Jim Crow governments and FHA redlining excluded blacks from GI Bill benefits

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. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 50

Categorization

• XREF: Redlining as the residential analogue to the tax-code provisions the reader is hunting for later in the book; Katznelson’s ‘When Affirmative Action Was White’ is the historiographic backing. — connects to: The GI Bill opened elite law schools to talented veterans regardless of class. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 4058