GI Bill benefits were implemented through Jim Crow channels that excluded black recipients

Evidence

Katznelson’s work explains how the GI Bill left the responsibility for implementing its homeownership, small-business, and education benefits up to state and local governments, many of which upheld the Jim Crow system. On the federal level, the FHA engaged in redlining of neighborhoods where black Americans lived, rendering homes there ineligible for low-interest-rate thirty-year FHA-insured loans. At the same time, legal and de facto discrimination prevented black Americans from buying homes elsewhere. Black veterans faced similar barriers at colleges and universities, few of which would enroll them. Black and white workers both paid the federal income taxes that generated the revenue to finance these benefits, but black Americans were prevented from receiving them. They could only watch from the sidelines as their money helped fund the creation of a robust middle class, one that was almost exclusively white. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 50

Categorization

• XREF: Directly advances the four-provision-plus-mechanism goal: FHA redlining and GI Bill devolution to Jim Crow states are mechanisms of the wealth gap. — connects to: Segregating a hearing room mirrors the Jim Crow bus seating regime — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 76
• QUESTION: Worth checking specifics of how the Homestead Act of 1872 (the author’s date) excluded black Americans, since the canonical Homestead Act was 1862.