Finding common ground, these disparate groups banded together in one of the most segregated cities in postwar United States to collectively confront issues such as police brutality and substandard housing, calling themselves the Rainbow Coalition. The First Rainbow Coalition tells the movement’s little-known story through rare archival footage and interviews with former coalition members in the present-day.

While the coalition eventually collapsed under duress from constant harassment by local and federal law enforcement, including the murder of Fred Hampton, it had a long term impact, breaking down barriers between communities, and creating a model for future activists and diverse politicians across America. [Description from PBS.]

Trailer

Purchase the film for classrooms at Good Docs. The film is also available to stream for free for a limited time at PBS Independent Lens.

The post The First Rainbow Coalition appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

This lesson is based on The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.

An 11th-grade student leaned back in his chair at Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon, and said, “Absurd. That is the only way to describe those numbers. They are absurd.” He and his classmates had just read statistics about the racial wealth gap in their Political Economy class: White households are worth at least 10 times as much as Black households; only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth while a third of Blacks do; Black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. These numbers are absurd, and they are not accidental.

This lesson, “How Red Lines Built White Wealth: A Lesson on Housing Segregation in the 20th Century,” introduces students to the 20th-century housing policies that bankrolled white capital accumulation while halting Black social mobility — and contributed to the absurd injustice of the modern wealth gap.

Find more remote-ready lessons here and refer to our remote teaching guide.

The mixer role play is based on Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (Liveright, 2017), which shows in exacting detail how government policies segregated every major city in the United States with dire consequences for African Americans. Students encounter stories about the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, the Veterans Administration, redlining, blockbusting, zoning, racially restrictive deeds and covenants, and move-in violence. Students also meet many people who fought bravely against this dizzying array of racist policies. This could be an introductory lesson in a unit on housing segregation, gentrification, the racial wealth gap, and/or reparations in a U.S. history, economics, or government course.

For more context and background on this lesson, read the online article, The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated the United States by Richard Rothstein.

Roles for this mixer include:

• Joseph Lee Jones, a Black man married to a white woman who sued to be able to live in a new housing development in St. Louis
• Frank Stevenson, a Black Ford employee in California who faced stiff obstacles when trying to purchase a home
• David Bohannon, a white real estate developer in California who built new homes which excluded African Americans
• Wallace Stegner, a white writer who tried to assist Black homebuyers but faced resistance from the FHA
• Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association
• Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior under President Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Walter Jackson, who, with other Black workers, won the right to move into the Sojourner Truth Housing Project in Detroit
• Edward Jefferies, who in 1945 ran to be re-elected mayor of Detroit
• William Warley, an African American lawyer who was blocked from buying a home in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1915
• Harland Bartholomew, a white planning engineer working for the city of St. Louis
• Frederick Ecker, president of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company
• President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) that paved the way to homeownership for millions of Americans
• Gabriel Eaton, who works for the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)
• Arnold Cabot, who works for the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), one of the many government agencies formed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to address the economic crisis of the Great Depression
• Robert Mereday, a Black WWII veteran who helped started a trucking company and helped build the suburbs, even though he wasn’t allowed to live there
• William Levitt, a white real estate developer, often called the father of suburbia
• J. C. Nichols, a real estate developer who developed a way to keep my developments all white at a time when the Supreme Court was beginning to question whether it was constitutional to use government power to bar Black people from buying property in certain areas
• Ethel Shelley, a Black woman who bought a home in a white neighborhood, was sued for eviction, and went to the Supreme Court
• “Norris Vitchek”, a real estate “flipper” in blockbusting
• Clyde Ross, served in World War II, and in 1947 moved to Chicago, where I became a taster for Campbell’s soup.
• Ethel Weatherspoon, one of the founding members of the Contract Buyers League (CBL), who bought a house “on contract” in North Lawndale in Chicago in the 1950s
• Wilbur Gary, a Black WWII veteran who faced racist violence due to buying a home in a white community
• Daisy Myers, who bought a home with her husband in Levittown, Pennsylvania but was forced to move back to an African American community due to racist violence directed at her family
• Harvey Clark, an Air Force veteran who works as a bus driver in Chicago
• Anne Braden, a white journalist and civil rights activist
• Lou Fushanis, who sells houses in Chicago and developed a scheme to make a lot of money off the racism of government housing policies
• Langston Hughes, an esteemed African American poet and writer
• Gerald Cohn, a white school teacher
• Robert Weaver, the secretary of housing and urban development in the mid-1960s, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson
• Katherine Peden, a white Democratic politician from Kentucky, the only woman on the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (known as the Kerner Commission)
• Catherine Bauer Wurster, a white housing expert and advisor to the U.S. Housing Authority (USHA), a government agency that helps manage and finance housing
• J. Dexter Peach, chairman of the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), a nonpartisan government agency that issues investigative reports to assist Congress in writing good policies and laws
• Vincent Mereday, a Navy veteran, who fought in World War II, and has been working for his uncle’s trucking and hauling company since the war ended
• Steven Barnard, who helped write a report for the New Jersey State Attorney General’s Office in the 1960s about the impact of building a new interstate highway on the city of Camden

From the author of The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein:

I recommend this important Zinn Education Project lesson, “How Red Lines Built White Wealth: A Lesson on Housing Segregation in the 20th Century,” for use by middle school to college instructors.

