1936 Federal Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) map of Wheeling, West Virginia
I am a 50 year old affluent white male American. I went to law school and dedicated my professional career to representing death-sentenced prisoners, both Black and White, in the deep south, where I live today. I didn't participate in slavery or consciously engage in racially discriminatory behavior. I've marched and agitated in support of civil and human rights since I was a teenager. Because I read some books and talked with some knowledgable people and educated myself, I knew that I benefited from white privilege -- for example, that I can walk down the street and not worry that police will stop me for no reason, because I'm white. And I knew how racism had infected the criminal justice system. But until I engaged in additional research recently, I did not realize the extent to which I have materially benefitted from white supremacy -- that a non-trivial part of my good life is derived, both proximately and ultimately, from America's original sins -- from the fact that white lives have been valued over Black lives.
My home state of West Virginia is a "red" state, Trump country. Super white. Growing up in Wheeling, West Virginia, I, like all Mountaineers of my generation, was taught in school that slavery was not a major issue in our state, that it was a mountainous part of the pre-Civil War state of Virginia inhospitable to plantation slave labor, and that in any event, we had nobly seceded from Confederate Virginia in 1863 and merged with the United States of America. I was taught about Wheeling's history as an industrial center producing coal and steel products, the state's natural Appalachian beauty -- boring stuff. We patted ourselves on the back and moved on to 9th grade. Never gave it a second thought.
Well, the truth has been there all along if one cared to look.
Let's trace it back.
SLAVERY IN PRE-SECESSION WESTERN VIRGINIA AND WHEELING
Before secession, slave-holders owned between 33-40 percent of the land now comprising West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, and they had outsized political and social power. In the police-state reality at that time, local laws required non-slaveholding whites to pay for and participate in community slave patrols, implicating entire communities in perpetuating slavery and generating intense racial animosity between Black people and poor whites. Impolitic words critical of the enslaved trade could result in arrest and imprisonment. See Nick Brumfield, expatalachians, “It’s Time to Talk About West Virginia’s Slaves”; Eber Pettit, “Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad.”
Contrary to the tendency in history books to gloss over slavery in Appalachia as somehow less egregious than deep south plantation systems, slavery existed in every county in Appalachia and was quite as harsh. Enslaved people were worked, brutally and often to death, on small farms, in coal mines, and in salt mines and works all over western Virginia. (Much later, after emancipation, a 9 year old Booker T. Washington would be put to work in a Kanawha County salt furnace.) “It’s Time to Talk...”, supra; see also James Fallows, The Atlantic, “Slave Labor in the West Virginia Salt Works”; “West Virginia Slavery in the Ohio and Kanawha River Valleys”; Dr. Jacqueline Clark, “Slavery in Appalachia: The Hidden History”.
Wheeling's celebrated founding family, the Zane family, were major slave-holders who brought Virginia's slavery-based society to what is now the northern panhandle of West Virginia, along the Ohio River. See Wikipedia, “History of slavery in West Virginia”; Sean Duffy, Archiving Wheeling, “250 Years of Race Relations in the Northernmost Southern City of the Southernmost Northern State.” Another Wheeling founder, Moses Shepherd, and his wife, famed Lydia (Boggs) Shepherd, grew wealthy operating their large slave-labor based plantation and grist mill — what is now the Elm Grove neighborhood. See Wikipedia, “History of Shepherd Hall”.
Wheeling became a major trans-shipment point in the enslaved trade. Thousands of enslaved people were sent overland from Richmond to Wheeling, where they would be auctioned off and "sold down" the Ohio river to buyers in Kentucky and further south on the Mississippi River to the brutal plantations of Mississippi and Louisiana.
Wheeling's Market House (“Upper Market”) and Town Hall, where weekly slave auctions were held. Wheeling’s “Lower Market”, south of downtown, was later renamed and is now well known as the “Center Market”.
Witnesses recalled enslaved men, women, and children, forced to walk through Wheeling down National Road, chained or roped together, until they reached the market in downtown Wheeling, on the shores of the Ohio river. (That is: right past neighborhoods where I spent my childhood.) A whipping post stood at 11th and Chapline. Auctions of enslaved people would happen on the block at 10th and Market downtown (not far from where I would later obliviously drink milkshakes as a child at G.C. Murphy's fountain). Families were brutally sundered. Wheeling's founding wealth flowed in significant part from the slave trade. See, e.g., ”West Virginia Slavery...”; Wikipedia, “History of slavery in West Virginia”; Wheeling Intelligencer, “Historian Explores ‘Awfulness’ of Enslavement”; Appalachian Magazine, “A Trip to West Virginia’s Slave Market in Wheeling”; Dorothy Cooper, “The Black Community in Wheeling.” Today there is a small sign at 10th and Market marking the site at which enslaved people were “sold down river.”
