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"Bonastia, Christopher"
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Knocking on the door
Knocking on the Dooris the first book-length work to analyze federal involvement in residential segregation from Reconstruction to the present. Providing a particularly detailed analysis of the period 1968 to 1973, the book examines how the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) attempted to forge elementary changes in segregated residential patterns by opening up the suburbs to groups historically excluded for racial or economic reasons. The door did not shut completely on this possibility until President Richard Nixon took the drastic step of freezing all federal housing funds in January 1973.Knocking on the Doorassesses this near-miss in political history, exploring how HUD came surprisingly close to implementing rigorous antidiscrimination policies, and why the agency's efforts were derailed by Nixon.
Christopher Bonastia shows how the Nixon years were ripe for federal action to foster residential desegregation. The period was marked by new legislative protections against housing discrimination, unprecedented federal involvement in housing construction, and frequent judicial backing for the actions of civil rights agencies.
By comparing housing desegregation policies to civil rights enforcement in employment and education, Bonastia offers an unrivaled account of why civil rights policies diverge so sharply in their ambition and effectiveness.
eBook
Low-Hanging Fruit: The Impoverished History of Housing and School Desegregation
This article assesses the causes and consequences of weak federal enforcement of school and housing desegregation since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Political actors who acknowledged that state action played a central role in school and residential segregation, and argued that federal, state, and local governments had an obligation to rectify this situation, were uncommon. In examining the efforts of two such individuals—Housing and Urban Development Secretary George Romney and Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff—this article begins to untangle the story of why school desegregation policies rarely reached beyond the most blatant perpetrators of racial separation, and why housing desegregation policies barely got off the ground.
Journal Article
Black Leadership and Outside Allies in Virginia Freedom Schools
In July 1963, students from Queens College (QC) and a group of New York City teachers traveled to Prince Edward County (PEC), Virginia, to teach local black youth in Freedom Schools. The county had eliminated public education four years earlier to avoid a desegregation order. PEC Freedom Schools represented the first major effort to recruit an integrated group of outside teachers and students to educate black students in a civil rights battleground over an entire summer. In contrast to the racial and class tensions that arose between black leaders and predominantly white volunteers in other civil rights campaigns, PEC volunteers willingly deferred to the expertise of local and outside black leaders. This paper identifies the relatively modest scope and well-defined mission of the program, the real-world experiences of volunteers, and the high quality of black leadership as factors that led to this positive outcome.
Journal Article
Housing Desegregation in the Era of Deregulation
When Jimmy Carter was sworn into the nation's highest office on Jan 20, 1977, Civil Rights supporters mustered some hope. In \"The State of Black America--1977,\" the Urban League reflected this tempered optimism: After eight years of a national Administration that blacks--rightly or wrongly--regarded as hostile to their needs and aspirations, they now feel that 1977 might bring a change in direction and that possibly the same type of moral leadership that led the nation to accept the legitimacy of black demands for equality during the 60s, might once again be present in Washington. By the mid-1970s, the expanded civil rights coalition, under the adept coordination of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, had won bipartisan respect in Congress for its ability to mobilize constituency group support.\" However, Civil Rights gains tended to come in \"complex areas little understood by the general public, such as employee testing and minority hiring tables,\" rather than in high-profile issues such as housing desegregation.
Journal Article
WHITE JUSTIFICATIONS FOR SCHOOL CLOSINGS IN PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY, VIRGINIA, 1959–1964
From 1959 to 1964, Prince Edward County, Virginia, dodged a court desegregation order by refusing to operate public schools. Though the county played an integral role in the national battle over civil rights, scholars and journalists have largely neglected Prince Edward's role in the national drama of race. In 1951, Black high school students went on strike to protest unequal school facilities. This strike led to an NAACP lawsuit that became one of five decided in Brown v. Board of Education. When faced with a final desegregation deadline in 1959, the county put itself in a unique position by becoming the only school district in the U.S. to close its public schools for an extended period of time rather than accept any desegregation. Most White students attended a private, segregated academy; over three-quarters of Black Prince Edward students lost some or all of those years of education. White county leaders believed they were creating a blueprint for defying desegregation in the rural South and perhaps, they hoped, throughout much of the United States. Using archival materials, interviews and secondary accounts, I explain how White county leaders made a public case for the school closings. These leaders' rhetorical strategy was a crucial early draft in the depiction of segregation as a natural state free of racial rancor. The segregationist rhetoric emanating from Prince Edward County was grounded primarily in arguments for privatization, local self-determination, and taxpayers' rights. Such arguments would come to dominate conservative rhetoric nationwide.
Journal Article
