Ghetto Code: A History of Segregation, Racial Zoning and Spatial Isolation in American Cities

Zoning has been used by municipalities for the past century to steer environmental growth and direct land use agendas. It can be used for progress or peril but always to serve one group at the expense of another. On the surface, zoning was designed to prevent certain negligible land uses, like hazardous industry, from encroaching on residential and common areas. Although the language in many zoning ordinances historically expressed the desire to create spatial order and prevent environmental nuisances; it was in fact, used as a tool to divide the races and keep blacks out of white neighborhoods. The first zoning ordinance (or code) was enacted in New York City in 1916. It proved so effective at controlling land and people that by 1936, 1,322 cities had zoning ordinances of their own.[1] Chicago’s first zoning ordinance of 1923 stands as a good example of zoning’s racial intent. “By determining what can be built or maintained in a given area, this [zoning] ordinance became a tool used to limit housing opportunities for low-income residents, particularly African-Americans.”[2] As the late Professor of Urban Studies Marsha Ritzdorf explains “While in theory the original zoning ordinances of the late teens and early 1920s were designed to protect all citizens against the intrusion of noxious commercial and industrial uses into their neighborhoods and to preserve property values, they were in actuality devices designed to keep poor people, as well as industry, out of affluent areas.”[3] Urban historian Kenneth Jackson reinforces zoning’s racial origins in Crabgrass Frontier.

In actuality zoning was a device to keep poor people and obnoxious industries out of affluent areas…[Advocates of zoning] sought through minimum lot and set-back requirements to insure that only members of acceptable social classes could settle in their privileged sanctuaries…And in suburbs everywhere, North and South, zoning was used by the people who already lived within the arbitrary boundaries of a community as a method of keeping everyone else out. Apartments, factories, and ‘blight,’ euphemisms for blacks and people of limited means, were rigidly excluded.[4]

It can be argued that the first form of racial zoning dates back to 1865 when land on the coastal sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia (commonly called the Gullah Islands) was temporarily set aside for freed slaves along with an illusory allotment of 40 acres of land and a mule.[5] Since all blacks could not be sustained on islands as castaways; many cities in the first two decades of the 20th Century drafted legislation that defined black boundaries within cities. Before New York, Chicago and others established comprehensive zoning ordinances; southern and western cities used a primitive form of zoning called “racial districting” to contain blacks. Baltimore, Richmond, Atlanta, Louisville, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Oklahoma City all participated in this form of racial place making.[6] Baltimore led the way by creating the first exclusively black district in 1910.[7] In its defense, the Mayor declared, “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidents of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the White majority.”[8] The Mayor’s words stirred other cities and in 1922, Atlanta clearly codified racial districts of their own as, “R1 — White District; R2 — Colored district; and R3 — undetermined”.[9] Louisville, Kentucky is one of the most remarkable cities to draw color lines in this way. They designated sections called “black blocks” to contain their African-American population.[10] Notably, a legal challenge was brought against this action in 1914 by the President of the local NAACP branch, William Warley. Warley sued a white realtor, Charles Buchanan, for preventing him from buying land in one of the white blocks of the city. Buchanan agreed to sell Warley the property but was prevented from doing so by Louisville law.[11] The Supreme Court defended Warley and ruled that he should be allowed to buy property without respect to Louisville’s racial districts. Though on the surface this was a victory for black families seeking to escape confinement, it actually prompted cities to be more covert in their approach to racial segregation.

By the late 1920s, zoning’s power to restrict land use and people was widespread. This provoked opposition not only from blacks, but real estate developers across the country who were restricted from developing the kinds of property that they desired. In turn, another legal challenge to zoning came before The Supreme Court in 1926: The Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. Here a real estate company in a suburb of Cleveland called Euclid challenged the city’s zoning ordinance because it prevented them from developing a parcel of land for industrial use.[12] The Supreme Court upheld the Village’s zoning code and set a legal precedent that justified the rights of municipalities to restrict the use of land for purposes they deemed “undesirable”. The fact that this case does not address race specifically is irrelevant, as its implications for racial restrictions are unmistakable. In his opinion, Justice Sutherland explains that the impact of this case has social implications far beyond one tract of land.