Signage at 10th and Market in downtown Wheeling marking the location where enslaved people were auctioned.
The labor of enslaved people was also exploited to improve major transportation infrastructure in western Virginia, such as the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, which led directly to the growth of Wheeling, Clarksburg, and Parkersburg. Diabolically, transportation routes developed by enslaved people made western Virginia a central part of the nation's internal slave trade, enabling large caravans of enslaved people to be driven across the mountains towards river systems, like the Ohio at Wheeling, which would take them to the plantations of the deep south. See “It’s Time to Talk...”; “250 Years...”.
Across the river, plainly visible from the Wheeling side, was abolitionist Ohio. Free Pennsylvania lay short miles to the east. Thus, while Wheeling was trafficking in and profiting from the enslaved trade, the area was also an important node on the Underground Railroad. Clandestine efforts by abolitionist whites and free Black people helped enslaved people fleeing plantations in the south to escape to Ohio (often via Martin's Ferry) and overland to Pittsburgh, further north, in Pennsylvania. See “History of slavery…”; “250 Years...”.
One of the last escaped enslaved persons forcibly returned to bondage under the infamous 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was Lucy Bagby, owned by a prominent Wheeling family, the Goshorn family. After escaping to Cleveland, Bagby was discovered, and, after a court hearing, ordered returned to Wheeling and re-enslavement. The Civil War broke out months later. Bagby was later freed by Union soldiers. See “250 Years...”; “West Virginia Slavery...”.
POST-SECESSION AND POST-RECONSTRUCTION WEST VIRGINIA
The western Virginia counties that were in the process of seceding from Virginia in 1862 were exempted from the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 — even though most of those counties were still in active rebellion. No enslaved people were emancipated after West Virginia seceded and became one of the United States later in 1863, as the West Virginia constitution had been written so as to only very gradually phase out slavery. After the ratification of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865, however, the new state of West Virginia saw a massive out-migration of formerly enslaved people northward and westward to states not so saturated with the legacy of slavery and white supremacist animosity. See “History of slavery…”.
During the Reconstruction period, prospects for racial justice in West Virginia increased momentarily as the federal Freedmen’s Bureau began to support and expand upon public schooling infrastructure pioneered by free Black West Virginians. However, as a Union state, West Virginia was not subject, as former Confederate states were, to federal occupation to restrain depredations by Confederate sympathizing whites. Shortly after the war, these remnants formed Ku Klux Klan klavens to terrorize emancipated Black West Virginians, their settlements and schools. After the federal government all but abandoned efforts to meaningfully enfranchise Black people, former Confederate Virginians who had returned to West Virginia came to dominate state government and instituted laws which ushered in Jim Crow apartheid to the state. Id.
Terror lynchings of Black West Virginians occurred in the late 19th century following the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and into the early 20th century, especially as labor strife in the southern coal fields intensified. Although there were fewer lynchings in West Virginia than in the deep south, the rate of lynchings of Black people often exceeded that further south. Thus, Black people often faced a greater likelihood of being victims of racial violence in West Virginia. As one researcher recounts:
"[P]erhaps the most telling statement of West Virginia’s propensity towards lynching came from a black fugitive in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Faced with extradition back to Parkersburg, James Sherman declared, 'My God, don’t take me back there; you might as well hang me here.'" — Tim Konhaus, “’I Thought Things Would Be Different There’: Lynching and the Black Community in Southern West Virginia, 1880–1933”.
Lynchings were utterly terrifying and potent reminders to Black people that any challenge to white supremacy — any evidence of even minimal self-sufficiency or prosperity — could be justification for torture and murder. The Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, has documented 37 lynchings throughout West Virginia from the 1870s to the early 1900s. Other researchers have documented as many as 52 during roughly the same period. Each lynching terrorized and destroyed a human life, a family, a community, and the word went out.