Based on The Color of Law, it teaches about residential segregation in a fashion that is both accurate and creative. With it, teachers can correct the misinformation in textbooks that typically promote a myth that we came to be segregated by private actions alone. If younger generations finally learn the truth with a lesson like this, they’ll be in a better position to redress the unconstitutional segregation and inequality that was created by our government.

Classroom Stories

Students in my class are well aware of the fact that things are not as they should be in the United States. Specifically, they are aware of the fact that the color of their skin, in many ways, determines where they live, the wealth their families have (or have not) acquired, and the opportunities presented to them throughout their lives.

However, despite the fact that awareness of inequality is high, the understanding of WHY inequality, racism, and segregation still exists remains a mystery to many students. Or, they have been indoctrinated with the not-so-subtle message that these issues still exist purely as a result of individual racism or prejudice. Not many of these young people realize that the dire circumstances they observe are the result of systematic policies that have shaped our country for decades, and are still doing so today.

As soon as students received and began reading their roles for the lesson How Red Lines Built White Wealth: A Lesson on Housing Segregation in the 20th Century, I saw eyes begin to widen. Frantic highlighting and slight gasps of shock, along with giggles of disbelief, began to echo through the classroom. This is when you know students are about to learn something, and learn something that matters. Minutes later, the entire class was on their feet, moving to find someone they could share their “story” with. Maybe it was a story of move-in violence, or the story of how their character used the prejudiced voting population in the United States for their own personal gains. Whatever it was, students were eager to share and to listen.

After nearly an hour of mingling, the class began to discuss what they discovered. The students who played the government officials, the building contractors, and the loan officials oscillated between outrage and nervous chuckles of disbelief, while those who played Black community members seemed to shake their heads in familiar understanding. Was any of the information on prejudice, or the horrifying experiences for the Black community, new to them? Not really. However, what they hadn’t understood was the intentional and systemic nature of the government’s involvement in these practices and their outcomes.

At the end of the day, the entire class seemed to leave the room with a newfound sentiment of “now this makes sense.” Now it makes sense as to why the results of the blatant segregation from decades and decades ago still exists. Now it makes sense as to why I live where I live, and you live where you live. Now it makes sense as to why the money resides in certain homes, but not others. And the question that now exists in students minds is not “why,” but rather “how” — “How do we change things? How do we learn more? And how do we make a difference?”

—Jennifer Stangland

High School English Teacher, San Francisco, California

I used the lesson titled, How Red Lines Built White Wealth, in order for students to learn about red lining and institutionalized racism. The mixer lesson was very engaging for students, allowing them to move around the classroom, collaborate with one another, and learn new information that they hadn’t studied before.

As a teacher, the lesson was extremely detailed and made me feel prepared. From introduction activities to exactly how to run the mixer to multiple options for follow up activities, the lesson was robust and meaningful. I always check Zinn Education Project for new and exciting lessons that keep students engaged and speak truth!

—Nicole Powers

High School Language Arts/English Teacher, San Marcos, California

The post How Red Lines Built White Wealth: A Lesson on Housing Segregation in the 20th Century appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

The 18-minute film is based on the book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein who also narrates.

Watch

Segregated by Design from Silkworm on Vimeo. Length: 18 minutes.

Film Contents

I. A Forgotten History
II. The Policies
III. Racial Zoning
IV. The Slums
V. Slum Clearance
VI. The Wealth Gap
VII. Effects of Segregation
IIX. Constitutional Remedy

A Silkworm Studio Film. Directed by Mark Lopez and written by Mark Lopez and Richard Rothstein. Narrated by Richard Rothstein. Production management by Lea Wülferth. Music, Sound Design & Mix by YouTooCanWoo. 2019.

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In 1949, photographer Don Normark visited Chávez Ravine, a close-knit Mexican American village on a hill overlooking downtown Los Angeles. Enchanted, he stayed for a year and took hundreds of photographs documenting community life. But little did Normark know that he was capturing the last images of a place that was about to disappear — within a few short years, the entire neighborhood would be gone. Chávez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story tells the story of how this Mexican American community was destroyed by greed, political hypocrisy and good intentions gone awry.

Photographer Don Normark in an early self-portrait.

In this film, filmmaker Jordan Mechner explores what happened, interviewing many of the former residents of Chávez Ravine as well as some of the officials who oversaw the destruction of the community. Narrated by Cheech Marin and scored by Ry Cooder and Lalo Guerrero, Chávez Ravine combines contemporary interviews with archival footage and Normark’s haunting black-and-white photographs to reclaim and celebrate a beloved community of the past. [Description from Independent Lens.]

Background

Located in a valley a few miles from downtown Los Angeles, Chávez Ravine was home to generations of Mexican Americans. Named for Julian Chavez, one of the first Los Angeles County Supervisors in the 1800s, Chávez Ravine was a self-sufficient and tight-knit community, a rare example of small town life within a large urban metropolis. For decades, its residents ran their own schools and churches and grew their own food on the land. Chavez Ravine’s three main neighborhoods — Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop — were known as a “poor man’s Shangri La.”