Until recent years, urban life was comparatively simple, but with the great increase in concentration of population, problems have developed, and constantly are developing, which require, and will continue to require, additional restrictions in respect of the use and occupation of private lands in urban communities.[13]

Justice Sutherland would have been well aware that the massive migration of black families to cities was one of the biggest “problems” to have developed at the time. In fact, by 1926 when his opinion was written, the topic of the “negro problem” in cities was widely and hotly debated in newspapers, public forums and in the courts. A series of violent race riots in Chicago and elsewhere had also made the problem unmistakable.[14] The fact that he evades the black migration as the cause of the “great increase in concentration of population” is a glaring omission.

Although zoning was upheld in the previous case, the earlier decision in Warley v. Buchanan forced city governments to make it harder to prove that zoning codes were influenced by race. To this end, laws were created based on observations of the distinct differences in black behavioral patterns versus whites. An important distinction was the fact that many black families were renters and often lived in overcrowded apartment houses. To address this, lawmakers and city planners laid out separate zones for “single-family homes” versus apartments or “multi-family homes”. This limited where rental housing that housed mostly African-American families could be built. Zoning was further used to exclude blacks by defining the kind of family that could live in the “single-family” neighborhoods. In language that eerily reflects the political rhetoric of today, city governments used a sterilized definition of “family” as a basis for disqualifying blacks. “Family” is qualitative — the interpretation of the associated values that go along with it opens a wide window for bias to one group’s value system versus another. Family values vary based on culture, time and place and often develop more from social constraints than tradition. Making a romanticized white family model the standard for neighborhood inclusion undermined the legitimacy of the black family: making them easy and even logical candidates for exclusion. One definition of family that was used in the 1970s can be found in The Village of Belle Terre, New York (a place that actively practiced exclusionary zoning — as will be discussed later). Belle Terre defined “family” as, “One or more persons related by blood, adoption or marriage, living and cooking together as a single housekeeping unit, exclusive of household servants”.[15] This definition is more akin to imagery on television shows like Leave It to Beaver or The Waltons than the diverse metropolises that American cities had become by then. Since more white families could fit into this construct, they were qualified to live in the most desirable homes in the best residential neighborhoods. Black families on the other hand were relegated to slums.

The black family had to be excluded because they were a threat to the white image of the model American community. As Harvard Law Professor Gerald Frug suggests, “Support for local zoning policies has often been articulated in the anti-urban language of sentimental pastoralism: a bedroom community of detached, owner-occupied, single-family houses, located in a natural setting, is often said to be ‘the best place to raise a family’”.[16] Columbia Law Professor Richard Briffault reinforces this sentiment by describing how white suburbs have defended themselves against black advancement under the guise of protecting “`the home and family — enabling residents to raise their children in ‘decent’ surroundings, servicing home and family needs, and insulating home and family from undesirable changes in the surrounding area.’”[17] In order for this model to work there had to be a criteria for inclusion. To this end, whites made themselves the standard. Since they were the benchmark for acceptance, they in turn rendered their families models of wholesomeness, admiration and divinity. Conversely, black families were condemned as inferior, subversive, degenerate and to be kept out at all costs. The black family was therefore the anti-neighbor: the antithesis of the white moonstruck image of the perfect urbane community.

Additional court cases expose the use of family-based zoning to keep blacks out of desirable white communities. Ironically, some were brought by race-neutral groups that unwittingly fell into the black stereotypical profile. In 1974, a group of students in the Village of Belle Terre, Long Island, were prevented from living together in a home because they did not conform to the Village’s definition of “family”. Like many African Americans at the time, college students were mostly renters and did not occupy dwellings as traditional white nuclear familes. As a result, Belle Terre denied them housing. The students sued the Village in a case that made it to the Supreme Court. The Court upheld Belle Terre’s zoning code and ruled that the students had no right to live there because they were not, by definition, a “family”. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Thurgood Marshall clearly acknowledges that the underlying issue in this case is race.

Zoning officials properly concern themselves with the uses of land with, for example, the number and kind of dwellings to be constructed in a certain neighborhood or the number of persons who can reside in these dwellings. But zoning authorities cannot validly consider who those persons are, what they believe, or how they choose to live, whether they are Negro or White, Catholic or Jew, Republican or democrat, married or unmarried.[18]

