A federal housing project was deliberately built as a segregation buffer

Evidence

Immediately, black leaders attacked the plan. … Though they found the whole scheme reprehensible, critics were particularly incensed by the city’s plan to create a housing project merely “as the east anchor of a so-called racial ‘buffer.’ ” … Public housing was desperately needed in other “slum areas,” the Atlanta Daily World editorialized. … To waste the Housing Authority’s time and money for the purpose of preventing citizens from securing homes, instead of its purported goal of helping them, seemed a cruel joke. … The local chapter of the NAACP agreed, publicly voicing its opposition and even filing complaints with federal authorities over their participation in the scheme. … Despite the protests, the Housing Authority pushed ahead with the project, completing it in late 1955 and naming it after Joel Chandler Harris, the Atlanta author of the Uncle Remus tales. … Further underscoring the segregating purpose of the Harris Homes, the city constructed high-strength cyclone fences between the whites-only project and the black neighborhood to the north. … Although black realtists resented the “buffer plan,” they grudgingly went along with it. … Practically speaking, they knew, the acquisition of more than seven hundred homes in a fine residential section outweighed the stigma of the “buffer zone.” … And so, after three years of bitterness, the Mozley Park problem had found a solution. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 171

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete documentation that public housing and infrastructure were frank instruments of racial buffer-zone policy before color-blind rhetoric emerged.
• XREF: Federally funded white-only housing built as a racial wall parallels the government-built exclusion discussed in the reader’s other segregation-focused material on suburban conservatism. — connects to: Suburban racial innocence made government housing segregation almost unthinkable as a personal concern — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 42; Challenging segregation required exposing how government had shaped housing patterns. — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 29; Federal loan agencies institutionalized racial segregation as real-estate orthodoxy — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 144 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Residential segregation was deliberately constructed, not natural or market-driven #exemplifies (0.88) — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 340
• Federal housing programs institutionalized residential segregation through redlining and demolition #expands (0.85) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1196
• Government credit policy manufactured residential segregation by design. #exemplifies (0.82)
• Federal redlining maps formally institutionalized racial segregation in the 1930s #corroborates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 369
• Residential segregation was conceived as territorial defense of white islands against black encroachment #expands (0.75) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 115
• The federal government deliberately excluded black families from postwar homeownership programs #corroborates (0.74) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 322
• Federal housing policy institutionalized the equation of black occupancy with falling property values #expands (0.72) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 144