The death knell for Chavez Ravine began ringing in 1949, the same year that Don Normark captured his collection of photographs of the community. The Federal Housing Act of 1949 granted money to cities from the federal government to build public housing projects. Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron voted and approved a housing project containing 10,000 new units — thousands of which would be located in Chavez Ravine.

Viewed by neighborhood outsiders as a “vacant shantytown” and an “eyesore,” Chávez Ravine’s 300-plus acres were earmarked by the Los Angeles City Housing Authority as a prime location for re-development. In July 1950, all residents of Chavez Ravine received letters from the city telling them that they would have to sell their homes in order to make the land available for the proposed Elysian Park Heights. The residents were told that they would have first choice for these new homes, which included two dozen 13-story buildings and more than 160 two-story bunkers, in addition to newly rebuilt playgrounds and schools. Some residents resisted the orders to move and were soon labeled “squatters,” while others felt they had no choice and relocated. Most received insubstantial or no compensation for their homes and property.

Film Clip

Using the power of eminent domain, which permitted the government to purchase property from private individuals in order to construct projects for the public good, the city of Los Angeles bought up the land and leveled many of the existing buildings. By August 1952, Chávez Ravine was essentially a ghost town. The land titles would never be returned to the original owners, and in the following years the houses would be sold, auctioned and even set on fire, used as practice sites by the local fire department.

Photos by Don Normark. Click image collage for album.

The plan for Los Angeles public housing soon moved to the forefront of a decade-long civic battle. The story of Chávez Ravine is intertwined with the social and political climate of the 1950s, or the “Red Scare” era. While supporters of the federal public housing plan for Chávez Ravine viewed it as an idealistic opportunity to provide improved services for poor Angelenos, opponents of the plan — including corporate business interests that wanted the land for their own use — employed the widespread anti-communist paranoia of the day to characterize such public housing projects as socialist plots. In 1952, Frank Wilkinson, the assistant director of the Los Angeles City Housing Authority and one of the main supporters behind Elysian Park Heights, faced questioning by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was fired from his job and sentenced to one year in jail.

The Los Angeles City Council attempted to cancel the public housing contract with federal authorities, but courts ruled the contract legally binding. But by the time Norris Poulson was elected mayor in 1953, the project’s days were numbered. Poulson ran for office using the Chavez Ravine controversy as a platform, vowing to stop the housing project and other examples of “un-American” spending. After much negotiation, Poulson was able to buy the land taken from Chavez Ravine back from the federal government at a drastically reduced price, with the stipulation that the land be used for a public purpose.

Los Angeles was also a rapidly growing city in the 1950s. Despite its expanding population, the city had yet to host a major-league sports team. County supervisor Kenneth Hahn began to scout out potential teams that might be willing to relocate to Los Angeles, including the Brooklyn Dodgers. Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley soon struck a deal with the city officials, acquiring the minor league Los Angeles Angels and its small ballpark with the promise of a new stadium to be built on the land from Chavez Ravine. As Frank Wilkinson explains in the film Chávez Ravine, “We’d spent millions of dollars getting ready for it, and the Dodgers picked it up for just a fraction of that. It was just a tragedy for the people, and from the city it was the most hypocritical thing that could possibly happen.”

O’Malley’s move to Chávez Ravine did not occur without major controversy. Vicious inter-city politics included allegations of Mayor Poulson making illegal deals with the Dodgers while betraying the public, while supporters of the stadium, including public figures such as Ronald Reagan, argued that opponents were “baseball haters.” In the end, O’Malley supporters won a public referendum by only three percent, allowing O’Malley to build the stadium in exchange for giving the Angels’ ballpark back to the city. Additional lawsuits froze the official transfer of land and delayed construction, but in 1959, the city began clearing the land for the stadium after removing the last few families that had refused to leave Chávez Ravine. On April 10, 1962, the 56,000-seat Dodger Stadium officially opened. [Background from Independent Lens.]

Film website on Independent Lens | Purchase from Bullfrog Films.

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Aurora Vargas is carried by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies after her family refused to leave their house in Chávez Ravine. May 8, 1959. Source: Hugh Amott, Los Angeles Times.

Desiree Barksdale’s description [below] reveals the pain that many students feel when their home is stolen — through eviction, divorce, court orders that place them in foster care, or gentrification that pushes low-income and people of color out of our school’s neighborhood and into the “numbers,” as the students call the outer ring of Portland where they have landed.

I knew it was the eviction notice that came no matter how hard [my mother] worked, how good we were, how friendly of a neighbor we were. I was young, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew we were going to have to move again, but so soon this time? Would we end up in a shelter again? Would we have to switch schools? Again? Tears swelled my eyes and poured down my dirty, 8-year-old cheeks. My tiny fists clenched so tight my knuckles turned white, my whole body shook with angry sobs. Barely brushing 4 feet tall, I was going to destroy the whole world for what they were doing to me: for taking away my security, my happiness, my home.