The students involved in this case are collateral damage: inadvertent casualties who suffered an unintended consequence. They are not part of the group that the law intends to exclude but found themselves unprotected by association. They were unknowing participants in a social experiment designed to exclude blacks from an all-white community. In a simple quest for student housing, they were trapped in the interstices of a racial turf war that had been going on in American cities for decades. Notably, the practice of exclusionary zoning has had a long and enduring legacy in Long Island beyond Belle Terre. Nearby Cove Neck (former home of President Roosevelt) incorporated in 1927 with a zoning code that required that homes be built with large lot sizes making it harder for blacks to afford.[19] Long Island continued to exhibit exclusionary practices decades later in the 1990s as one-fifth of African Americans polled by Newsday said they had been discriminated against while trying to rent an apartment and 21% said the same when trying to buy a home.[20]

Though Long Island is a severe case, they are not alone in using family distinction to exclude African-Americans through zoning. In 1977, lawmakers in The Village of Arlington Heights (a suburb of Chicago) refused the construction of much needed low and moderate income housing on the grounds that the Village was zoned for “single-family” residences. Arlington Heights had been successful for years in preventing a significant number of blacks from living there by holding firm to their zoning code. The 1970 census for instance reveals that only 27 of the Village’s 64,000 residents were African American (less than one tenth of one percent).[21] Though a number of blacks worked in Arlington Heights at a major factory, they commuted as far as 20 miles away from urban areas like Chicago. When the Arlington Heights Planning Commission was approached by a developer with a federally subsidized mixed-income and mixed-race land development called Lincoln Green; the city quickly hid behind their family-based zoning classification as the sole basis for their opposition. When the developer sued the Village on the grounds that the zoning code was in violation of the Federal Housing Act, the courts ruled that refusing to rezone the land to accommodate Lincoln Green was not in violation of the law. Although they defended Arlington Heights’, The Supreme Court clearly acknowledged that the true intent of their “single-family” zoning designation was to exclude blacks. In his opinion, Justice Powell explains, “Since Lincoln Green would have to be racially integrated in order to qualify for federal subsidization, the Village’s action in preventing the project from being built had the effect of perpetuating segregation in Arlington Heights.”[22]

Not only did municipalities hide behind established zoning codes to prevent blacks from entering white communities; they also changed zoning codes to suit their needs when they saw blacks approaching. In 1969, a developer attempted to build Park View Heights: an affordable housing project sponsored by HUD in an unincorporated region outside of St. Louis, MI. If built, the development would house a significant number of African-Americans. In response, local city planners and lawmakers quickly changed the zoning code to restrict multi-family developments. “When they learned of this plan, Whites in the area (Black residents made up less than 2 percent), successfully petitioned the county to incorporate as The City of Black Jack. They then enacted a zoning ordinance prohibiting the construction of any multi-family dwelling.”[23] Like Arlington Heights, this municipality used family-based zoning to prevent African-American families from entering. The distinction in this case is that the area was already zoned for multi-family housing and was quickly changed to halt the advancement of blacks. The town had never changed their multi-family zoning designation because they had never been confronted with the potential of blacks encroaching. At the threat of impending black neighbors, Black Jack changed their entire housing composition. When the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice brought suit against them, The United States Court of Appeals ruled that rezoning the land to block the development of low-income housing was in fact a violation of the Fair Housing Act. The Black Jack decision was a victory for black families in that it made it harder for later municipalities to exclude them based on family composition, however the case lingered in court longer than the developer could reasonably pursue the project (seven years) and it was actually never built.[24] Notably, Black Jack continued its irrational use of family-based zoning into the 21st century. In 2006, the city was sued for denying an occupancy permit to an unmarried couple with children because they did not consider them a “family” by definition.[25] Like the students in Belle Terre, this couple suffered the unintended effects of lingering race codes.

Racial zoning and other tactics devised to exclude blacks stem from the same cause: whites viewed blacks as inferior and unfit to live together in the same community. By the time African-Americans began advancing into urban areas en masse; whites held deep pejorative views of the black family that rendered them undesirable neighbors. Whites closely observed the behavior of black immigrants and out of ignorance interpreted their differences as manifest inferiorities. “Middle-class whites were repelled by what they saw as uncouth manners, unclean habits, slothful appearance, and illicit behaviors of poorly educated, poverty-stricken migrants who had only recently been sharecroppers.”[26] Whites who were already influenced by predetermined fears were mortified at the invasion of this new group that they deemed subordinate and lacking adherence to their cultural standards. In 1970, surveys of whites in San Francisco revealed that, “41% believed that blacks were less likely to take care of their homes than whites; 24% said that blacks were more likely to cheat or steal; and 14% said that blacks were prone to commit sex crimes.”[27] A similar survey in Detroit at the time revealed that almost half of whites in that city viewed the black family as immoral when compared to whites.[28] Civil Rights Attorney Vernon Jordan sheds light on white ignorance of black neighbors in describing his family’s experience as the first homeowners to integrate Hartsdale, New York in 1970. As whites curiously peered through his window to get an introduction into black family life, one woman who couldn’t contain her dismay approached his wife in a drugstore and remarked, “I saw you and your husband and your daughter in the house, sitting down to the table having dinner. I did not know black people did that.”[29]

