 Thank you all for inviting me to be with you here today on the anniversary by a day of events that not only traumatized your community but started a national conversation that I hope will continue for quite some time. And thank you to Tom Bailey and to the Kwame Foundation for organizing this event. Fifty years ago, just a few months ago, Martin Luther King gave a commencement speech at Oberlin College in Ohio and in that commencement speech he said the following. Let nobody give you the impression that the problem of racial injustice will work itself out. Let nobody give you the impression that only time will solve the problem. That is a myth and it's a myth because time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. Well we've been seduced by that myth that segregation will take care of itself, that our racial problems in this country will solve themselves and we've been seduced by that myth because there's another myth that we also are seduced by and that's a notion that's widely held across the political spectrum that we have something in this country that we call de facto segregation. We have somehow come to the belief that African Americans are separated from whites because people like to live with each other of the same race or because of private discrimination or perhaps because black people don't have enough money to live in middle-class communities or maybe real estate agents steered them to different places. In fact, we have the jury segregation. We live in a society which has been segregated racially by law, not by accident. It's been segregated by public policy that was racially conscious and purposeful designed to separate the races not only in St. Louis but in every metropolitan area in this country and the effects of those policies which persisted well through the 20th century still endure and because those effects endure and because we believe that our segregation happened somehow accidentally we've never been motivated or really figured out how to reverse the public policies that created it. Now I've written a lot about this as some of you know in St. Louis in particular segregation began with local ordinances and ordinance that separated blacks and whites and told blacks which blocks they could live on and which blocks whites which blocks they could live on. St. Louis in the early 20th century established a zoning commission whose purpose among others was to segregate St. Louis neighborhoods that had white single family homes white owned single family homes in which their deeds prohibited resales to African-Americans were given protective zoning classifications and neighborhoods where African-Americans lived were zoned at a much lower level and saloons were permitted to locate their factories that polluted were permitted to locate their the area was permitted to turn into a slum specifically because it was inhabited by African-Americans public housing in St. Louis was specifically segregated by race as it was in every metropolitan area in the country in St. Louis in the 1930s the neighborhood of DeSoto car was once an integrated neighborhood where working-class families black and white European immigrants and African-Americans had to live in the same neighborhood because they had to be able to walk to work they didn't have automobiles and they had to be able to get to the factories in downtown St. Louis. St. Louis and the federal government raised that neighborhood in order to build a public housing project for blacks only they took an integrated neighborhood and converted it into a black community then they built a separate public housing project on the south side of St. Louis for whites only public housing segregated St. Louis in a way it had never been segregated before this was a nationwide phenomenon in 1949 President Truman proposed a much expanded public housing program the bill came before Congress and Republicans in Congress who were opposed to any involvement of the public sector in the real estate industry figured out that they could kill the National Housing Act that President Truman had proposed by adding an amendment we call today a poison pill amendment an amendment that if it passed would guarantee the defeat of the entire housing bill and the amendment that the Republicans put forward was an amendment that all public housing had to for the first time be integrated this was in 1949 Northern liberal Democrats who were in favor of public housing fought against the integration amendment because they realized that if the integration amendment were passed then southern Democrats would join with Republicans and defeat the entire public housing bill as a result and they were successful they defeated the integration amendment as a result the public housing bill was passed and a vastly expanded public housing program on a segregated basis was instituted across the nation not just in St. Louis but everywhere in St. Louis you may recall the Pruitt-Igoe Towers that were built with authority of that National 49 that 1949 Housing Act of Pruitt Towers were for blacks the Igoe Towers were for whites that's how it was constructed as a segregated public housing project now eventually it became all black and that also was the result of federal policy designed to segregate the races the federal housing administration once World War two ended once the Korean War ended and material was again available for civilian housing construction the federal housing administration guaranteed bank loans to mass production builders across the country to develop subdivisions for whites only that was an explicit federal housing administration condition the most famous of these you probably have heard of it is Levittown in New York here in St. Louis