economic livelihood and the public supports that White communities had, Black communities were forced to live in run-down conditions without the means or support structures to improve them. Rather than a commentary on Black worthiness, the state of the urban environment in the twentieth-century was a self-fulfilling prophecy set up by White politicians to continue the Jim Crow style of control established after the Civil War.
Segregation reinforced economic disparity, depressed housing costs, and increasingly separated these sections of the city from the thriving parts of town. Urban researcher Hans Skifter Andersen (2002) noted that areas experiencing urban decay or “blight” often become ensnared in a cycle of “self-perpetuating negative social, economic and physical processes … that make them increasingly different from the rest of the city” (p. 153). Anderson described the structural and personal dynamic that characterized St. Louis’s urban decline,
“Segregation is a product of structural factors in cities and of decisions taken by individual households. In their search for location, people choose between places that have different perceived qualities regarding housing, physical and social environment, access to transport, jobs, services and natural beauties, and status and cultural identity. When these qualities are more unevenly distributed in space, which means that differences between “bad” and “good” or “ordinary” areas are more obvious, segregation will tend to become stronger because the incentives for house hunters to choose or avoid certain urban areas will be increased.” (p. 155)
Further, he noted that the segregation resulting from these structural factors and individual household decisions effectively initiated a downward spiral that further isolated these areas of urban decline and created increased poverty and displacement.
Anderson again: “Segregation takes place as an interaction between social and spatial differentiation and leads to a concentration of poor and excluded people – or special ethnic groups – in certain parts of the cities. This concentration leads… to changes in the quality of the neighbourhoods and to an exclusion of places as possible living areas. This exclusion of places then adds to spatial differentiation in the cities and increases segregation. Another self-perpetuating process … indicates that living in deprived housing estates could lead to further social exclusion of people staying there, which again tends to increase social inequality” (Anderson, 2002, p. 155).
Your Turn
How did the blatant racist policies keeping Black men and women from receiving the GI benefits further hurt the African American community?
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Read a report from Brandeis University on the discriminatory practices which kept Black veterans from GI resources.
Read: Humes, E. (2006). How the GI Bill Shunted Blacks into Vocational Training. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 53, 92–104. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25073543
Read: Eric Dandweiss, St. Louis: Evolution Of American Urban Landscape (Temple University Press, 2001).
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Zinn Education Project on the GI Bill of 1944.
Zinn Education Project: “How Red Lines Built White Wealth”
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Read: Colin Gordon's Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (2008).
Read: Eric Sandweiss's St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape (2001)
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Coates, T. (2014). “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic Monthly.
Woods II, L. L. (2013). ALMOST “NO NEGRO VETERAN … COULD GET A LOAN”: AFRICAN AMERICANS, THE GI BILL, AND THE NAACP CAMPAIGN AGAINST RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION, 1917–1960. The Journal of African American History. 98 (3) 3, Symposium: “St. Claire Drake: The Making of a Scholar-Activist”, pp. 392-417.
Wilson, W. J. (2012). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, Second Edition. The University of Chicago Press.
——-. Wilson, W. J. More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2009.