Free Disintegration by Eugene Robinson Page B

unto themselves—Dodge Main, with its thirty thousand workers, or Ford’s gargantuan River Rouge complex, which employed ninety thousand at its height—had begun to shrink.
    Similar transformations were taking place around the country. The steel mills left Pittsburgh, relieving the city of a noxious pall of smog but also taking away a reliable source of employment. The stockyards and slaughterhouses left Chicago, revealing a magnificent—but largely jobless—waterfront. (Washington was an exception; it didn’t have any heavy industry to lose, and its main employer, the federal government, was recession-proof.) Of course, this wasn’t just happening to black America; it was a wrenching adjustment for the whole nation, and the impact on working-class whites was profound. But blacks had been systematically kept at a disadvantage—they were generally the last hired, the first fired, and the least insulated against the cold new reality. Changes that were difficult for all working-class urban communities proved devastating for black America.
    The combination of industrial transformation, devastation from the riots, and the advent of new options led many African Americans to move out of the inner cities. For years they had been streaming out of Washington to the northern and eastern reaches of the city and then beyond, establishing footholds in the suburbs. After the riots, the stream became a flood—especially to Prince George’s County, Maryland, which in those days was mostly white and semirural, a land of pickup trucks and good old boys.
    This movement would not have been possible before the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited“discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of dwellings, and in other housing-related transactions, based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status (including children under the age of 18 living with parents or legal custodians, pregnant women, and people securing custody of children under the age of 18), and handicap (disability).” 5 With that legislation, restrictive housing covenants banning blacks and other “undesirables” were invalidated—and black people, for the first time, had the right to live in neighborhoods like mine.
    From today’s vantage point, it is hard to imagine how pervasive these covenants were or what a big role they played in keeping blacks (and often Jews) out of neighborhoods where they were not wanted. Researching a planned remodeling of my suburban house in 1997, I discovered that technically I wasn’t supposed to be living there—a longstanding covenant constrained property owners to sell only to whites. These restrictions are now patently illegal, of course, but once they were valid contractual agreements and enforceable by law. As far as I can tell, the whites-only covenant in my neighborhood has never been formally erased, although the Fair Housing Act made it not worth the paper it was written on.
    It’s wrong to think of the 1968 riots as the One Definitive Moment when black America ceased to exist as a coherent entity or to serve as a useful concept. The fragmentation of America’s once-whole black communities—a process which, it is important to keep in mind, was greatly beneficial overall—had begun at least a decade earlier, and it took decades longer to progress to the point of being fully recognizable. But it is true that black America was different after the 1968 riots, physically and psychologically.
    Earlier that year, the report issued by the Kerner Commission on the 1967 Detroit and Newark riots had ventured a famously pessimistic assessment: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” 6 In fact, those separate but unequal societies had existed for decades; perhaps the grandees of official Washington hadn’t noticed that the lunch counters they patronized all those years were segregated, or maybe all of them were out of town when the