After hearing students like Desiree discuss the gentrification of Jefferson High School’s neighborhood, Dianne Leahy, the insightful and hardworking teacher with whom I co-taught junior English for the last two years, and I decided to create a yearlong curriculum we christened “Stealing Home.” In the unit, we look at the history and literature of stolen homes and land — from Native American “removals” to reservations, to the violent expulsions of African Americans during the 1920s and ’30s, to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. We look at the resistance that emerged. The last segment of our unit — eminent domain and urban renewal — brings the teaching back to our neighborhood and the students’ anger over gentrification that initiated our investigation.

Mrs. Abrana Arechiga and her daughter, Mrs. Vicki Augustain, look at the ruins of one of their Chavez Ravine homes Date: May 14, 1959. Click for more photos from the UCLA IMLab.

To understand how eminent domain works, students consider Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop (also referred to as Chávez Ravine), where Dodger Stadium now lives, and Albina, the historic African American neighborhood that Jefferson High School anchors.

– – – –

We started with Hugh Arnott’s photograph [above] of Chávez resident Aurora Vargas, being physically carried from her home by police officers. As we showed students the Vargas slide, we said, “First, just notice what you see. Make a list of your observations about the photograph.” As students shared their observations, we listed them on the board. For the next section, we asked students to make connections. “What does this photograph remind you of? Anything from your life? From movies? From a book?” Again students shared out loud.

– – – –

As a language arts teacher, I have a duty to teach students to read and write effectively, but one cannot write without learning how to think about the world, to step back from our individual pain and ask questions and find patterns. I want students like Desi to know that her loss of home wasn’t because she wasn’t good enough or smart enough, but because we live in a system that continues to put profit over people

Classroom Stories

I used Linda Christensen’s Stealing Home lesson and my students LOVED IT! Many connected to this lesson on a personal level. It is a huge piece of getting them to understand the human side to complicated (and boring) government issues.

Housing discrimination and other forms of systemic racism/classism are all themes I touch upon many times throughout the year, but particularly in looking at Civil Rights Supreme Court cases… I work through with students some of the options of the federal government and ask the big question “in what situations should our federal government use its rank over state governments?”

Megan Briere’s class in Las Vegas, NV

Once students better understand these topics through more personal narratives like Christensen’s, it is something they are passionate about post-lesson and they love discussing how these issues still exist today and how we might go about changing them (whether that’s at the federal level or not).

Students gain so much by being able to make personal and lifelong connections to issues involving our government.

—Megan Briere

High School Social Studies Teacher, Las Vegas, Nevada

Living in Charleston, South Carolina my students are no stranger to housing discrimination. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, housing uncertainty is increasing in the community. The lesson “Stealing Home: Eminent Domain, Urban Renewal, and the Loss of Community,” taught over several days, served as a great opportunity to help my students make connections between historical housing discrimination and current issues in the community.

I began the lesson with a comparison of photos and stories. First, Aurora Vargas being carried out of her home and then a recent CNN story about people being evicted during the pandemic. Students were asked to compare and contrast what they were seeing and reasons people could be removed from their homes.

We then talked through the Dodger Stadium story and talked about all the ways the people fought back and what “eminent domain” means. Eminent Domain is personal to my students because there is a current push in Charleston to replace a section of low-income neighborhoods with a freeway. Students were able to make a lot of connections between Dodger Stadium and what they are seeing in Charleston.

We finished by talking about Thomas’ Albina Poem. Students read it and shared their reactions to it. I then showed them photos of how the neighborhood around our school has changed in the last decade. We talked about gentrification and several students were able to share how their families have been affected by all the changes in Charleston. After looking at photos I again asked them to reflect on the poem and what they think the future of Charleston holds.

In reflection, students expressed that they liked being able to talk about these issues that our community faces and use words like “gentrification” to describe what they have experienced. They also expressed a desire to dig deeper into the historical aspects of how racism shapes Charleston.

—Annie Palumbo

Middle School Social Studies Teacher, Charleston, South Carolina

This lesson was originally published in the Summer 2013 issue of Rethinking Schools magazine.

For more lessons and articles like this one, visit Rethinking Schools.

The post Stealing Home: Eminent Domain, Urban Renewal, and the Loss of Community appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Home to generations of Mexican Americans, Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop were founded in the 1840s. They grew into strong communities, with more than 300 families running their own schools and churches and managing their own land, representing a small town life within a major urban center.

Yet the tranquility of these communities changed by 1949. With the passage of the 1949 Federal Housing Act, 10,000 new low-income houses were approved to be built in Los Angeles, and Mayor Norris Poulson chose Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop (often referred to by government officials as Chavez Ravine) as the sites of the new houses.

The Mexican American citizens living in the town were promised first selection of the new houses, so they initially agreed to see their beloved village razed to the ground. But another major event occurred a few years later in 1958  — Major League Baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers were relocating to Los Angeles, and the new baseball stadium was to be built on the communities of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop. The residents decided to fight until the end as a unified resistance group.