Although white perceptions of black family life were deeply misguided, the fact remained that the black family was indeed different. Blacks did not fit into the perfect image of white homogeneity (as described in the earlier definition of family) nor could they for a number of variables. The black family in many ways was broken, tarnished and recovering from the effects of generations of slavery and enforced segregation. African-Americans who migrated to northern cities in many cases arrived poorly educated and exhibited the pathologies resultant from generations of racism and the depressed lifestyle of the Jim Crow South. As a result, the black family evolved in an unorthodox fashion. For one, they did not conform to the traditional male-headed family household model. They appeared motley and disjointed with multiple family members “doubling up” in apartments and subdivided homes.[30] As Professor Ritzdorf describes, “It is true that the black family developed in a different form than that which is held up as the White, middle-class ideal. Urban poverty, underemployment, and unemployment led to a higher proportion of both female-headed and other alternative household forms for African Americans.”[31] Massey and Denton add on to this explanation by placing the evolution of the black family in a socio-economic context.

The decline of manufacturing, the suburbanization of employment, and the rise of a low-wage service sector dramatically reduced the number of city jobs that paid wages sufficient to support a family, which led to high rates of joblessness among minorities and a shrinking pool of “marriageable” men (those financially able to support a family). Marriage thus became less attractive to poor women, unwed childbearing increased, and female-headed households proliferated.[32]

Whatever the cause of the black families’ condition; whites who occupied urban centers thought the worst of these newcomers and wanted no part in living together. As W.E.B. DuBois observed of Philadelphia at the turn of the last century, “[Whites] regard color prejudice as the easily explicable feeling that intimate social intercourse with a lower race is not only undesirable but impractical if our present standards of culture are to be maintained.”[33] In Sundown Towns, historian James Loewen suggests that the psychology behind excluding blacks can be traced to America’s very foundation. He reasons “`If the founding fathers…thought African Americans were `altogether unfit to associate with the white race,’ then let’s stop associating with them. And let’s do this, not by altering our behavior, but by limiting their choices — by excluding them.[34] As was seen in the City of Black Jack, whites were not altogether opposed to altering their behavior either if it meant not having to live with blacks.

Fear of romantic race-mixing was also a major justification for excluding blacks from white communities. The threat of miscegenation (the sexual mixing of blacks and whites) combined with the fear of rape by black men against white women, contributed considerably to the imposition of restrictions to keep the races apart. As George Frederickson writes in The Black Race in the White Mind, “In the United States the racial ideal was of course lily-white, and legal barriers to intermarriage certified black exclusion from the ‘real’ community.”[35] In White on Black, Sociology Professor Jan Pieterse traces the fear of rape as justification for exclusion to Black Codes of the 17th Century that prohibited sexual relations between black slaves and white women.

To justify these restrictions, certain myths were propagated, such as that of the black male as being hypersexed and of the white woman on the pedestal — the idolization of the white female in the American south. Black men were said to have an exceptionally large penis, as well as an insatiable animal sexuality. ‘The black male was variously described as a “walking phallus”; an animalistic satyr possessed with insatiable appetites…a sexually uninhibited man preoccupied with sex.’[36]

This “black beast” versus “white goddess” ideology caused whites to see black men as a threat to their most prized possession: the white woman. Such inflammatory satirical imagery was the justification for numerous lynchings of black men in the American south and was now posited as a justification for racial exclusion in the North. A notable place for excluding blacks based on this theriomorphic psychology is Anna, IL (a town whose name local lore attests is an acronym for Ain’t-No-Niggers-Allowed).[37] Anna has justified having virtually no black residents for over a century on an urban legend involving the rape of a white woman by a black man, Will James, in 1909. This incident led to a spectacular carnival-style lynching attended by thousands of white families that year in Cairo, IL. The town is reputed to have had no black residents since.[38] James Loewen explains that reference to a singular incident, rather true or fictive, involving an uncivilized black “beast” who misbehaved in some fashion has been a common justification for excluding blacks. He illustrates, many all-white communities explain their, “all-white status by invoking incidents that embody the familiar ‘African American as problem’ ideology, but with specific local details about what blacks did wrong here…to justify the continued vigilance and sometimes brutal actions required to maintain a town or suburb as an all-white community.”[39]

