Did Racists Create the Suburban Nation?

Since the l992 elections, when suburbanites outnumbered all other voters for the first time, historians have viewed suburbanization with a sense of alarm. Metropolitan-area historians have built with great ardor upon a foundation of earlier work, especially that of Kenneth Jackson.¹ Using the latest geographical techniques with great resourcefulness, these historians have deepened Jackson's troubling picture of a distinctive post-World War II American sprawl. Above all, they have reinforced two of Jackson's observations: postwar America's suburban migration was divisive; it was also surprisingly unnatural and unspontaneous.

These historians have made clear that America's booming economy and population, left to natural impulses, might well have herniated up rather than out. The Interstate Highway Trust Fund and mortgage guarantees by the Federal Housing Adminstration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) were only the most obvious subsidies that induced Americans to own more cars and houses than market forces could have done. The unfairness of suburbanization is now obvious. The FHA's guidelines were explicitly racist. Local zoning laws enforced—and often created—class distinctions. Private lenders choked off the improvement of black neighborhoods with redlining and poured extra capital into white ones. Realtors' code of ethics required them to steer black and white homebuyers apart. New ghettoes were created by public housing and urban renewal policies. Recent historians, led by Thomas Sugrue, have emphasized even more than Jackson the desperate plight of those left —or rather pushed—behind. They have emphasized that the pushing was often violent.² Where Jackson explored many additional causes and effects of suburbanization, recent historians call suburbanites home to a sense of responsibility for urban crises.

Two new books by Matthew Lassiter and Kevin Kruse do much more than show that the South took part in the vast anti-social migration to the suburbs. Inequality appears more intractable now than l00 or 50 years ago because spatial boundaries, imposed in the post-World War II era, now block upward mobility—the great escape hatch that America once had (or white America plausibly believed it had) from the global reality of class division. Lassiter and Kruse excavate a uniquely instructive section of those boundaries. The boundaries are encrusted with reefs of economic and educational differences that make their man-made origins hard to discern. Lassiter and Kruse, because they dig and sift in the South, reveal that liberal accommodation of the civil rights movement—the other great escape hatch America thought it had from inequality—often depended upon and reinforced the boundaries that local governments used to accommodate racism.

Race was unmistakably a useful tool for creating suburban boundaries. A big question remains as to how much difference, in the long run, race made.³ Suburbanized America may be reaching the point where racism is no longer necessary to justify the inequality it experiences. Is America now just like other countries that accept social inequality and deem it inevitable? With extraordinary intellectual and moral patience, Lassiter and Kruse bring us closer to an answer than we have been since the era of suburbanization and desegregation began.

The heart of Lassiter's book is a tale of two cities. Atlanta today has "a historically unprecedented concentration of poor minority students in the central city" and a "transparently unequal school system." Charlotte, by contrast, has "one of the most integrated public school systems in the United States" (p. ll8). Lassiter balances his exhaustive Atlanta-Charlotte comparison with rich parallels from Richmond, Little Rock, Raleigh, Memphis, and other southern cities. This rare comparative discipline keeps Lassiter in the real world. He avoids detours on the scenic road-not-taken, where one finds the standards that implicitly frame other histories of race and rights.

In Atlanta as in the rest of the country, Lassiter explains, federal mortgage guidelines "mandated racial and class hegemony...