Housing scarcity and residential transition drove working-class whites into organized racism

Evidence

IN SEPTEMBER 1946 Holt Gewinner stood in a vacant lot near the Piedmont Mills on Atlanta’s West Side and served up a half-hour rant to gathering workers. … His address covered the usual range of extremist arguments, but he ended with an issue he knew would interest his audience more than anything else. “The reason veterans cannot find housing,” Gewinner argued, “is that unscrupulous real estate dealers are selling white property to Negroes, thus forcing all whites in the neighborhood to move.” The crowd had been watching with some curiosity until then, but now it cheered “enthusiastically and spontaneously.” … The pledge cards he distributed were short and simple. “I want the Columbians to continue the fight for the American white working man,” the signers swore. “I want the Columbians to continue the fight to effectively separate the white and black races.” Several mill workers inked their names on the spot and urged friends to follow suit. One of them, a bus driver who had arrived late, seemed reluctant. “I don’t know anything about it,” he protested. One of the newest recruits summed it up for him: “It’s to keep the niggers down.” — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 104

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to earlier chapter claims that segregationists understood resistance as defending rights/freedoms, now grounded in the concrete housing stake. — connects to: Desegregation pressure forced segregationists to reinvent themselves as respectable homeowners — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 106; Desegregation of public spaces drove working-class whites to reject civic community and city progress — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 252; Racism and mobility myths prevented white workers from revolutionary consciousness — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1438 (+17 more)

Broader Connections

• Desegregation of public spaces drove working-class whites to reject civic community and city progress #expands (0.82) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 252
• Desegregation taught working-class whites that self-interest trumps community loyalty #expands (0.78) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 191
• Racism and mobility myths prevented white workers from revolutionary consciousness #expands (0.75) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1438
• Distancing from Blacks was a condition of acquiring social Whiteness #expands (0.72) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 388