The representative from the L.A. Housing Authority who came to the defense of the families, Frank Wilkinson, was targeted and jailed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Aurora Vargas is carried by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies on May 8, 1959, after her family refused to leave their home. Source: Hugh Amott, Los Angeles Times

Manuel Arechiga, a citizen of whose family had lived there for generations, remarked that:

My family and I fought every way we knew how to stay in our home in Chavez Ravine. Police had to carry my daughter, Aurora Vargas from our house. . .  we lost our home and our land, but we didn’t lose our pride because we fought with everything we had.

Given no compensation for their displacement, the citizens of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop were forced to flee and find housing elsewhere, while the Brooklyn Dodgers’ stadium was constructed on the historic site of a now destroyed Mexican American community.

Learn More and Take Action

Visit Buried Under the Blue and sign a petition with multiple demands, including “reparations from the agencies that destroyed our three communities and robbed the generational wealth of the people of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop.”

Listen to NPR’s Codeswitch podcast, “Remembering the Lost Communities Buried Under Center Field” and the bilingual record Chavez Ravine by Ry Cooder. Find many more photos in the UCLA IMLab Chavez Ravine Media Archive.

Teach about the practice of displacement with Linda Christensen’s lesson “Stealing Home: Eminent Domain, Urban Renewal, and the Loss of Community.”

Earlier History

There is likely not a single place that is not layered with meaning, storied at some level with displacement and slavery. The Chávez Ravine in Los Angeles, CA is no exception. Pulling back these layers reveals a more complex story of Indigenous slavery. pic.twitter.com/GSkkXjfim6

— Native Bound Unbound (@NatBoundUnbound) May 11, 2023

The post May 8, 1959: Mexican American Communities Evicted appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Green New Deal rally in Detroit ahead of the Democratic Party presidential primary debate on July 31, 2019. Source: Becker1999 via Flickr

In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change determined that global emissions need to be halved in less than 12 years or we will face catastrophically worsening drought, floods, extreme heat, and incalculable suffering. This fact has been repeated by those in the Climate Justice Movement so many times it can feel like screaming into the void. And yet it must be repeated because it is true and urgent. Slashing global emissions in this decade is a necessity, but it will take enormous pressure from below to demand that transformative policies are enacted by the world’s most powerful governments. We need action and action now.

Terrifying scenarios of a scorching future cannot alone propel us forward. We need to be energized and sustained not only by the harm we seek to prevent, but by the beautiful possibilities on the carbon-free horizon. The brilliance of Molly Crabapple’s and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s short film, A Message from the Future, is that it introduces the Green New Deal as a possible path toward a hopeful and humane future, not just an escape plan from a dystopian one. But to get there — to universal health care, a federal jobs guarantee, a transformed energy infrastructure, and an economy where the labor movement is powerful and care work is predominant — we need action and action now.

As K–12 educators already trying to tackle climate justice in our classrooms, we need no convincing about the wisdom of teaching the Green New Deal (GND). But given that the GND is not a single policy or even platform, but a still-developing vision of transformation, what should that teaching look like? In developing this lesson — part of a suite of lessons we are creating for Rethinking Schools — we were clear that we wanted to invite students to be engaged as architects of that vision, not just observers. We wanted students to be able to make judgments about and share opinions on the collection of policies needed to prevent climate disaster and secure a more just future.

“Green Jobs” by Lisa Vollrath, Creative Action Network poster series.

The GND is ambitious. That makes it easy for protectors of the status quo to dismiss it as impractical, impossible, pie in the sky. Without concrete historical parallels to refer to, we were concerned that our students’ imaginations would fall prey to cynicism or defeatism. So we turned to the obvious place: the original New Deal, from which the GND of course takes its name. It was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 inaugural speech that he accurately described what the people, experiencing the emergency of the Great Depression, expected from him: “action and action now.”

In this lesson, students learn about the ambitious and multifaceted plan of “action and action now” through the stories of a wide variety of people who interacted with New Deal policies. The twenty people students will “meet” include:

• Viola B. Muse, hired as part of the “Negro Unit” of the Federal Writers Project to document the stories of the last living formerly enslaved people in Florida;
• Martina Gangle Curl, an artist hired to paint murals around Oregon by the Federal Art Project;
• Fred Ross, hired by the Farm Security Administration to manage a camp in California for migrant workers fleeing the dust bowl and unemployment;
• James Lowe, hired by the Civilian Conservation Corps to do forestry work in rural Pennsylvania. His story is included in Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement;
• Emma Tiller, a sharecropper in Texas who benefited from the Works Progress Administration’s jobs program even while criticizing FDR’s agricultural policies;
• Sylvia Woods, union organizer and public speaker, starting at 10-years-old when she refused to sing the “Star Spangled Banner” at school ;
• Louise Stokes, raised two sons who became a congressperson and a mayor, in a public housing unit funded by the New Deal’s Public Works Administration;
• Jesse Jackson, unofficial mayor of the Hooverville encampment in Seattle;
• Ella Baker, labor and civil rights activist, taught in the Workers Education Program;
• Woody Guthrie, a renowned folk musician who composed ballads about labor struggles.

