What is Fair Housing Month?
In the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. riots gripped many of America’s largest cities. During that time President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Titles VIII and IX of that act are commonly known as the Fair Housing Act, which were meant as a follow up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Signed on April 11, 1968 the new act expanded upon laws already in existence by prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, or national origin. Later acts prohibited discrimination towards people with disabilities and families with children, which includes pregnant woman. Each April is celebrated as Fair Housing Month in recognition of this landmark law.
Read More About Fair Housing
Each April the Fair Housing Center for Rights and Research releases a Fair Housing Reading List for Adult Readers. This list includes titles of local interest, titles chosen Center staff, titles for young readers, and titles that focus on larger issues affecting society. The list includes items the library owns in physical format, which have been placed on a display for April, but there are many titles that the library has access to through Hoopla and Libby. This blog post will feature a few of the titles available as either an audiobook or ebook, occasionally the library has the same title available in both Hoopla and Libby, so you can check both services for availability.
Democratizing Cleveland: The Rise and Fall of Community Organizing in Cleveland, Ohio 1975–1985
A trenchant history of Cleveland’s community organizing movements, detailing their origins, campaigns, and legacies.
Randy Cunningham, a founding member of the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus, spent nearly fifteen years researching grassroots efforts that put neighborhood concerns and voices front and center. In Democratizing Cleveland, he chronicles one of the greatest examples of mass civic and democratic education in Cleveland’s history.
The decade between 1975 and 1985 was a thriving period of social movements and community groups built around civil disobedience. Many of these groups, led by women, were able to unite white and black neighborhoods in a common cause. Cunningham introduces readers to the various groups and the causes they took on, covering topics such as:
- Insurance and bank redlining
- Community development and urban renewal programs
- The movement’s decline during the Reagan administration
Lead Babies and Poisoned Housing: Environmental Injustice, Systemic Racism, and Governmental Failure
Drawing on historic sources as well as present-day interviews, Lead Babies and Poisoned Housing is a story about systemic racism, environmental injustice, and the failure of government.
In 2016, 1,100 mainly minority residents of a low-income housing complex in East Chicago, Indiana, received a letter from the city forcibly evicting them from their homes because a high level of lead was found in the soil under their houses. The residents were given two months to move. Many could not find safe housing nearby. The site was designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as a Superfund site because of the large amount of toxic material on it. More than 1,300 similar sites are located throughout the United States. Over 70 million people live within three miles of one of these sites.
Five years later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General charged three federal agencies—EPA, HUD, and CDC—with causing the lead poisoning of children living in the complex. The EPA, responsible for the cleanup, had been aware of the situation for 35 years. The director of the local housing authority admitted to building the complex over a demolished lead smelter. When health issues arose, the housing authority blamed the residents’ sanitary habits rather than its own failure to maintain the structures. The Center for Disease Control and Preventions’s testing of blood lead levels was revealed to be faulty. In short, the very agencies that were supposed to protect these people instead neglected, ignored, and blamed them.
But this isn’t just a story of victimization; it is also about empowerment and community members insisting their voices be heard. Lead Babies and Poisoned Housing records the human side of what happens when the industries responsible for polluting leave, but the residents remain. Those residents tell their stories in their own words-not just what happened to them, but how they acted in response. We should listen, not only for justice, but as a cautionary tale against repeated history.
We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just, and Inclusive Communities
A groundbreaking new vision for public safety that overturns more than 200 years of fear-based discrimination, othering, and punishment.
As the effects of aggressive policing and mass incarceration harm historically marginalized communities and tear families apart, how do we define safety? In a time when the most powerful institutions in the United States are embracing the repressive and racist systems that keep many communities struggling and in fear, we need to re-imagine what safety means. Community leader and lawyer Zach Norris lays out a radical way to shift the conversation about public safety away from fear and punishment and toward growth and support systems for our families and communities. In order to truly be safe, we are going to have to dismantle our mentality of Us vs. Them. By bridging the divides and building relationships with one another, we can dedicate ourselves to strategic, smart investments—meaning resources directed toward our stability and well-being, like healthcare and housing, education and living-wage jobs. This is where real safety begins.
In this book Zach Norris provides a blueprint of how to hold people accountable while still holding them in community. The result reinstates full humanity and agency for everyone who has been dehumanized and traumatized, so they can participate fully in life, in society, and in the fabric of our democracy.
