Chapter 26 - "The Affluent Society"

Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC)

· Who:
o President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (because he created the program as part of the New Deal)
· When:
o Mid-twentieth century
· Where:
o U.S.A.
· What:
o Program that allowed borrowers to purchase their homes by paying back their mortgage over a 15 year period instead of the standard 5 year mortgage that caried large balloon payments at the end of the contract.
· Why:
o Though homeowners paid more for their home under the HOLC, homeownership grew

Federal Housing Administration (FHA)

· Who:
o FDR
· When:
o Mid-twentieth century
· Where:
o USA
· What:
o Program that increased access to home ownership by insuring mortgages and protecting lenders from financial loss in the event of a default. Lenders, however, had to agree to offer low rates and terms of up to twenty or thirty years. Even more consumers could afford homes.
· Why:
o To expand affordability of homes for consumers

Servicemen's Readjustment Act

· What was it better known as?: GI Bill
· What did it do?: offered low-interest home loans, a stipend to attend college, loans to start a business, and unemployment benefits.

William Levitt/Levittown

the prototypical suburban community, in 1946 in Long Island, New York. Purchasing large acreage, subdividing lots, and contracting crews to build countless homes at economies of scale, Levitt offered affordable suburban housing to veterans and their families. Levitt became the prophet of the new suburbs, and his model of large-scale suburban development was duplicated by developers across the country.

As signs of the country's postwar affluence, what percentage of the population owned

· Televisions: 87% 1960
· Washer/dryers: (~75%) NOT FROM BOOK
· Automobiles: 74% 1959

What was issued for the 1st time in 1950 that gave consumers further increased access to credit?:

Credit Cards

How was the HOLC prejudicial in its practices? Why did it not afford equal opportunity for homeownership to all?:

the core of HOLC appraisal techniques, which reflected the existing practices of private real estate agents, was the pernicious insistence that mixed-race and minority-dominated neighborhoods were credit risks.: Did not issue loans as a result of their prejudices, created a segregated housing market

Residential Security Maps

· What were they and why were they used?: the HOLC created Residential Security Maps to identify high- and low-risk-lending areas. People familiar with the local real estate market filled out uniform surveys on each neighborhood.
· Graded from A-D (D being worst, A being best)

What was "REDLINING?":

Those rated with a "D" grade where "redlined" and banks limited loans there.

Shelley v. Kraemer (1948)

· What did this case brought before the U.S. Supreme Court determine?
o In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with African American plaintiffs and, in Shelley v. Kraemer, declared racially restrictive neighborhood housing covenants—property deed restrictions barring sales to racial minorities—legally unenforceable. Discrimination and segregation continued, however, and activists would continue to push for fair housing practices.

Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

· When?
o May 17, 1954
· What were the major aspects of the case - i.e., why was the case brought before the court?
o State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional.
· What was the verdict?
o The court found by a unanimous 9-0 vote that racial segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court's decision declared, "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." "Separate but equal" was made unconstitutional.12
· Which constitutional amendment did the court determine was being violated?
o 14th
· What was the problem with the court's verdict?
o Integration and desegregation did not immediately follow

Thurgood Marshall:

undermined Jim Crow's constitutional underpinnings. These attorneys initially sought to demonstrate that states systematically failed to provide African American students "equal" resources and facilities, and thus failed to live up to Plessy. By the late 1940s activists began to more forcefully challenge the assumptions that "separate" was constitutional at all.; first African American Justice

NAACP

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Founded February 12, 1902

Briggs v. Elliott

the first case accepted by the NAACP, illustrated the plight of segregated Black schools. Briggs originated in rural Clarendon County, South Carolina, where taxpayers in 1950 spent $179 to educate each white student and $43 for each Black student. The district's twelve white schools were cumulatively worth $673,850; the value of its sixty-one Black schools (mostly dilapidated, overcrowded shacks) was $194,575.13 While Briggs underscored the South's failure to follow Plessy, the Brown suit focused less on material disparities between Black and white schools (which were significantly less than in places like Clarendon County) and more on the social and spiritual degradation that accompanied legal segregation. This case cut to the basic question of whether "separate" was itself inherently unequal.

What was the "Double V" campaign in WWII?:

the struggle for Black inclusion had few victories before World War II, the war and the Double V campaign for victory against fascism abroad and racism at home, as well as the postwar economic boom led, to rising expectations for many African Americans. When persistent racism and racial segregation undercut the promise of economic and social mobility, African Americans began mobilizing on an unprecedented scale against the various discriminatory social and legal structures.; a slogan and drive to promote the fight for democracy in overseas campaigns and at the home front in the United States for African Americans during World War II.

Sarah Keys

In 1953, years before Rosa Parks's iconic confrontation on a Montgomery city bus, an African American woman named Sarah Keys publicly challenged segregated public transportation. Keys, then serving in the Women's Army Corps, traveled from her army base in New Jersey back to North Carolina to visit her family. When the bus stopped in North Carolina, the driver asked her to give up her seat for a white customer. Her refusal to do so landed her in jail in 1953 and led to a landmark 1955 decision, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, in which the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that "separate but equal" violated the Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Poorly enforced, it nevertheless gave legal coverage for the Freedom Riders years later and motivated further assaults against Jim Crow.

Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company (1953)

Sarah Keys refusal to do sit in segregated seating landed her in jail in 1953 and led to a landmark 1955 decision, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, in which the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that "separate but equal" violated the Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Emmett Till

In the summer of 1955, two white men in Mississippi kidnapped and brutally murdered fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. Till, visiting from Chicago and perhaps unfamiliar with the "etiquette" of Jim Crow, allegedly whistled at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant. Her husband, Roy Bryant, and another man, J. W. Milam, abducted Till from his relatives' home, beat him, mutilated him, shot him, and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. Emmett's mother held an open-casket funeral so that Till's disfigured body could make national news. The men were brought to trial. The evidence was damning, but an all-white jury found the two not guilty. Mere months after the decision, the two boasted of their crime, in all of its brutal detail, in Look magazine. "They ain't gonna go to school with my kids," Milam said. They wanted "to make an example of [Till]—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand."16 The Till case became an indelible memory for the young Black men and women soon to propel the civil rights movement forward

Rosa Parks:

On December 1, 1955, four months after Till's death and six days after the Keys v. Carolina Coach Company decision, Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery city bus and was arrested. Montgomery's public transportation system had longstanding rules requiring African American passengers to sit in the back of the bus and to give up their seats to white passengers if the buses filled. Parks was not the first to protest the policy by staying seated, but she was the first around whom Montgomery activists rallied.

Montgomery Bus Boycott:

lasted from December 1955 until December 20, 1956, when the Supreme Court ordered their integration. The boycott not only crushed segregation in Montgomery's public transportation, it energized the entire civil rights movement and established the leadership of the MIA's president, a recently arrived, twenty-six-year-old Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr

.: King helped create the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to coordinate civil rights groups across the South and buoy their efforts organizing and sustaining boycotts, protests, and other assaults against southern Jim Crow laws.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC):

an African-American civil rights organization. SCLC is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., who had a large role in the American civil rights movement.

Civil Rights Act (1957):

the first such measure passed since Reconstruction. The act was compromised away nearly to nothing, although it did achieve some gains, such as creating the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Commission, which was charged with investigating claims of racial discrimination. And yet, despite its weakness, the act signaled that pressure was finally mounting on Americans to confront the legacy of discrimination.