SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) - Members of the Caddo Parish Civil Rights Heritage Trail project team at LSU Shreveport, KTAL NBC 6 NEWS, and Red River Radio (NPR) are excited to announce the beginning of a series that will show how redlining had harmful economic, social, and psychological effects on sections of Shreveport. The series, headed by LSU Shreveport Professor of History Dr. Gary Joiner seeks to examine the causes and effects of redlining in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Here is a brief introduction to the series, written and mapped by Joiner and edited by KTAL/KMSS' Jaclyn Tripp. Institutional racism comes in many forms and sometimes lasts for centuries or at least several generations. It is always rooted in xenophobia, which is an unreasonable fear of strangers or foreigners, an “us versus them” mentality. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as part of his New Deal policies during the Great Depression, created a myriad of agencies to soften Americans’ hardships. Most worked as intended, but a few went horribly wrong. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) became operational in 1933, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934. The FHA concentrated on high-end, safer loans, while the HOLC operated on the broader market. They were tasked with identifying areas where federally backed “economically sound” residential loans could be granted on non-farm properties and providing them. The HOLC sent teams to 239 US cities with populations exceeding 40,000 people according to the 1930 Census and created maps portraying residential neighborhoods. Local real estate professionals assisted them in their evaluations. The only cities in Louisiana assessed by the HOLC in Louisiana were New Orleans and Shreveport. Interactive map of the HOLC project cities. Source: https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map#loc=5/38.3397/-101.7993 The teams used existing street maps to determine neighborhood status. They often used Sanborn Fire Insurance Map indexes. In Shreveport, they used a city map drawn by the local Globe Map Company. The FHA used the HOLC maps as core documentation and drew their versions. These were almost all destroyed when the Fair Housing Act was enacted. The maps were not publicly available and were closely held for decades. HOLC teams used grease pencils to color code residential areas down to city block levels. Neighborhood Levels –5 Class A - The best areas were labeled “A” and colored green. These were safest for long-term loans. These neighborhoods featured the best housing and well-manicured lawns; the residents were upper middle class. These were almost entirely White populations. The FHA insured long-term mortgages. Class B—Still desirable White neighborhoods were labeled “B” and colored blue. The homes in these neighborhoods were middle-class and stable, with FHA—insured mortgages of 20 years or less. Class C – “Definitely Declining” neighborhoods were labeled “C” and colored yellow. These were mixed-race areas. The FHA insured these mortgages of 10 years or less. Class D – “Hazardous” neighborhoods were labeled “D” and colored red. They were uninsurable. In the South, they were almost 100% Black neighborhoods. There were primarily immigrant populations in the Northeast, Midwest, and West. Homes were in poor condition, and the accompanying descriptions were primarily derogatory. The color coding of Class D neighborhoods was known internally as “redlining.” The term has since become a code for blatant government segregation. The ills associated with redlining were first addressed by the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which outlawed it and forced financial regulators to enforce the changes. This was followed by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, which required lending data to be made public. The original mapping data was not part of this disclosure. Some revisionist researchers downplay the role these maps had on American culture. However, most agree that their impact was devastating. Economists Bhash Mazumber, Daniel Aaronson, and Daniel Hartley, who work for the Federal Reserve, posited that the appraisers weren’t merely identifying disparities that already existed in the 1930s, and that were likely to worsen anyway. The lines they helped draw, based in large part on the belief that the presence of blacks and other minorities would undermine property values, altered what would happen in these communities for years to come. Maps alone didn’t create segregated and unequal cities today. But the role they played was pivotal. HOLC map of Shreveport from 1940. Source: University of Richmond Mapping Inequality. The base map is the 1940 Globe Map Co. Map and Street Guide of Shreveport, LA. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map/LA/Shreveport/areas#mapview=full&loc=13/32.4829/-93.7526 Self-fulfilling prophecies The maps became self-fulfilling prophecies, as “hazardous” neighborhoods — “redlined” ones — were starved of investment and deteriorated further in ways that most likely also fed white flight and rising racial segregation. These neighborhood classifications were later used by the Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration to decide who was worthy of home loans at a time when homeownership was rapidly expanding in postwar America. Kenneth T. Jackson, a historian, discovered a HOLC map of St. Louis in 1976; since then, researchers have pored over archives to determine their effects. The maps had previously been all but ignored. Now, they are used to define how systemic racism has lingered or thrived, not only in segregated housing but also in spirals of economic decline, displacement due to gentrification, and in coastal urbanized areas, where severe storm damage affects disproportionately poorer minority neighborhoods. Over the past twenty years, the federal government and some large cities have successfully sued large realty chains, lending institutions, and insurance companies over continued redlining practices. Courts have delivered mixed rulings on cases due to plaintiffs’ standings or improper filings. Some of the most notable successful cases include CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BUREAU, and UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. HUDSON CITY SAVINGS BANK, FSB, for $33 Million, State of New York v. Evans Bancorp settlement for $825,000, and US Department of Housing and Urban Development v. Associated Bank, for $200 Million. One might ask, “Were the federal government, the banks, and the insurance companies operating on inherently evil motives?” No, from an economic perspective. The lens we see through today is not the same as during the Great Depression. The national economy was in freefall. The federal government was essentially not allowed to intervene in banking practices and had no desire to during the free-wheeling Roaring ‘20s. When the stock market crashed in 1929, no one had the authority to act, and paralysis set in. Before the FHA came into effect in 1934, banks could not place a ceiling on the number and amount of mortgages they granted. The Federal Reserve reasoned that banks would be able to pay depositors if little cash was on hand in the event of a run on the bank. While the FHA institutionalized redlining, the practice did not originate with the federal government, and public and private redlining were fundamentally intertwined.” When the HOLC began in 1933, the nation found itself in a crippling vice. A cross-country housing shortage, horrible crop yields during the Dust Bowl, and the abysmal job market meant that whites moved to larger cities for any jobs. Blacks and immigrants were primarily stuck in place. Those who left the South for the far West and the Midwest between 1910 And 1930 had done so. Many lower middle-class and lower-class neighborhoods were trapped in place. The myth of accidental ghettos Strict segregation policies in large cities across the nation in the nineteenth century led to ghettos (not in the traditional sense of a homogeneous ethnic, religious, or racially composed neighborhood), but in a stereotypical inner-city lower class, often an impoverished area with little or no opportunity of advancement of jobs, poor education, and a real or apparent high crime rate. Richard Rothstein, perhaps best summed up the problem: "We have a myth today that the ghettos in metropolitan areas around the country are what the Supreme Court calls ‘de-facto’ — just the accident of the fact that people have not enough income to move into middle-class neighborhoods or because real estate agents steered black and white families to different neighborhoods or because there was white flight. It was not the unintended effect of benign policies,” he says. “It was an explicit, racially purposeful policy that was pursued at all levels of government, and that’s the reason we have these ghettos today and we are reaping the fruits of those policies." This is the first of many articles that will show exactly where redlining occurred in the city of Shreveport and broach the psychological, sociological, economic, and spiritual effects caused by redlining neighborhoods and business districts here and throughout the United States. Sources: Price Fishback, Jonathan Rose, Kenneth A. Snowden, and Thomas Storrs. "New evidence on redlining by federal housing programs in the 1930s." Journal of Urban Economics Vol. 141: May 2024. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119022000390?via%3DihubTodd M. Maloney, “How and Why the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Made Its Redlining Maps.” In Robert K. Nelson. Introduction, in Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, et al. “Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America.” Edited by Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers. Americsan Panorama: An Atlas of United States History, 2023.https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redliningRobert K. Nelson. Introduction, “Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America.”https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining Federal Reserve History Essay. https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/redlining (June 22, 2023).6 Ibid. In enforcing fair lending laws, the Federal Reserve Board defines redlining as "a form of illegal disparate treatment whereby a lender provides unequal access to credit, or unequal terms of credit, because of the race, color, national origin, or other prohibited characteristic(s) of the residents of the area in which the credit seeker resides or will reside or in which the residential property to be mortgaged is located." (fn 1.)Price Fishback, etal, Thomas Storrs, “New Evidence on Redlining by Federal Housing Programs,” 141. Emily Badger, “Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: How Redlining’s Racist Efforts Lasted For Decades,” The New York Times,Ausust 24, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/upshot/how-redlinings-racist-effects-lasted-for-decades.htmlCandace Jackson, “What is Redlining?” The New York Times.August 22, 2021,https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/realestate/what-is-redlining.htmlSee Bloomberg City Lab Brendan Mock, “Redlining is Alive and Well—And Evolving,”https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-28/eight-recent-cases-that-show-redlining-is-still-alive-and-evolvinghttps://www.justice.gov/opa/file/777866/dlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/11/business/dealbook/evans-bank-settles-new-york-redlining-lawsuit.htmlhttps://www.housingwire.com/articles/34006-hud-associated-bank-redlining-settlement-is-largest-ever/Carl Behrens. Commercial Bank Activities in Mortgage Finance. National Bureau of Economic Research, 1952: 15-25.Federal Housing Administration. Ninth Annual Report, 1942. LaDale Winling and Todd Michney. "The Roots of Redlining: Academic, Governmental, and Professional Networks inthe Making of the New Deal Lending Regime," Journal of American History 108, no. 1, June 2021: 42–69; Federal Reserve History Essay. https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/redlining (June 22, 2023).See the National Archives, “The Great Migration (1910 – 1970)” https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/migrations/great-migration“Historian Says Don’t ‘Sanitize’ How Our Government Created Ghettos,” Fresh Air, National Public Radio, May 14,2016. https://www.npr.org/2015/05/14/406699264/historian-says-dont-sanitize-how-our-government-created-the-ghettosRichard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, (New York:W.W. Norton, 2017), xvi.Fresh Air, “Don’t ‘Sanitize’ How Our Government Created Ghettos.”