there were many of those developments subdivisions created with federal housing administration guarantees for whites only African-Americans were prohibited from buying into those subdivisions even though they had the same incomes as the lower-class working-class white families who bought into them in St. Louis there was one very liberal builder a fellow by name of Charles Vatterot still a famous St. Louis name who decided he was going to build subdivisions for whites and a subdivision for blacks he built St. Anne for whites with federal housing administration guarantees when he proposed to build a separate subdivision for blacks the porous he was denied federal housing administration guarantees because the federal housing administration would not guarantee bank loans for builders who proposed to build housing for African-Americans well as these subdivisions developed across St. Louis metropolitan area and in every metropolitan area in this country in the country whites began to abandon public housing they could bail purchase homes in FHA subsidized subdivisions in the suburbs and pay less monthly carrying charges than they were paying rent in the I go public housing project I mean sorry in the in the yeah in the I go public housing project or in public housing projects for whites anywhere in the country as whites were lured out of public housing and out of the inner city generally across the country and subsidized to move to single-family homes in the suburbs industry moved as well jobs became inaccessible to African-Americans who were left in the inner cities as the FHA succeeded in segregating metropolitan areas and the economic conditions of black communities deteriorated the black communities became slums they became slums partly because housing supply was so short for African-Americans there were very few homes areas where they were permitted to buy whites could purchase anywhere in the metropolitan area and because of the demand being so much greater than the supply families had to double up they subdivided their homes they doubled up with with other families living in the same apartment slum conditions develop the city of St. Louis did not collect garbage as frequently and in these neighborhoods as it did in neighborhoods with less density and as a result slums were created again as a result explicitly of purposeful federal policy well once slums got created the next development instituted by the federal state and local governments was slum clearance the Pruitt-Igoe Towers were dynamited in 1972 areas in downtown St. Louis where which were vibrant African-American communities although overcrowded and very dense were demolished in order to build for example your gateway arch highway interchanges to build the to bring the new white suburbanites into their downtown jobs a university expansion all of these things were built on former African-American neighborhoods that were cleared because they were slums well where the residents of those neighborhoods go once they were once their neighborhoods were cleared the federal government gave some of them not all of them but the very few of them vouchers that would enable them to rent apartments at market rates in other areas but throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area very few communities would permit the vouchers to be used Ferguson was one of them which would permit the vouchers to be used and as a result of this series of events African-Americans started to move to Ferguson soon it was one of the only places where they they were permitted to live Ferguson became a predominantly African-American community other communities in the same area Jennings became even more African-American this was a history of purposeful deliberate racial segregation promoted by the federal state and local governments we do not have de facto segregation we have the jury segregation it's a violation of our Constitution all of these racial boundaries that we have created in every metropolitan area of the country violate the 14th the 5th and the 13th amendments to our Constitution they require a constitutional remedy as Martin Luther King said they will not just disappear by themselves unless we undo the segregation of our metropolitan areas with policies that are as aggressive as those we use to segregate our metropolitan areas we will not see the end of the racial polarization that we have in the society will not see the end of the kinds of events that took place in Ferguson a year ago and that triggered a national conversation that as I say I hope will continue our first job it seems to me and your first job is to make this history known because unless people become aware of this history there is never going to be public support for the kinds of aggressive policies that we need to reverse the segregation of our metropolitan areas that we've created so long as we're oblivious to this history and we believe that our racial separation happened by accident that happened because people like to live with each other of the same race or because African Americans just happen to have lower incomes in the whites so long as we believe that if we believe it happened by accident we're likely to believe it's going to undo itself by accident unless we understand that the racial segregation of St. Louis and every metropolitan area in this country was deliberately created by public policy we're never going to motivate our allies and the public to support the kinds of aggressive racially conscious policies that are going to be necessary for desegregation again I want to thank you very much for inviting me to be with you today even if remotely and I wish you the best of success for a very successful conference thank you