Once called “Houston of Heaven,” the city has long touted its harmonious racial and ethnic diversity. But the real story is of course more complicated. In the newly published book Houston and the Persistence of Segregation: An Afropessimist Approach to Urban History, historian David Ponton III examines postwar Houston and his view of the city as a progressive paradigm. They argued that our sensibilities ignored the existence of persistent racial segregation. Senior editorial writer Leah Binkovitz sat down with a professor from the University of South Florida to discuss Houston’s past, present and future. Their conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Q: Why Houston? This is a book about postwar racial segregation, the point in history when legal segregation is generally thought to have finally broken down. What makes Houston the right place to talk about this?
answer: Much urban history has focused on the big cities we know. Philadelphia; Oakland, California. Washington DC; New Orleans; Atlanta. Houston has been left out of the story of what happened in postwar America in terms of residential segregation.
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Houston did not experience this postwar economic impact. Its economy was actually growing when other economies were slumping. While Houston did not experience a population decline, these other cities did. And there was no bifurcation in Houston between a black urban center and white suburbs. Houston already had black suburbs, some of which received federal subsidies.
Houston, like other cities, cannot be explained by these other mechanisms. However, the result was the same. Excessive racism against black Americans is clearly occurring throughout the United States, including in Houston. In other words, understanding the mechanism is important, but not an explanation. And if those are not explanations, Huston asks: Why does racism persist?
Q: What alternative explanations for racism in Houston do you consider in this book? (Spoiler alert: It’s in the title.)
answer: What remains is what we see in the book’s intimate stories: deep-rooted anti-Blackness. So even today in Houston, one of the most diverse metropolitan areas in the country, the Kinder Institute has seen gradually decreasing levels of racism, with the exception of one group in particular: Houston’s black population. I keep discovering that. In fact, the Kinder Institute notes that Houston’s blacks continue to live “virtually separate” from whites and blacks of Asian descent.
Q: Residential segregation is definitely the most visible outcome, but in your book you talk about all kinds of segregation. Why is separation important? What is it for?
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answer: Separation looks like separation. But it’s also a very intimate relationship. It requires intimacy and proximity.
For example, consider the story of the green pond. Billy Bodenheimer was a 12-year-old white boy living in Montrose in 1959. He was sexually abused and found murdered in an icebox. City police are investigating the incident. They will land at the area’s Green Pond, near where the River Oaks Shopping Center is now.
Neighborhoods like River Oaks were developed in close proximity to established black neighborhoods like Green Pond. Because the developers thought this way. “We want to get away from this poor black population, but we also need to get close enough to them so they can work for us,” such as domestic workers. ” Here is this poor black neighborhood nestled between middle-class Montrose, the black Fourth Ward, and ultra-wealthy River Oaks.
And then this boy dies. In recent weeks, there have been reports of white men in their 20s attempting to lure young white girls into his car. Nearby, a black girl was sexually abused and murdered. And several similar accounts have been reported of this white man preying on his children in the area.
But instead of investigating it, the police entered Green Pond and rounded up these seven young black men and boys. They put them in an icebox. They call them racial slurs. And the young people were convicted of this crime.
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Residential segregation is thus translated into separation of power within the criminal legal system through this structured intimacy.
Q: Houston is very proud of its diversity. I think for some people this will be a difficult story to reconcile with what they see: Are cities still that segregated? What kind of reactions have you received to this work so far?
answer: In response to the hesitation people may have in accepting this, let’s first look back at Houston’s past, back to boosterism, which goes back to the Jim Crow era. People described Houston as a heavenly place. Even in the Jim Crow South, it was seen as a place where black people could build their wealth. They may start a business. they were able to survive. Without racial violence and intimidation from white Houstonians, we would not face the kind of violence we have seen in rural areas like Alabama and Mississippi. Houston has always boasted that it is a progressive place in the South. I don’t want to discount that either.houston teeth A special place.
That being said, that’s part of the job of storytelling, right?
Although Houston was a good place to live for many black Texans, they were still overly segregated. They continued to experience high rates of police violence. They were working minimum wage jobs. Today, there are black people living in River Oaks, but their numbers are very small.
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Next, look across the street. Who lives next door to you? Look at your child’s classroom. Who are they being educated by? We’re looking at racism and it’s staring us in the face.
The question is not whether the argument is correct or not. The question is, does your daily life reflect a truly integrated Houston? Or are we fooling ourselves?
Q: The book begins with Chrystia Adair, a 20th century black civil rights activist and suffragist. You highlight all her accomplishments, but also how these underlying dynamics constrained her, sometimes literally, in what she could accomplish or even achieve her dreams. I’m paying attention.
You wrote about her going to a department store and forcing the clerk to let her try on a corset. That’s a perfect metaphor. She protests the degrading view of black women as too dirty to try on clothes, but she does so by legitimately embracing a different kind of constraining ideology.
This is a true history book about Houston, but it also argues that we need to dream new dreams for our future. how? I’ve always wondered what a truly unconventional dream looks like.
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answer: I’m with you, Leah. We’re both going to have a hard time with the dream part.
By the end of this sentence, I want to tell people that this whole system of isolation has been built, and we spent a lot of money building it. And the system of police brutality, and we spend a lot of money to maintain it. And then there’s the system of deprivation from public education, which ironically costs a lot of money. We’ve invested in these structures that make life harder for poor Houstonians of all racial groups, and for black Houstonians as a racial group as well.
But other than that, there’s really no limit to how you can make your dreams come true. Imagine the wildest thing possible. What would it look like to create a Houston that reflected your wildest dreams?
Leah Binkovitz is a senior editorial writer at the Houston Chronicle.