We hoped these glimpses of the New Deal would equip our students, when it came time to talk about the Green New Deal, with historical precedents to dream big, and with plenty of practical ideas about how to transform those dreams into policies.

This lesson is not meant to hold up the 1930s as a “When America Was Great” moment. We are clear-eyed about the New Deal: Its housing policies exacerbated and deepened segregation and the racial wealth gap; many of its provisions left out agricultural or domestic workers — and therefore the majority of Black workers in the United States; although the Indian Reorganization Act halted some of the most genocidal policies toward Native people, many other natural resource-related projects — like dam building — ignored treaties and destroyed ways of life; and it was during the New Deal that the Roosevelt administration oversaw the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

The New Deal, like the country from which it sprang, was poisoned by white supremacy. A number of the roles in the mixer speak to their exclusion from New Deal programs or about its shortcomings.

Read an essay about this lesson “Teaching the Green New Deal: The Prequel” by Suzanna Kassouf, Matt Reed, Tim Swinehart, Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, and Bill Bigelow in Rethinking Schools.

Classroom Stories

In my unit on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, I’ve found so many of the Zinn Education Project’s resources to be helpful, especially the mixers and roleplays. In conjunction with finishing chapter 21 in the novel, I used the Zinn Education Project’s lesson, “From the New Deal to the Green New Deal.”

I teach English to high school juniors in school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and this particular mixer was wonderful because it shared the stories of diverse people from across the nation during the struggles of the Great Depression and how the New Deal helped AND hindered them in their quest for survival and dignity.

By Ricardo Levins-Morales

It also provided our class a nice contemporary connection between the climate crisis that was present during the Dust Bowl years and the even more massive climate crisis we are facing now. Students were able to see those connections and it provided out class an entry point into understanding what the Green New Deal is and how it connects to the first New Deal.

I had a number of students curious to learn more about the Green New Deal after watching the video A Message from the Future, and the activity also allowed us to discuss the Build Back Better Plan currently being weakened in Congress.

In addition to the excellent and detailed description of the lesson provided, I also began our lesson with a freewrite and discussion on the question,

What obligations does a government have towards its citizens? What do you think? What does Steinbeck think?

We then watched “A Message from the Future” and proceeded with the mixer, which by this point my students are familiar with.

As with previous activities from the Zinn Ed Project, the lesson was high interest for students and led to some excellent connections and reflection, a few of which I will share below:

Jesse Jackson, right, the “mayor” of Hooverville, and Ruben Washington make plans to dig ditches to drain water from the streets in the settlement on January 13, 1935. From Seattle Times Archive.

The story in the mixer that made the biggest impression on me was Jesse Jackson. I think this because he was able to help a lot of people even though the cops were harassing and fighting the community that he made. Something that inspires me about the original New Deal programs is how many people they DID help even if they were closed off to a lot of other people. Some New Deal programs that I would like to see today would be the Federal Art Project for the sole reason that it funds visual art and artists, which I think is very cool.

I think the single best lesson to learn from the New Deal is to listen to the peoples opinion.

Connections I see between the New Deal and what is seen in the Grapes of Wrath is about the American economy, in which these jobs provided a little bit of hope in people’s lives. It’s how the hopes of the Joads is to obtain a job to earn an honest living through work and they take pride in that. People who had benefited from the New Deal benefited in the form of being able to work and backed up by the government and ensuring a degree of financial security.

Ella Baker stood out because she got her degree and it didn´t even help her get a job, when she finally did get a job she help stand up for justice and teach other people to stand up also.

I connected my story — Jesse Jackson’s story — to The Grapes of Wrath as I was the mayor of Hooverville and in the story, the Joads stayed at a Hooverville for a while.

I think the biggest “lesson” from the New Deal that we can learn for thinking about a “Green New Deal” is that we shouldn’t let large corporations run things and cause problems within communities. Some connections I made was Jesse Jackson was harassed by the police, similar to how the Joads were harassed.

If we were to do the green deal again I think we should focus on research related jobs, they promote the economy, have little to no impact on the environment, and you can have a million researchers without any labor leakage. I think the biggest lesson we can learn is that serious projects like these, that promote individual wealth and welfare just work, they simply improve everything around them with little loss in terms of money.

These types of activities, especially the social justice-focused lesson plans created for the Zinn Ed Project, provide opportunities for students to learn about the important, real people who drove the positive changes we’ve seen in our country over its history. It’s a true, “history from below.”

But more than just learning, students begin to empathize and see connections in their own lives and values with people who have been a part of huge, seemingly overwhelming changes. And, it also lets them think about what changes they’d like to see in our own world, and hopefully see that they can be a part of those changes.

Thanks again, Zinn Ed Project!