Whites viewed their resistance to black advancement in cities as legitimate warfare and often used the language of combat to describe their opposition. One real estate trade journal of the 1950’s depicts the movement of black families as the invasion of an army. When “the infiltration of the antipathetic racial group begins to gnaw at the edge, it will not be long until direct access will be had to the very core of the neighborhood itself.”[40] Considering white fear of sexual race-mixing; references to protecting a neighborhood’s “core” would have had multiple interpretations and profoundly amplified already stoked fears. As to the military-like response by whites, Robert Weaver explains, “This strategy…has been taken over into the thinking of white Americans who speak and think of the ‘invasion’ of a neighborhood by Negros, the ‘infiltration’ of an area by colored people, or the ‘loss’ of a neighborhood.”[41] Stephen Meyer offers the black perspective on the hyperbole surrounding their perceived attack on white communities, in As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door. He explains, “Most blacks did not intend to lead assaults on white areas; they only sought better housing, but many whites interpreted the rhetoric literally. They blocked the penetration as if defending against a foreign enemy, using any means at their disposal to deter the migration.”[42]

Although whites used numerous organized methods to block the so called assault by blacks on their communities; violence was an especially favored war tool. Bloody urban battles followed upwardly mobile blacks wherever they moved and were especially severe against the first black families with the means to integrate an all-white neighborhood. These pioneer blacks were in sum subject to written and verbal threats, mob violence, break-ins, beatings, shootings, lynchings, cross burnings, rock-throwing, bombings, and arson.[43] Picketing outside a black family’s home was another preferred form of harassment. White picketers reminded blacks they were unwelcome by holding signs bearing epithets that read, “We Want This Neighborhood White!” and “We Want This Nigger Moved”[44]. These mobs were comprised of spontaneous groups who would join in on the agitation impromptu or in a more organized fashion. Often violent protests against blacks was a family affair among whites, as entire households (men, women and children) banded together to intimidate their new black neighbors at various intervals throughout the day.[45] Remarkably, these urban terrorists would target considerable hostility toward blacks of high social status. Evidence of this can be found in a 1957 teaching manual produced by the National Association of Real Estate Boards (presently known as The National Association of Realtors). This publication cautioned its members to beware of, “`a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.’”[46] This group was considered to be the most threatening and was to be resisted by all means. The renowned chemist Percy Julian fit such a profile and found himself victim when his home was bombed after he moved his family into the Chicago suburb of Oak Park in 1950. Julian, determined to resist the attacks, often sat in a nearby tree with a shotgun ready to engage anyone advancing on his property.[47] Likewise, Lorraine Hansberry recounts nearly being hit by a “missile” (a flying brick) that was hurled through her family’s window when they moved into the all-white Chicago community of Woodlawn in 1937.[48] The Hansberry family underwent considerable harassment including coming outside one day and finding their car covered in paint.[49] The family was later evicted until Lorraine’s father, Carl Hansberry, joined with the NAACP, to file suit overturning the neighborhood’s restrictive covenant (a cousin of racial zoning that kept tracts of land white-occupied by prohibiting landowners from selling property to blacks).[50] Notably, Lorraine Hansberry’s experience in this home directly influenced the writing of A Raisin in the Sun: her play about a black Chicago family striving to escape the ghetto.

The violence and antagonism displayed against black homeowners was part of a multifaceted attack on incoming blacks often drafted by white homeowners associations. These associations consisted of whites who joined forces to hold the line in communities where blacks encroached. Depending on the community, these groups took on many different names including: improvement clubs, taxpayers associations, civic associations, chambers of commerce or homeowners’ foundations.[51] These associations claimed to promote patriotic causes aimed at upholding the best interest of their respective communities but their primary function was keeping blacks out. As Massey and Denton explain, “Although ostensibly chartered for the purpose of promoting neighborhood security and property values, their principal raison d’être was the prevention of black entry and the maintenance of the color line”.[52] It is important to note that these politically powerful organizations influenced more than their respective city blocks. They also held sway over numerous public policy and city council decisions including zoning.