Marker at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice at Montgomery, Alabama, documenting terror lynchings in West Virginia from the 1870s through the early 1900s. Lynchings were intended to terrorize free Black people into submitting to white supremacy and Jim Crow apartheid.
THE GREAT MIGRATION BRINGS BLACK WORKERS BACK TO AN ETHNICALLY DIVERSE WHEELING
In the early 20th century, Black people fleeing racial terror in the deep south came to Wheeling to work in the burgeoning coal, steel, and glass industries there. They tended to settle in diverse immigrant communities in North and South Wheeling, right along the river near industry, and in communities like Elm Grove near local coal mines. This was part of the Great Migration of millions of Black people northward in an effort to escape the worst of the Jim Crow apartheid caste system, enforced through terror lynchings. See, e.g., Isabel Wilkerson, Smithsonian Magazine, “The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration.”
Black refugees from the deep south were looking for good jobs and a better life. Although still an apartheid city, Wheeling at that time was an urban enclave more like a tiny Philadelphia -- a diverse, industrial melting pot of European and Middle Eastern immigrants, native born whites, and Black migrants from further south. Increased enthusiasm among Black and white workers for unionization faltered, however, when white unions refused to allow Black workers to join, exacerbating Black workers’ structural disadvantage in the labor market and ultimately hamstringing the larger labor movement. See, e.g., National Archives, “African Americans and the American Labor Movement”; Harry H. Jones’ 1936 speech, “Wheeling’s 20th Man.”
Black and white coal miners at an Elm Grove mine in the 1930s.
My paternal grandmother's family - German Catholic immigrants - settled in a diverse North Wheeling neighborhood along the Ohio river just before the turn of the century, and my great-grandfather worked in the glass furnaces.
My grandmother's North Wheeling neighborhood along the Ohio River, right around the time of her birth in 1904. That's Ohio across the river.
He worked alongside Black people and would complain to his daughter, my grandmother, about how his co-workers were mistreated because of the color of their skin. My grandmother recalled fondly that when her father passed, one Black family wrote to her mother, asking if they could attend her father's funeral. My grandmother was still in touch with that family as late as the early 1990s.
My great-grandfather, a German immigrant, settled his family on Kenney Street in a racially and ethnically diverse North Wheeling neighborhood around the turn of the 20th Century. He worked alongside other immigrant and Black co-workers in a Wheeling glass furnace. He hated how his Black co-workers were mistreated and discussed it with my grandmother. (Every day after coming home from work, he would strip off his sweaty work clothes, take a bath, and change into his suit for the evening...)
DISCRIMINATORY HOUSING AND LENDING PRACTICES EXACERBATE INEQUALITY IN WHEELING
Wheeling was a deeply racially unequal society because of the history recounted above and because white people in both public and private spheres took conscious, concrete steps to keep it that way. In the early 20th century, municipalities in the United States commonly used zoning regulations to restrict the movement of non-white families into white neighborhoods. After the Supreme Court found such regulations unconstitutional in 1917, white property owners relied on racial restriction covenants — barring occupancy and/or sale to non-whites — in property deeds to maintain the all-white character of neighborhoods. See Nancy H. Welsh, “Racially Restrictive Covenants in the United States.”
This was true in Wheeling. For example, my future step-father grew up in a house whose deed of sale in 1939 included a clause that prohibited sale of the property “to any but members of the Caucasian race." While these covenants ultimately became unenforceable under Supreme Court precedent, they have tended to remain in property deed language.
Deed of sale for my step-grandparents’ home in the Oakmont neighborhood in Wheeling showing racial restriction covenant preventing conveyance “to any but members of the Caucasian race.”
Further, by custom and common practice, the real estate and credit markets excluded most Black families from participation, so that they could not purchase or obtain credit to purchase homes or start businesses, especially in all-white enclaves. See, e.g., Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations.”
This meant, for example, that my paternal grandfather benefitted from never having to contend with race discrimination, or face competition from Black entrepreneurs, when he set up his truck dealership and service center along National Road in the white Woodsdale section of Wheeling (named for Archibald Woods, a Wheeling founder and slave-holder).
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT POLICY REINFORCES RACIAL INEQUALITY, DEVASTATING CITIES
These discriminatory practices, which systematically excluded Black people from economic opportunity while enhancing white wealth creation, were supercharged by federal government policies enacted in the early 1930s.
