How does geography do the work of Jim Crow laws?
In the 1940s and 1950s the whole country was living in central cities or in rural areas. Suburbs as we know them hadn’t come into existence. There was a tremendous demand for housing at the end of World War II, and the federal government stepped into the breach, and stepped into the role of addressing the demand for housing, as it also stepped into the role of addressing the demand for civil rights and inclusion by blacks. In creating the suburbs it was explicit that the suburbs were for whites only. You had a couple of things happening at the same time: You had the end of the war. You had blacks coming to the North and to urban areas in record numbers. You had demands for civil rights, and you had the federal government essentially paying white people to leave the central city and to live in this new space – a white space – called the suburbs. The structure of that is still what we’re living with today. So much of the work of Jim Crow laws was maintaining social distance between black