These voluntary associations employed a variety of tools in their efforts to preserve the racial homogeneity of threatened neighborhoods. They lobbied city councils for zoning restrictions and for the closing of hotels and rooming houses that attracted blacks; they threatened boycotts of real estate agents who sold homes to blacks; they withdrew their patronage of white businesses that catered to black clients…they collected money to create funds to buy property from black settlers…they offered cash bonuses to renters who agreed to leave the neighborhood.[53]

A caricature of members of such associations can be seen in A Raisin in the Sun, as a fearful representative of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association’s “Welcoming Committee” visits the Younger family to attempt to buy back the home they recently purchased in an all-white community.[54] It is notable that the author would have personally been all too familiar with this scene as a member of the Woodlawn Property Association (Anna Lee) presented the lawsuit to remove her family from their home in 1940.[55] The Woodlawn Association and others like it played a particularly integral role in keeping Chicago communities all-white by being involved in a host of political and legislative decisions.

The Woodlawn Property Association for example, organized to prevent the passage of those amendments that would promote “Negro Encroachment.” The Oakland-Kenwood Property Owners Association rallied to block amendments that would allow apartments in the area on the grounds that this would encourage the entry of African-Americans who could not afford single-family homes.[56]

Even neighborhoods reputed for racial inclusion like Chicago’s Hyde Park, historically formed associations to block blacks. As early as 1917, (after cities like Baltimore, Atlanta and St. Louis designed their racial districts) a group of realtors, pressured by homeowners from the Hyde Park, Kenwood and Oakland neighborhoods, lobbied for a similar racial zoning scheme citing that the entrance of blacks would lead to a severe depreciation in property values.[57] Notably, these associations were not above the use of direct violence as well. In 1918, The Kenwood and Hyde Park Property Owners Association was responsible for 58 bombs thrown into the homes of black property owners. They described themselves as a “red blood organization” and became known for rallying white homeowners around the slogan “Make Hyde Park White.”[58] Notably, decades later in 1943, The Hyde Park Property Owners Association continued to exercise racial exclusion by actively organizing to stop black members of the Women’s Army Corps from living in the nearby barracks.[59]

[1] Kenneth T. Jackson. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of The United States. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1985), 242.

[2] Joseph P. Schwieterman and Dana M. Castel. Jane Heron editor. The Politics of Place: A History of Zoning in Chicago (Chicago, IL: Lake Claremont Press, 2006), 28.

[3] Marsha Ritzdorf. “Family Values, Municipal Zoning, and African American Family Life.” In June Manning Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf, editors. Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows (California: Sage Publications, 1997), 81.

[4] Kenneth T. Jackson. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of The United States. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1985), 242.

[5] George M. Fredrickson. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1987). 175.

[6] Joseph P. Schwieterman and Dana M. Castel. Jane Heron editor. The Politics of Place: A History of Zoning in Chicago (Chicago, IL: Lake Claremont Press, 2006), 28.

[7] Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A Denton. American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 41.

[8] Silver, Christopher. “The Racial Origins of Zoning in American Cities.” In Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows. June Manning Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf, editors. (California: Sage Publications, 1997), 27.

[9] Ibid.,34

[10] James W. Loewen. Sundown Towns. (New York, NY: The New Press, 2005), 101.

[11] Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A Denton. American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 188.

[12] Joseph P. Schwieterman and Dana M. Castel. Jane Heron editor. The Politics of Place: A History of Zoning in Chicago (Chicago, IL: Lake Claremont Press, 2006), 25.

[13] Daniel R. Mandelker, Roger A. Cunningham, and John M. Payne. Planning and Control of Land Development: Cases and Materials: Fourth Edition (Charlottesville, Virginia: Law Publishers, 1995). 79,80.

[14] Allan H. Spear. Black Chicago: The Making of the Negro Ghetto:1890–1920. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), 129.

[15] Daniel R. Mandelker, Roger A. Cunningham, and John M. Payne. Planning and Control of Land Development: Cases and Materials: Fourth Edition (Charlottesville, Virginia: Law Publishers, 1995). 261.

[16] Gerald E. Frug. City Making: Building Communities Without Building Walls. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999), 143.

[17] Ibid., 57.

[18] Marsha Ritzdorf. “Locked Out of Paradise: Contemporary Exclusionary Zoning, the Supreme Court, and African Americans, 1970 to Present.” In June Manning Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf, editors. Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows (California: Sage Publications, 1997), 48.