As part of the New Deal, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which insured private home mortgages, and the Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC), a federally funded entity which assisted homeowners in refinancing mortgages. Federal backing caused declines in interest rates and in the size of down payments on home purchases just as my paternal grandparents were purchasing a home in the white Oakmont section of Wheeling in 1941, a stone's throw from National Road, where enslaved people once walked to market. My future step-father's parents also bought their home in this neighborhood around the same time (the deed featuring a clause prohibiting conveyance to non-whites).
FHA and HOLC policies purported to stabilize the mortgage market and help "Americans" afford homeownership in an effort to pull the country out of economic depression. Instead, these policies dramatically increased wealth inequality as between whites and minorities by reinforcing and institutionalizing discriminatory lending practices nationwide. See, e.g., “Reparations...”; “Mapping Inequality: Introduction”; National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), “HOLC ‘Redlining’ Maps: The Persistent Structure of Segregation And Economic Inequality;” Beatrix Lockwood, “The History of Redlining.”
In the mid to late 1930s, FHA agents surveyed (white) local officials and (white) bankers across the country to determine the distribution of credit risk in different neighborhoods. While other factors were considered, the primary driver of the credit risk grading system was the racial and ethnic composition of a given neighborhood. The result of this survey was a series of color-coded "residential security" maps which would help the government decide which properties were worth investment.
Districts colored green were "Best" - no penetration by "Negro" families or "foreigners"; blue districts were "Still Desirable" - not as desirable but at low risk of "infiltration" by non-whites; yellow districts were "Definitely Declining" - low-income, non-white, and "foreign born" populations; and red districts were "Hazardous" - diverse central city districts populated by Black families and other "undesirable populations." Investment was encouraged in suburban green and blue districts, but adamantly discouraged in yellow and red districts. In fact, the FHA insisted that properties they insured use racially restrictive covenants in order to preserve a green district's A-rating -- meaning all-white -- status. See “History of Redlining.”
Annotation for 1936 HOLC map (not Wheeling): “This area is yellow, largely because the school for white children is in the negro area, D-8, and because the negroes of D-8 pass back and forth for access to the William Byrd Park which lies to the west. For this reason losses on properties being taken.”
The color-coded maps gave rise to the term "redlining" to describe the walling off of lower income minority communities from access to credit and financing. They were distributed by HOLC to lenders nationwide, thus entrenching "redlining" practices and other techniques to maintain property values in all-white communities and sideline neighborhoods where minorities had settled. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has written: "Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage." See “Reparations.” Redlining thus locked Black families, already oppressed socially and economically by the strictures of Jim Crow apartheid (see, e.g., “Ann Thomas: Growing up in Jim Crow Wheeling”), out of the legitimate mortgage market, leaving them at the mercy of unregulated lenders who charged usurious interest rates. Property values in redlined districts plummeted.
In their book, "Black Wealth/White Wealth", Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro described the fallout in metropolitan areas across the nation: "Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the 'self-fulfilling prophecies' of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable."
Meanwhile, white families' wealth surged as they took advantage of federal policies which subsidized their flight to prosperous suburbs. Over the ensuing decades, segregation became entrenched as a result of explicit government and banking industry policy, even after de jure segregation was outlawed.
MY FAMILY MOVES TO "A"-rated ALL-WHITE NEIGHBORHOODS IN WHEELING
The HOLC "residential security" map for Wheeling from the 1930s shows that the suburban neighborhood where my father, my step-father, and I grew up was inside the small, green, all-white, A-rated district known as Oakmont. The racially and ethnically mixed urban neighborhood in North Wheeling, where my paternal grandmother grew up on Kenney St., was colored red and rated "D" -- "hazardous."
1936 Wheeling HOLC map shows roughly 70% deemed “declining” or “hazardous” due to presence of Black and/or “foreign born” families.
My paternal grandmother was able to leave her lower-income, diverse North Wheeling community to live in the more prosperous, all-white Oakmont suburb away from the river. Her father's Black co-workers, no matter how hard they worked and saved, could not. The redlined, downtown Wheeling districts (as well as redlined districts over the hill, like Elm Grove) slowly declined, starved of investment and development, its non-white and less-"desirable" immigrant residents immobilized.
My grandmother, a child of German immigrants, moved from the lower income, racially and ethnically mixed redlined neighborhood in North Wheeling to the A-rated, all white neighborhood in Oakmont. This kind of movement is how many European immigrants to America made the transition from "immigrant" to "white."