The Lines Between Us: Two Families And A Quest To Cross Baltimore’s Racial Divide
A masterful narrative-with echoes of Evicted and The Color of Law—that brings to life the structures, policies, and beliefs that divide us.
Mark Lange and Nicole Smith have never met, but if they make the moves they are contemplating-Mark, a white suburbanite, to West Baltimore, and Nicole, a black woman from a poor city neighborhood, to a prosperous suburb-it will defy the way the Baltimore region has been programmed for a century. It is one region, but separate worlds. And it was designed to be that way.
In this deeply reported, revelatory story, duPont Award–winning journalist Lawrence Lanahan chronicles how the region became so highly segregated and why its fault lines persist today. Mark and Nicole personify the enormous disparities in access to safe housing, educational opportunities, and decent jobs. As they eventually pack up their lives and change places, bold advocates and activists—in the courts and in the streets—struggle to figure out what it will take to save our cities and communities: Put money into poor, segregated neighborhoods? Make it possible for families to move into areas with more opportunity?
The Lines Between Us is a riveting narrative that compels reflection on America’s entrenched inequality—and on where the rubber meets the road not in the abstract, but in our own backyards. Taking readers from church sermons to community meetings to public hearings to protests to the Supreme Court to the death of Freddie Gray, Lanahan deftly exposes the intricacy of Baltimore’s hypersegregation through the stories of ordinary people living it, shaping it, and fighting it, day in and day out.
This eye-opening account of how a city creates its black and white places, its rich and poor spaces, reveals that these problems are not intractable; but they are designed to endure until each of us—despite living in separate worlds—understands we have something at stake.
Show Me A Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race, and Redemption
Not in my backyard — that’s the refrain commonly invoked by property owners who oppose unwanted development. Such words assume a special ferocity when the development in question is public housing. Lisa Belkin penetrates the prejudices, myths, and heated emotions stirred by the most recent trend in public housing as she re-creates a landmark case in riveting detail, showing how a proposal to build scattered-site public housing in middle-class neighborhoods nearly destroyed an entire city and forever changed the lives of many of its citizens.
- Public housing projects are being torn down throughout the United States. What will take their place? Show Me a Hero explores the answer.
- An important and compelling work of narrative nonfiction in the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground.
- A sweeping yet intimate group portrait that assesses the effects of public policy on individual human lives.
Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America
An irreverent, yet powerful exploration of race relations by the New York Times-bestselling author of The Chris Farley Show
Frank, funny, and incisive, Some of My Best Friends Are Black offers a profoundly honest portrait of race in America. In a book that is part reportage, part history, part social commentary, Tanner Colby explores why the civil rights movement ultimately produced such little true integration in schools, neighborhoods, offices, and churches–the very places where social change needed to unfold. Weaving together the personal, intimate stories of everyday people–black and white–Colby reveals the strange, sordid history of what was supposed to be the end of Jim Crow, but turned out to be more of the same with no name. He shows us how far we have come in our journey to leave mistrust and anger behind–and how far all of us have left to go.
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism
“Powerful and important . . . an instant classic.” –The Washington Post Book World
The award-winning look at an ugly aspect of American racism by the bestselling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, reissued with a new preface by the author.
In this groundbreaking work, sociologist James W. Loewen, author of the classic bestseller Lies My Teacher Told Me, brings to light decades of hidden racial exclusion in America. In a provocative, sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, Loewen uncovers the thousands of “sundown towns”—almost exclusively white towns where it was an unspoken rule that blacks weren’t welcome—that cropped up throughout the twentieth century, most of them located outside of the South.
Written with Loewen’s trademark honesty and thoroughness, Sundown Towns won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and launched a nationwide online effort to track down and catalog sundown towns across America.
In a new preface, Loewen puts this history in the context of current controversies around white supremacy and the Black Lives Matter movement. He revisits sundown towns and finds the number way down, but with notable exceptions in exclusive all-white suburbs such as Kenilworth, Illinois, which as of 2010 had not a single black household. And, although many former sundown towns are now integrated, they often face “second-generation sundown town issues,” such as in Ferguson, Missouri, a former sundown town that is now majority black, but with a majority-white police force.
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review).
Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.
