It's in chapter 2 ("The Steel Ring: Race and Reality in Greater St. Louis") that you get to read about a time in American history when the official policy of the federal government was to actually protect wealth, instead of the policy of today when HUD seeks to destroy it and the Attorney General of the Department of Justice (sic) sides with the black insurrection in 67 percent black Ferguson saying, [Holder says he understands mistrust of police as Ferguson protests dwindle, Fox News, 8-21-14]:
"I understand that mistrust," Holder said. "I am the attorney general of the United States. But I am also a black man."
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| Whites build and sustain civilization; blacks follow and revert civilization to the black mean (Forbes) |
Gordon's subhead for this chapter is Zoning and the "Negro Invasion," 1914-1917:
The first such effort was quite blunt. At a time when cities were first exploring the politics and legality of local zoning, St. Louis was one of a handful of cities to propose - as a matter of municipal law and policy - formalizing racial segregation.
And, in St. Louis and elsewhere, the push to clean up the City by regulating the location of tanneries or stockyards or tenements extended logically to the "nuisance" of black occupancy as well.
The fear of "negro invasion" in St. Louis was best expressed, and carefully orchestrated, by local realtors. In 1915, the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange (SLREE) created a new organization - the oddly named "United Welfare Association" - to drum up support for a racial zoning ordinance and to use new initiative and referendum procedures to place a zoning ordinance on the 1916 ballot. In its campaign, the Exchange hammered away at the fundamental threat to property values. "Before buying a home in an unrestricted locality, a man usually ascertains very nearly just what his interest, taxes, repairs, etc. are going to cost him," one pamphlet put it, "but there is no present method by which he may determine how much the property will depreciate because of the NEGRO invasion." Protection from such an invasion, by this logic, was as reasonable and responsible as fire insurance:
Do YOU REALIZE that at any time you are liable to suffer an irreparable loss, due to the coming of NEGROES into the block in which you live or in which you own property?... Perhaps you do not think your neighborhood will be invaded. Neither do you believe you are going to have a fire when you pay your fire insurance. While perhaps you have not yet been affected by this class of people coming into your neighborhood, you surely want protection against this growing danger which is more menacing than fire or the elements. At present you have no remedy in a matter of this kind. (p. 69-70)Those white realtors knew of the problems caused by blacks, which no one is allowed to admit is behind the decay in the quality of schools, business district, housing stock (blight is black-in-origin), and property values: basically every metric measuring quality of life drops significantly once a city goes from majority white to majority black. [Blame poverty, age for weak North County home market, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8-18-2013]
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| What do you notice about homicide in St. Louis? Not many dots in the majority white areas of the city... (New York Times) |
So, while the New York Times whines about "apartheid" in 67 percent black Ferguson (the "white power structure"), let's look at a late 2013 article published in the same paper, detailing the quality of life black people create in North St. Louis... home to Ferguson. [In Places Like North St. Louis, Gunfire Still Rules the Night, New York Times, 11-19-2013]:
The unmistakable pop of a gunshot ricocheted through the park in the humid air, and Montez Wayne could only hope that the bullet did not have his name on it. He sprang from his seat beneath a sprawling bald cypress, ready to make his move.Was today the day?He had seen it play out too many times before: the blast of gunfire, the blood, the body. In Mr. Wayne’s neighborhood and others on the North Side of St. Louis, drugs, poverty and struggle go hand in hand with gun violence. He barely knows his father. His mother died when he was 14, around the time he started selling drugs. His list of dead friends grows each year.Mr. Wayne lives in a poor, mostly black community, where, as in similar neighborhoods across America, residents are fed up with persistent gun violence. Victims die one by one, or in clusters. In Chicago, 23 people were shot in a matter of hours in September, 13 of them in a park in a gang-related attack. Three died.
Some communities have begun their own initiatives. The 21st Ward was the first to install street surveillance cameras, spending $600,000 out of the ward’s capital improvement budget on 25 of them. A 46-inch flat-screen television in a community center shows footage from every camera, but no one currently monitors them full time. Shortly after they went up two years ago, one camera caught a drive-by shooting. The police caught the assailants a short time later, said Antonio French, the ward’s alderman.
Remember what we learned from Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City, and realize it's the Federal Governments's mandate to ensure the blossoming of 1,000 Ferguson nationwide:
Do YOU REALIZE that at any time you are liable to suffer an irreparable loss, due to the coming of NEGROES into the block in which you live or in which you own property?... Perhaps you do not think your neighborhood will be invaded. Neither do you believe you are going to have a fire when you pay your fire insurance. While perhaps you have not yet been affected by this class of people coming into your neighborhood, you surely want protection against this growing danger which is more menacing than fire or the elements. At present you have no remedy in a matter of this kind.100 years later, every city that goes from majority white to majority black collapses, a problem far more menacing to the overall health of the community - and value of both private and residential property - than a fire or the elements.
A city can rebuild after a fire, an earthquake, a hurricane (in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: an atom bomb attack), but it cannot rebuild once it goes majority black.
Where civilization once flourished, a food desert is now lamented...





