The 1970s were marked by continued social unrest due to the Vietnam War and to inequities African Americans faced in housing, education, employment, and the judicial system.

Lacking the “generational wealth” that resulted from the asset accumulation related to home ownership made possible by the GI Bill, most African Americans faced an increasing number of obstacles generated and maintained by a white-centered culture (Coates, 2014), or “white racial frame” (Feagin, 2014, p. 63).

By the 1980s, failed urban renewal and decades-old public housing set the stage for expanded racist drug laws (“Three Strikes Law”), the crack epidemic, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As a result, by the early 1990s two generations of African American males had been devastated by mass incarceration, HIV/AIDS, or both (Feagin, 2014, p. 160; CDC, 2016). 

In response to ongoing inequities in housing, education, and employment, a number of Black freedom, Black power, and Black nationalist organizations began to form.

The Liberators, the Zulus, the Black Liberation Front, and The Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION) created important networks of political and social influence that, along with local unions and the local chapter of the NAACP, supported racial justice. While not always following legal or peaceful means of achieving their goals, these organizations pushed back against systemic racism, including police brutality, that had led to decades of inequity between Black and white people in the St. Louis metropolitan area (Lang, 2009, p. 220). These organizations were successful enough in their support of racial justice that the FBI (the COINTELPRO program) and local authorities worked, covertly and overtly, to pit them against one another. Lang wrote that ultimately, these groups ended up “splintering under the weight of their own ideological factionalism, they also succumbed to the state harassment that plagued other black freedom workers” (2009, p. 224). 

When St. Louis public “housing authorities announced their second rent increase in two years” in 1969, thousands of Black residents went on a rent strike (Lang, 2009, p. 214). By the end of the strike, which left the Housing Authority close to bankruptcy, tenant and community leaders had negotiated “disbanding the five-member Housing Authority,” and establishing a more equal system of leadership consisting of the Tenant Affairs Board, and a tenant bill of rights (Lang, 2009, p. 214).

Nevertheless, the growing inequities of the 1970s and 1980s left African Americans less able to take advantage of America’s economic boom in the mid-1990s.

This situation left African Americans even more susceptible to modern-day speculators who flipped dilapidated houses that were bought cheap, fixed cheap, and sold for more than they were worth. Pietila (2010) found that “As a criminal enterprise it [flipping] was…corrosive because quick buck artists gypped buyers but also gave kickbacks to greedy appraisers whose fraudulent paperwork was accepted by corrupt mortgage brokers and sleazy title company officials” (p. 258). Financial damage caused by flipping left African Americans vulnerable to the subprime mortgage scandal perpetrated by Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and other unethical lenders in the early- to mid-2000’s.