—Nick DePascal

High School English Language Arts Teacher, Albuquerque, New Mexico

The post From the New Deal to the Green New Deal: Stories of Crisis and Possibility appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Racial segregation characterizes every metropolitan area in the United States and bears responsibility for our most serious social and economic problems — it corrupts our criminal justice system, exacerbates economic inequality, and produces large academic gaps between white and African American schoolchildren. We’ve taken no serious steps to desegregate neighborhoods, however, because we are hobbled by a national myth that residential segregation is de facto — the result of private discrimination or personal choices that do not violate constitutional rights. In truth, however, residential segregation was created by racially explicit and unconstitutional government policy in the mid-20th century, including the racially explicit federal subsidization of whites-only suburbs in which African Americans were prohibited from participating. Only after learning the history of these policies can we be prepared to undertake the national conversations necessary to remedy our unconstitutional racial landscape.

Such a national conversation is now possible. Without minimizing the terrible dangers of today’s resurgent white supremacist activity, we also should take hope from the reaction to it: a widespread willingness to confront, in many cases for the first time, the history of African American subjugation. Our previous failure, even refusal to do so, has impeded our ability to eliminate the racial caste conditions that permeate U.S. society.

Not to be underestimated is the wave of Confederate monument removals across the South, and the acknowledgement that these monuments were erected not after the Civil War to commemorate the misguided heroism of Confederate soldiers, but rather during the Jim Crow and post-Brown v. Board of Education eras, for the purpose of celebrating slavery and its residues in second-class citizenship. Who could have imagined, even a few years ago, that a white elected politician in the South, presiding over the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, would proclaim that Confederate monuments celebrated a system “where hundreds of thousands of souls were bought, sold, and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery, of rape, of torture.”

Speaking to his fellow citizens in New Orleans of how we mis-celebrate our history, Mayor Mitch Landrieu continued:

America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined “separate but equal”; where Freedom Riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well, what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth.

And it immediately begs the questions, why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame. . . all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans. So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

Recognition of historic wrongs is an essential predicate of the resolve to correct them. As another Southern white politician, Joseph Riley Jr., mayor of Charleston, South Carolina from 1975 to 2016, recently put it, only after we “acknowledge the burden so many were forced to bear, and set the table for a deeper inquiry into the past we all share, [can] we begin to heal the wounds of racial injustice, bridge the gulf that divides us still and come together at last around a common understanding of who we truly are as American people.”

My recent book, The Color of Law, has become relevant only because of this new willingness to confront the reality of our racial history — as a first step toward remedy. It tells a “forgotten history of how our government segregated America,” resulting in the concentration of African Americans in segregated neighborhoods in every metropolitan area of the nation, not only in the South, but in the North, Midwest, and West as well. The book explains that the Constitution requires knowledge of this history before we can enact policies to integrate our communities.

That’s because the Supreme Court has made a distinction between de facto and de jure segregation. De facto segregation is racial concentrations that result from private prejudice, discriminatory practices of rogue real estate agents, personal choices to live with same-race neighbors, or income differences that have kept low-income families from moving to middle-class communities. De jure segregation, in contrast, results not from private activity but from government law and policy that violated the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth amendments to the federal constitution.

The Supreme Court has said that if segregation is de facto, there is little we can do to correct it. What happened by accident can only be undone by accident. But if segregation has been created de jure, by government’s explicit racial policies, not only are we permitted to remedy it, we are required to do so.

We share a national myth that residential segregation is de facto. It is a myth embraced not only by conservatives, but by liberals as well. It is perpetuated by our standard high school history curriculum, in which commonly used textbooks routinely describe segregation in the North as de facto, mysteriously evolved without government direction. Yet, as The Color of Law recounts, the myth is false. Federal, state, and local governments deliberately segregated residential areas of every metropolitan area of the nation, designed to ensure that African Americans and whites would have to live separately.

For example, the federal government purposefully placed public housing in high-poverty, racially isolated neighborhoods to concentrate the black population. And it created a whites-only mortgage insurance program to shift the white population from urban neighborhoods to exclusively white suburbs. The Internal Revenue Service granted tax exemptions for charitable activity to organizations that openly enforced neighborhood racial homogeneity. Government-licensed realtors, with the open support of state regulators, enforced a “code of ethics” that prohibited the sale of homes to African Americans in white neighborhoods. In thousands of cases, police forces organized and supported mob violence to drive black families out of homes on the white side of racial boundaries. Federal and state regulators sanctioned the refusal of the banking, thrift, and insurance industries to make loans to homeowners in other-race communities.

By the time the federal government reversed its policy of subsidizing segregation in 1962, and by the time the Fair Housing Act banned private discrimination in 1968, the residential patterns of major metropolitan areas were set. White suburbs that had been affordable to the black working class in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s were now no longer so, both because of the increase in housing prices (and whites’ home equity) during that period, and because other federal policies had depressed black incomes while supporting those of whites. At the beginning of the New Deal the National Recovery Act established industrial wages at lower levels for industries where black workers predominated; later, Social Security and Fair Labor Standards legislation excluded from coverage occupations in which African Americans predominated, for example, agriculture and domestic service. It was not until 1964 that the National Labor Relations Board for the first time refused to certify a union’s exclusive bargaining status because it openly refused to represent black workers.

Open housing demonstration in Seattle, October 20, 1963. Image: Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection.

