Society.15 The conditions in which my grandmother reared Floyd were the same as those the protesters were willing to burn down.
After the riots, Blacks continued to press for economic justice in the face of flagrant discrimination. The intense labor demands of the high-growth automotive industry pressured companies to meet those needs with Black workers. Approximately one in five Detroit autoworkers was Black when I was born in 1970, up from 16 percent in 1960.16 The proliferation of unionized jobs in the auto industry empowered Black people in Detroit like few other places in the country. In terms of labor participation, Detroit had become a Mecca for Black people, just like Grandma Doris talked about.
University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue found that, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, unionized companies hired more Black people for higher pay than their non-unionized peers; the positions came with benefits, including health insurance and pensions. Union rules privileging seniority helped protect Black workers from discrimination by their supervisors, encouraging longevity in their jobs and, subsequently, creating much-needed opportunities for wealth building. Unions also created fair employment practice departments for autoworkers to seek redress for grievances.
“Because auto industry jobs were unionized and relatively well-paying, Black autoworkers formed a Black labor ‘aristocracy,’ ” wrote Sugrue in a series of articles on Blacks in the auto industry.17 General economic growth in the region in the 1960s and 1970s spurred business activity among Black-owned companies.
Floyd’s Uncle Rufus, who also lived in Detroit the late 1960s, saw an opportunity in the growth of the auto industry to start a trucking company. Rufus Criswell’s Trucking Company hauled lumber from the ports to the factories in Detroit. His business supported about a dozen employees and his immediate family who also lived in Detroit. When Rufus’ trucking business was growing, Floyd lived in Pittsburgh, and he soon got a call to return home and help with the business. It was an opportunity for a fresh start that he desperately needed, and it would help him take care of his two young sons and his daughter. In addition to giving him a job, Rufus also invited Floyd to stay with him in his house on Whitcomb Street.
Moving back to Detroit made sense. In 1970 in Detroit, the overall unemployment rate was 7.2 percent; Black unemployment was 10.3 percent. In many U.S. cities, the unemployment rate for Blacks was double that of Whites. Floyd took Rufus up on the offer. He married Bernice, the mother of his daughter, packed their bags, and moved to Detroit. My brother Kevin and I stayed at home with Mom and Mary in Wilkinsburg about 300 miles away.
Floyd landed a solid job, had a family who supported him, and was living rent-free in a single-family home in a solidly middle-class neighborhood where the lawns were maintained and light decorations in the front gave the neighborhood an upright identity. But it didn’t take him long to return to his old life of drugs and crime. Floyd was an addict. And the criminalization of the underground economy of drugs, prostitution, and other activities made Floyd vulnerable to incarceration.
In 1971, two years after he moved to Detroit, Floyd was sentenced to two and a half to five years for attempted larceny in Jackson State Penitentiary (now Michigan State Penitentiary), located about seventy-five miles outside of Detroit. He was released in 1974, but police records show he received another sentence of one to two and a half years for carrying a concealed weapon the year he was released. Floyd entered Jackson on a third charge of unarmed robbery in 1977 for a ten-year bid. Between his stints in prison, Floyd fathered another child in Detroit with his wife Bernice, as well as two children with another woman. When Floyd was killed in prison in 1978, he left behind six children born of three women. The kids ranged in age from ten to one.
He died the day before his twenty-seventh birthday. Records say he was stabbed in the heart at 7:50 a.m., dying of a single, fatal wound. My family says someone killed Floyd while he tried to break up a fight. The records are painfully inadequate. I believe Floyd died because he entered a prison instead of a drug treatment center. Many will point to his drug use and his criminal activity as causes. Floyd’s personal story is about so much more than his individual choices. Floyd’s story is about the devaluation of Black people as well as the places and homes in which he lived. That story of devaluation is being played out in the lives of countless others today.
RACISM COMES OUT IN THE WASH OF RESEARCH
Racism can be defined as the systemic devaluation of people because of their race, ethnicity, and/or immigration status. However, people and places are inextricably linked. When it comes to housing discrimination, it’s hard to see where bigotry against people begins and where place-based injustice ends. Discriminating against place leads to people of color being subjugated to racism en masse. That kind of discrimination involves the devaluation of the cities and towns as well as the physical structures within them. Policymakers, captains of industry, and private citizens all have used place-based strategies to throttle Black people’s development, restrict our movement, as well as imprison us based on racialized criminal justice policy. For proof, you need go no further than past and present redlining; predatory lending practices; environmental racism that subjects our communities to disproportionate exposure to pollution and hazardous waste; harmful zoning practices that make us susceptible to flooding and post-disaster displacement; as well as discriminatory drug sentencing and stop-and-frisk laws that reflect policymakers’ extreme disregard for Black people.18 All these injustices take years off our lives and value from our homes.
In a study I coauthored with my colleagues Jonathan Rothwell of the survey company Gallup and David Harshbarger, also at Brookings, we examined how prices in Black-majority neighborhoods convey value; we compared home prices between Black-majority neighborhoods and White neighborhoods. We examined homes of similar quality in neighborhoods that were comparable—except for the racial demographics—to make an apples-to-apples comparison between places where the share of the Black population is 50 percent or higher and those where there are few to no Black residents. After controlling for factors such as housing and neighborhood quality, education, and crime, we found that comparable homes in neighborhoods with similar amenities are worth 23 percent less in Black-majority neighborhoods, compared to those with very few or no Black residents. The percent difference is the devaluation. In real dollars, owner-occupied homes in Black neighborhoods are undervalued by $48,000 per home on average, amounting to a whopping $156 billion in cumulative losses nationwide.
Take the metropolitan statistical area (the urban core and surrounding areas) of Rochester, New York, for example. With a Black population of 11.5 percent, this metro area sees a 65 percent difference between the actual price of a home in a Black neighborhood and the adjusted rate for equivalent housing in one of the area’s White neighborhoods, amounting to a $53,000 loss in price per home. In the Durham-Chapel Hill metro area of North Carolina, which has a Black population of 26.8 percent, there is a 12.5 percent difference, resulting in $26,000 loss in price per home. In the Pittsburgh metro area, which has a Black population of 8.2 percent, there is an 11.6 percent difference, resulting in $12,000 loss in price per home. And in the homes in the Detroit metropolitan area—Detroit being the largest Black-majority major city in the nation—there is a 37 percent difference, resulting in $28,000 in average loss per home to a sum of $4.36 billion.
Let’s break all this down. Most people intuitively know that homes in Black neighborhoods are priced lower than those in White areas. This is certainly true. In the average U.S. metropolitan area, homes in neighborhoods where the share of the population is 50 percent Black are priced at roughly half the amount of homes in neighborhoods with no Black residents. There is a strong and powerful statistical relationship between the share of the population that is Black and the market value of owner-occupied homes (figure 2-1). Location in a Black neighborhood predicts a large financial penalty for 117 out of the 119 metropolitan areas
