Post-Jim-Crow discrimination persisted through covenants, lending, and USDA seizures

Evidence

In this phase of shape-shifting, antiblack discrimination could no longer hide in plain sight with Whites Only signs. It would have to become subtler and more duplicitous. That’s how you got racially restrictive covenants folded into real estate contracts until 1968, when Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, making it illegal. In the meantime, private white homeowners could prevent sales to prospective black homebuyers through privately enforced covenants. The Supreme Court made that clear in 1948, through its decision in Shelly v. Kraemer, when it ruled that while courts could not enforce racially restrictive covenants, private parties certainly could. Lenders could discriminate against black borrowers until Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. But even after 1974, the federal government through the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) continued to discriminate against black farmers when it came to access to credit. Since the 1950s, about 15 million acres of black land has been lost, most commonly by being “seized by the US Department of Agriculture to settle debts accrued by black farmers as a result of the department’s racist lending practices.” Ninety percent of black-owned farmland was simply repossessed by the government. (Nineteen-ten was the high-water mark for black ownership of land in this country.) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 405

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallel to the Turner (A Midwife’s Tale) and Whiteness of Wealth themes—this is the exact ‘saturated-system’ mechanism showing discrimination surfacing in new forms as old ones were outlawed. — connects to: Post-1964 racial discrimination persists in subtler forms as laws are overturned — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 422