I’ve summarized some of these policies on Terry Gross’s radio program, Fresh Air. But my articles and The Color of Law are not the only sources for correcting the de facto myth. Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example, in “The Case for Reparations” and other articles in The Atlantic, also tells part of this story. Several scholars have done the same.

We promote the myth of de facto segregation by mis-teaching our young people about our past. When I was researching The Color of Law, I examined high school history textbooks that were commonly in use during the early years of this decade, and was shocked by their mendacity in describing racial history. For example, in the more than 1,200 pages of the widely used high school textbook The Americans, a single paragraph was devoted to 20th-century “Discrimination in the North.” That paragraph included one sentence on residential segregation, stating that “African Americans found themselves forced into segregated neighborhoods,” with no further explanation of how this happened or how public policy was responsible.

Another widely used high school textbook, Pearson’s United States History, also attributed segregation to mysterious forces: “In the North, too, African Americans faced segregation and discrimination. Even where there were no explicit laws, de facto segregation, or segregation by unwritten custom or tradition, was a fact of life. African Americans in the North were denied housing in many neighborhoods.” The passive voice construction — “were denied” — is not just bad writing, it hides who exactly denied housing to African Americans.

The popular high school textbook History Alive! also teaches a distorted view by suggesting that segregation was only a problem in the South. “Even New Deal agencies,” it says, “practiced racial segregation, especially in the South,” failing to explain that the New Deal’s Public Works Administration initiated the nationwide civilian public housing program by demolishing integrated neighborhoods even in the North to build segregated projects in their place, or that the New Deal’s Federal Housing Administration denied loan guarantees to developers of suburbs wherever the danger of “infiltration” of “incompatible racial groups” was present.

Such indoctrination of today’s high school students minimizes the possibility of progress toward equality when these students become our country’s leaders. As New Orleans’ Mayor Landrieu put it, referring to the South’s glorification of Confederate leaders, “We justify our silence and inaction by manufacturing noble causes that marinate in historical denial.” This is equally true of the de facto myth we have manufactured about how our nation became segregated. The next generation will do no better a job than our generation has done of progressing toward a better future, unless we teach our young people a less-sanitized version of the past.

This article is part of the Zinn Education Project’s If We Knew Our History series.

Published on: Huffington Post.

© 2017 The Zinn Education Project, a project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

The post The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated the United States appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

The white backlash was brutal. Black people who attempted to register were “barred from buying groceries or gasoline, and from receiving bank loans and medical services in the region.” They were evicted from their sharecropper shacks. Two of the few Black farmers who owned land provided space for the homeless sharecroppers to live in tents while they organized to defend their right to vote.

To prepare to tell this story, children’s book author Alice Faye Duncan conducted extensive interviews with people from that historic voting rights movement. The result is a well-researched people’s history picture book, written for upper elementary and also informative and engaging for adults. Duncan’s narrative and Charly Palmer’s illustrations describe the brave organizing by local people and the role of national media in soliciting vital support from around the country.

There is no fairytale ending. While the sharecroppers eventually won political rights, many of them lost their employment and had to leave the area. And as Duncan writes in the epilogue, “Injustice remains as persistent a foe as it was in 1959. More than fifty years after Black voters in Fayette County were evicted and reduced to living in muddy tents, voter suppression and intimidation continues in every corner of the nation.” She urges young readers to carry on the struggle. [Description from Rethinking Schools.]

The post Evicted!: The Struggle for the Right to Vote appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Black landowner, Shepard Towles, allowed several displaced farmers to pitch tents on his land. Temporary housing provided relief.

However, the Black laborers suffered more reprisals. White store clerks, bankers, and doctors in Fayette denied farmers service because they dared to vote. White segregationists also terrorized the farmers living in “Tent City.”

On December 28, 1960, farmer, Early B. Williams, and his wife Mary were asleep with their four children when white teenagers riddled their Fayette tent with bullets. Early B. was shot in the arm. A bullet missed one child’s head by an inch. Police did not charge the culprits.

Accepting the risk, Black farmers in Fayette who registered to vote subjected themselves to eviction, muddy tents, and death threats until the Federal Justice Department ruled the evictions unlawful in 1962. These farmers inspired Black and white college students to start a voting rights movement in the rural South where masses of Black citizens were denied a voice and vote.

Like the Black farmers who inspired them, the college students and local citizens in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were attacked. But with daring, their movement led to the signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Tactics of voter suppression are on the rise in the 21st century. Evicted Black farmers, from Fayette County Tennessee, left behind an example of courage. No matter the danger, people must be vigilant to dismantle voter suppression and preserve democracy.

This entry submitted by Alice Faye Duncan, author of Evicted!: The Struggle for the Right to Vote.

Learn More

Uplift the Vote—The Fayette County Tent City Movement

Pete Seeger sings the “Fayette County Blues.”

Fayette County (Tent City Timeline)

Evicted!: The Struggle for the Right to Vote

Find lessons and more resources below on the long and ongoing struggle for voting rights.

The post Dec. 28, 1960: Black Farmers in Tennessee Evicted for Registering to Vote appeared first on Zinn Education Project.