This episode of Justice Above All investigates one way in which segregation has been rebranded in the twenty-first century: all-white, or “whites-only,” settlements. In recent years, there has been an alarming rise in these settlements across the United States. Attempts to build all-white settlements represent a modern version of segregationist housing practices like restrictive covenants. All-white settlements are morally corrosive to a multi-racial democracy and undermine the principles of inclusive housing articulated in the Fair Housing Act. Policymakers and all people who oppose segregation should actively resist the rise of all-white settlements.
Research Manager, Thurgood Marshall Institute
Senior Counsel, Legal Defense Fund
Director of Strategic Initiatives, Legal Defense Fund
Professor, American University School of Public Affairs and School of Education; Founding Director, Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab
Housing policies in the United States have long denied Black people homeownership opportunities. To revitalize the nation following the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the New Deal and Congress created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934 to “provide mortgage insurance on loans made by FHA-approved lenders.” However, the FHA’s underwriting manual encouraged racial segregation and stated that it was too risky to insure mortgages in majority- or all-Black neighborhoods. As such, the FHA denied homeownership opportunities in Black communities and encouraged white communities to prevent racial integration.
Restrictive covenants—agreements added to the deed of a home that prohibited the sale of that property to non-white people—were a popular tool among homeowners to ensure that their neighborhoods would remain exclusively white. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that racially restrictive covenants violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and therefore could not be enforced. Restrictive covenants were not deemed illegal, however, until two decades later with the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
The Fair Housing Act was signed into law on April 11, 1968, just days after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and following years of advocacy by the Civil Rights Movement for Black people to have equal access to housing. The Fair Housing Act protects people from housing discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, family status, and disability, whether they are renting an apartment, buying a home, or securing a mortgage.
However, in recent years, the threat of all-white settlements has emerged across the United States. All-white settlements are a repackaged form of racial segregation in housing, violating the principles of fair housing and an inclusive democracy. All-white settlements currently exist in Ravenden, Arkansas, near the Ozark Mountains, and in Jackson County, Tennessee. White segregationist groups have expressed a desire to establish additional all-white settlements in Michigan, in Maine, and along the Northeast corridor.
The growth of all-white settlements is fueled by racial disinformation and fear-based social manipulation by political actors to cultivate extremism and destabilize society for their personal and political gain.
Modern efforts to recruit support for segregated, all-white settlements are fundamentally dependent on the dissemination of racial disinformation through social media platforms. Echoing tactics from previous historical periods, proponents of racial segregation today strategically spread this disinformation to limit equality and undermine democracy.
The relentless proliferation of racial disinformation online exposes families, friends, and neighbors to the risk of adopting supremacist and extremist ideologies. To effectively counteract this threat, use the below actionable tools and strategies designed to expose and combat extremist thinking when it surfaces.
A network of nonprofit organizations receive funding through the Fair Housing Initiatives Program (FHIP) to conduct testing and investigate potential housing discrimination. These organizations work with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to assist people who believe that they may have experienced housing discrimination. Many of these nonprofits investigate the claims by sending “testers” to identify fair housing violations. In addition, HUD funds state and local agencies through the Fair Housing Assistance Program (FHAP) to enforce fair housing laws in their jurisdiction.
States can also stop the proliferation of “whites-only” communities through legislation. For example, Pennsylvania House Bill 2103 seeks to amend the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act to clarify that private or fraternal organizations cannot restrict membership on characteristics such as race.
