Racial Segregation and Concentrated Poverty: The History of Housing in Black America

In the 70's... we had a clinic, recreation center, ymca, salvation army, grocery store, & a small library; right in the community 😊those were good times, even though we were poor... by the mid 80's all those facilities were gone & replaced with a police station & crack 🥺

I love how it went from denial that it happened to "oh get over it"

I live in corpus Christi Texas and I am literally watching them build a new overpass right through a lower income neighborhood. Many of the residents would not sell their land to the government so they're building a highway right through it to force them out. This is still happening today

This is why they are literally making laws to prevent topics like this from being taught. They don't want to feel bad about what they did.

There’s a book called ‘The Color of Law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America’ that covers this in detail.

It’s called the Projects because that’s literally what they are… projects aimed at a specific demographic of people.

I forgot where I heard the quote from but "Black people have been called lazy ever since we stopped working for free"

The Federal Government destroyed many of black neighborhoods but never wanting to admit what that did to our communities.

It's important to understand that the government wants ghettos so you continue to work and produce for them.

Damn black people literally jumped out of the skillet right into the frying pan. Leaving the south to escape racism but ended up covertly experiencing racism in the north & was forced to live in terrible housing conditions. Today a lot of northern black people are moving back south. I live in FL & it’s getting to the point that’s hard to find native Floridian. Everyone I met is from somewhere else lol.

My great grandmother told me how Coconut Grove was a black neighborhood and how blacks were forced to live in Key West. Thank you for this video.

And racists say that black people are their own WORST enemy but they completely left this part OUT.....SMH.....

The government can not be trusted nor be expected to what is right. We make our own right and we need to raise our children with positive self worth. We can believe in ourselves and rise above what the government thinks what we should do or need. We need our community to be proud of ourselves and understand we are strong on our own without the government's help.

I was super curious. It’s sad to see people blame black people for their current population in “the ghetto” when it’s mostly due to racism and I’m sure those ppl faulting them wouldn’t want to be refused housing rights and pushed into poverty through discrimination themselves

In my opinion, This is why FICO scores exist so it keeps people in their place.

When will we help ourselves we have a responsibility in our present situation we must stop the violence in our community this is 2022 I am 60 and Love my people but we must change WE ARE OUR BIGGEST SETBACK

I’m white, conservative leaning with notes of left, and am constantly BLOWN AWAY by people who don’t know this history. I was born in the 60’s and knew people who lived in the projects, visited friends in the projects, and always wondered why is was full of Black Americans. Now I get it: American made slavery illegal, but then turned around and made it illegal to be black. When others say “Look at the immigrants who come here with nothing and do so well…” I have to point out that there was an expectation that we’d take care of our own first. Sure some people make it out of poverty, but only Black Americans were “legally” deprived of prosperity by their own government. No, it’s not rounding up and entire race and exterminating them, but it’s still unconscionable. Even our precious suburbs are racists, but most Americans don’t see that. Biden is doing what he can to start change, but the truth is that YouTube which giving Americans the platform they need to bring these injustices to light. If you think about, outside of the pilgrims, and a few others, most Americans have a history, which is much shorter in this country than that of African-Americans. Definitely something to think about.

Wow, this is exactly what happened where I’m from in syracuse, ny. In the 60’s there was a predominantly black community in what was known as the 15th ward that was completely bulldozed to build a highway, a jail, a hospital directly behind one that already existed, and right next to those highways are public housing communities built right after the bulldoxzing of the 15th ward in the 1970’s. Practically all of African American history from the first of our people who came here escaping the south was erased. We came here with nothing and built our own schools, doctors, barbershops, grocery stores, churches, and it was all wiped out for “urban renewal”. Ironically 50 years later we are facing the same problem. They are now talking about wiping out those same public housing communities as part of gentrification, turns out that highway that wiped out hundreds of years of African American history only lasts 50 years. Now hundreds of people are once again at risk of homelessness and having to relocate, if they’re lucky since they’ve slowly been raising rent prices in our neighborhoods, and paler richer faces have slowly been popping up as we get kicked out. History doesn’t change, it only repeats itself.

"Ghetto" has an earlier history in Europe where Jews were forced to live. "Ghet" is Yiddish for "separation." Ghetto is where Italians forced Jews to live, called shtetl in German and Eastern Europe areas. The name was transferred to Black neighborhoods after it was picked up from Jews and Italians in New York, where they were also segregated in places like the Bowery, in Manhattan. Robert Moses designed the highways that destroyed the Bronx, which was Italian and Jewish before it was Black and Dominican. The Bronx was thriving before the highways cut up neighborhoods and by-passed them with no exits.

“Generations less tired than me… There is always another generation coming.” Thank you young people. Here watching you carry on and proud of you.