1. I very much enjoyed staying in out of the heat, aside from watering the lawns and plants, and watching two episodes of the PBS series Ten That Changed America. First I watched "Ten Towns that Changed America" and it included a look at Greenbelt, MD, focusing on how the original city plan for Greenbelt was centered on pathways that went underneath the streets to keep cars and pedestrians apart and was also designed so that a variety of houses, apartments, and townhouses didn't face the street, but faced a large and green park area. When we lived in Greenbelt, we did not live in what's now known as Old Greenbelt where the original housing built in the 1930s is located, but the Co-op we shopped at, the gas station I frequented, the Greenbelt Aquatic Center, and the library are all in Old Greenbelt and I was in this part of town a lot.
A common thread running through the "Ten Towns that Changed America" was the fact that Greenbelt, like the Long Island suburb, Levittown, a housing development featuring inexpensive suburban houses built to help veterans of WWII be able to buy a house upon returning stateside with the help of federally subsidized mortgages, were white only. Part of the Greenbelt experiment was to create a planned community, not only of residences, but of the people who lived in them. All applicants were screened and interviewed to make sure they fit a certain profile and black people were excluded. Likewise, the Levitts, the developers of more than one Levittown in the east, wrote explicit language in their covenant that not only were these homes to be bought only by white people, but that residents were forbidden to sell their homes to black people.
Such prohibitions were not limited to Greenbelt and Levittown. Real estate developers and lending institutions across the country red-lined city maps, indicating where homes were not to be sold to black people nor would lending institutions make money available to black people, even when they were financially eligible. In many ways, being able to do well in the USA economy depends upon home ownership and, in many families, like our family, the benefits of home ownership get passed on to succeeding generations.
In my case, not only do I live in and own the house formerly owned by my parents, but when it came time to buy my first house twenty-five years ago, Mom and Dad could afford to help me make a down payment largely because they owned their home and enjoyed the financial benefits of this ownership. The only reason we could buy Mom and Dad's house last fall was because of the money we had from the sale of the house we sold when we moved to Maryland. So, not only do the advantages of home ownership get passed along, as they did for me, so do the disadvantages that come with being closed out of the housing market. It's a perfect example of seeing how history is a study, not of the past, but of continuation. Even though such discriminatory real estate and lending practices have been made illegal (but they continue), the effects of these practices live on, especially because non-white people were often shut out of the benefits inherent in getting a financial leg up by purchasing a house and were not able to these benefits themselves, let alone pass them on to future generations.
Back in February of 2018, the Center for Investigative Reporting, whose podcast is called Reveal, did a story on current lending practices that exclude black people. It's entitled, "Kept Out". It's here.
I also watched Ten Streets that Changed America which also, among other subjects, explored the lasting impact of racial discrimination and hostility, especially in the segment recording what happened when a white mob burned the prosperous Greenwood Street to the ground in Tulsa, OK in 1921. Greenwood Street was known as the Black Wall Street and was a prosperous black enclave on the other side of the tracks, segregated from downtown Tulsa.
2. The Sube needed new rear brakes and I took it down to Silver Valley Tires this afternoon and the guys there got the job done. While I waited for the Sube, I watched an episode of PBS's American
Masters series exploring the biography of Ted Williams. It was a fascinating look at Ted Williams' obsession to be baseball's best hitter and a troubling look at his family life off the field and his hostile relationship with newspaper reporters, as well as his complicated relationship with the baseball fans of Boston.
3. For the second night in a row we had a Family Dinner that included Lura and Lyle and Molly and Travis. We ate in Christy and Everett's back yard. We continued celebrating Molly's birthday. For dinner, the Deke made a fantastic dish of marinara sauce and Italian sausage over layers of zucchini, interspersed with cheese. It might best be called a zucchini lasagne. Lura made a fresh and tasty fruit salad and Carol made a crisp and delicious green salad and we had some cabbage salad left over from last night. For me, the high point of the dinner was when Christy presented us each with a Klondike bar for dessert. I liked my first Heath Klondike bar so much that I ate a second one, but switched from a Heath to an Original Klondike bar.
After a couple of hours, I slipped away from the dinner table to go home and watch Oakland play the Dodgers. When Khris Davis hit a mammoth home run (his 32nd) in the bottom of the sixth inning, I sent Rich Brock a message remarking on what a stud Khris Davis is. He was just getting home from work, had missed seeing the home run, but messaged me back saying, "Let's watch the rest of this game together". So we did. We passed a few comments back and forth about how the Dodgers' relievers dominated the A's hitters in the last couple of innings and bemoaned the fact that the A's have to face Clayton Kershaw tomorrow. It was sure fun, though, to have the game on and know that my Whitworth roommate and fellow sports fan was watching at the same time and that we could comment on the game as if we were in the same room watching it.
No comments:
Post a Comment