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Shelley v. Kraemer
An often derogatory word with a wide range of meanings and connotations, which generally refers to a densely-populated, badly-maintained, impoverished, and/or informally-constructed urban neighborhood with poor access to government services and infrastructure. In an American context, the word is often used synonymously with “ghetto” to refer to urban neighborhoods primarily inhabited by poor members of minority groups, especially African Americans. However, while Rothstein agrees that many African Americans live in neighborhoods that are both “ghettos” and “slums,” he carefully distinguishes these two terms from each other and uses them as objective descriptors of neighborhood conditions, rather than derogatory labels for the places inhabited by the most disadvantaged Americans. He specifically uses the word “slum” to refer to the disrepair and poor physical condition of many urban neighborhoods and illustrate how these poor conditions are the direct result of government action—both federal segregationist policies that forced African Americans into clearly-defined neighborhoods and local governments’ divestment from public services in those neighborhoods.
Slum Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by Slum or refer to Slum. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1
Quotes
Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state housing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto.
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Chapter 2
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This policy change, mostly complete by the late 1960s, ensured that integrated public housing would cease to be possible. It transformed public housing into a warehousing system for the poor. The condition of public projects rapidly deteriorated, partly because housing authority maintenance workers and their families had to leave the buildings where they worked when their wages made them ineligible to live there, and partly because the loss of middle-class rents resulted in inadequate maintenance budgets. The federal government had required public housing to be made available only to families who needed substantial subsidies, while the same government declined to provide sufficient subsidies to make public housing a decent place to live. The loss of middle-class tenants also removed a constituency that had possessed the political strength to insist on adequate funds for their projects’ upkeep and amenities. As a result, the condition and then the reputation of public housing collapsed. By 1973 the changeover was mostly complete. President Richard Nixon announced that public housing should not be forced on white communities that didn’t want it, and he reported to Congress that many public housing projects were “monstrous, depressing places—rundown, overcrowded, crime-ridden.”
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Chapter 3
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The frequent existence of polluting industry and toxic waste plants in African American communities, along with subdivided homes and rooming houses, contributed to giving African Americans the image of slum dwellers in the eyes of whites who lived in neighborhoods where integration might be a possibility. This, in turn, contributed to white flight when African Americans attempted to move to suburbs.
Zoning thus had two faces. One face, developed in part to evade a prohibition on racially explicit zoning, attempted to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods by making it difficult for lower-income families, large numbers of whom were African Americans, to live in expensive white neighborhoods. The other attempted to protect white neighborhoods from deterioration by ensuring that few industrial or environmentally unsafe businesses could locate in them. Prohibited in this fashion, polluting industry had no option but to locate near African American residences. The first contributed to creation of exclusive white suburbs, the second to creation of urban African American slums.
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Slum Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term Slum appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: If San Francisco, Then Everywhere?
...Through these factors, enforced through federal policy, East Palo Alto became an overcrowded, poorly serviced “slum.” To cope with the population growth, the government de-integrated the city’s existing high school and...
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Chapter 2: Public Housing, Black Ghettos
...African American inhabitants to move to segregated, increasingly overpopulated African American areas that soon became “slums.” The year before in St. Louis, the city government demolished two integrated neighborhoods in order...
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Chapter 3: Racial Zoning
...for “industrial” purposes or “even toxic waste” in order to relegate African American people to slums throughout the whole 20th century. There is no scientific doubt that minorities, and especially African...
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...unsafe businesses” in African American neighborhoods, protecting “exclusive white suburbs” by creating “urban African American slums.”
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Chapter 8: Local Tactics
...would not be exposed to black people.” To achieve this, they did what’s known as “slum clearance.” While urban African American neighborhoods “were indeed blighted,” government responses usually involved relocating African...
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