[19] James W. Loewen. Sundown Towns. (New York, NY: The New Press, 2005), 13.

[20] Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A Denton. American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 105.

[21] Daniel R. Mandelker, Roger A. Cunningham, and John M. Payne. Planning and Control of Land Development: Cases and Materials: Fourth Edition (Charlottesville, Virginia: Law Publishers, 1995). 418, 419.

[22] Ritzdorf, Marsha. “Locked Out of Paradise: Contemporary Exclusionary Zoning, the Supreme Court, and African Americans, 1970 to Present.” In June Manning Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf, editors. Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows (California: Sage Publications, 1997), 53.

[23] Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund. (2007) Long Road to Justice: The Civil Rights Division at 50. Washington, DC: LCCREF. Retrieved from http://www.civilrights.org/publications/reports/long-road/long-road-to-justice.pdf.

[24] Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A Denton. American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 229.

[25] Robert, Anthony E., American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri (personal communication, July 12, 2006). Retrieved from: http://www.aclu-em.org/downloads/ComplaintwithCity.pdf.

[26] Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A Denton. American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 29.

[27] Ibid., 94.

[28] Ibid., 94.

[29] Vernon Jordan and Annette Gordon-Reed. Vernon Can Read! A Memoir (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2001), 220.

[30] Mohl, Raymond A. “The Second Ghetto and the ‘Infiltration Theory’ in Urban Real Estate, 1940–1960.” In June Manning Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf, editors. Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows (California: Sage Publications, 1997), 61.

[31] Marsha Ritzdorf. “Family Values, Municipal Zoning, and African American Family Life.” In June Manning Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf, editors. Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows (California: Sage Publications, 1997), 78.

[32] Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A Denton. American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 6.

[33] W.E.B. DuBois, “The Negro Problems of Philadelphia,” from The Philadelphia Negro (1899). In Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, editors. The City Reader (London: Routledge, 1996), 57.

[34] James W. Loewen. Sundown Towns. (New York, NY: The New Press, 2005), 20–21.

[35] Ibid., 132.

[36] Jan Nederveen Pieterse. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 175.

[37] James W. Loewen. Sundown Towns. (New York, NY: The New Press, 2005), 3.

[38] Ibid., 173.

[39] James W. Loewen. Sundown Towns. (New York, NY: The New Press, 2005). 175.

[40] Raymond Mohl. “The Second Ghetto and The “Infiltration Theory” in Urban Real Estate, 1940–1960.” In June Manning Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf, editors. Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows (California: Sage Publications, 1997). 70.

[41] Robert C. Weaver. The Negro Ghetto. (Russell & Russell: New York). 32.

[42] Stephen Grant Meyer. As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods. (Janham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.). 6.

[43] Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A Denton. American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 30, 34, 35.

[44] Stephen Grant Meyer. As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods. (Janham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.). 230.

[45] Ibid., 9.

[46] Ibid., 7.

[47] Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund. (2007) Long Road to Justice: The Civil Rights Division at 50. Washington, DC: LCCREF. Retrieved from http://www.civilrights.org/publications/reports/long-road/long-road-to-justice.pdf.

[48] Lorraine Hansberry. To Be Young, Gifted and Black (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1995) . 7, 8.

[49] Raisin the Roof. (2010, September 30). Chicago Weekly, p.3

[50] Steven Carter. Hansberry’s Drama (Urbana, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), vii.

[51] Charles Abrams. Forbidden Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing. (New York, NY: Harpers and Brothers, 1955). 181.

[52] Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A Denton. American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 35.

[53] Ibid., 36.

[54] Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin In the Sun (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994), 113–119.

[55] Blakely, Robert J. (1986, December). “Earl B. Dickerson and Hyde Park”. Hyde Park Historical Society Newsletter, 1.

[56] Joseph P. Schwieterman and Dana M. Castel. Jane Heron editor. The Politics of Place: A History of Zoning in Chicago (Chicago, IL: Lake Claremont Press, 2006), 30.

[57] Ibid., 28.

[58] Charles Abrams. Forbidden Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing. (New York, NY: Harpers and Brothers, 1955). 182.

[59] Blakely, Robert J. (1986, December). Earl B. Dickerson and Hyde Park. Hyde Park Historical Society Newsletter, 2.

[60] James W. Loewen. Sundown Towns. (New York, NY: The New Press, 2005), 14