Around 1971, my parents and I moved to a house across Wheeling Park from my grandparents' house, in the Oakmont district. Our house bordered a blue, B-rated, "still desirable" district which had failed to make the A-rating decades earlier because five Black families had recently moved into that community.
From stable home bases in Oakmont, therefore, my paternal grandparents and my step-father's parents were able to send their children to the best schools, then to college and on to prosperous futures. Eventually they were able to sell their houses, whose value had steadily increased, in order to finance living in decent elder care facilities. Black families, meanwhile, were actively hindered in their efforts to achieve the “American dream.”
REDLINING CAUSES LONG TERM RACIAL SEGREGATION AND ECONOMIC STAGNATION IN WHEELING
Astonishingly, the HOLC map for Wheeling shows roughly 70 percent of the city designated as "definitely declining" or "hazardous" due primarily to "infiltration" by a minority of non-white families. This meant that most of my city was deemed a poor investment risk. Eventually, vibrant Black communities, such as that on Chapline Street, which had held their own in what amounted to forcibly “blighted” neighborhoods were decimated as “urban renewal” brought highway construction and “slum” clearance to the formerly redlined districts. See Sean Duffy, Archiving Wheeling, “Right of Way”; “250 Years...”.
My grandmother and two of her five children in 1941, at their new house in the “A”-rated, all white Oakmont neighborhood in Wheeling.
Slowly but surely, Wheeling's status as a once-prosperous, bustling small industrial city declined precipitously. When macroeconomic trends like the decline of the steel and coal industries hit Wheeling, it was already a shell of its former self. We watched as downtown literally fell apart. Today, most of my family has long since evacuated Wheeling and the state of West Virginia for better prospects in other states. Wheeling remains a highly segregated city struggling in the midst of economic stagnation, and it is not alone.
Although the Fair Housing Act of 1968 purported to outlaw practices like redlining, recent studies have found a high correlation between the HOLC redlining maps of the 1930s and the current geography of economic hardship and inequality in America's cities. In fact, banks like Wells Fargo were found to have engaged in practices similar to redlining as recently as 2010. See “History of Redlining”; see also Emily Badger, “Redlining: Still a thing.”
Further, the effects of government redlining policies of nearly a century ago continue to reverberate. According to a recent study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, "Three out of four neighborhoods marked 'hazardous' by [the FHA] 80 years ago are still struggling economically." Further, "65% of 'majority minority' communities are still in neighborhoods graded 'hazardous' in the 1930s and colored red on HOLC maps. In these neighborhoods, credit, the lynchpin of economic mobility, became either unavailable or very expensive. In contrast, neighborhoods given the highest grade in the 1930s, marked in green, are today 91% upper income, and almost entirely white." As a result, "[t]oday, the typical Black family has just 8 cents of wealth -- bank savings, investment holdings, or home ownership equity -- for every dollar accumulated by their white neighbors." See NCRC, “How 1930s Discrimination Shaped Inequality In Today’s Cities.”
Additionally, these formerly redlined neighborhoods are subjected to a significantly higher police presence than predominantly white neighborhoods. See Catherine Comp, “Mapping Projects Show Lasting Impact Of Redlining, Racial Covenants In Virginia.”
Today, Black people in Wheeling experience a rate of poverty (41.6%) more than three times that of whites (13.7%), and 1.6 times that of Black people in the country as a whole. The long history of slavery, apartheid, and government sponsored discrimination in housing and credit has essentially directly led to this deeply troubling statistic.
It didn’t have to be this way. In his essay, “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority and wrote in 1955, “A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy. Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.”
I HAVE PERSONALLY BENEFITED FROM WHITE SUPREMACY AND STRUCTURAL RACISM WITH ROOTS IN SLAVERY AND APARTHEID IN WHEELING
I grew up playing ball with cousins in my grandmother's back yard in her white neighborhood. I never felt unsafe. Adults told me I was loved and valued, and that I could be whatever I wanted to be. I never wanted for food and clothing. I went to the best schools in the city. I roamed the city on my bike, never fearful about crossing into territory where I wasn't welcome. Adults never talked to me about how to behave around police. I hardly ever encountered police as a young person growing up in Wheeling. I was never burdened with knowledge of Wheeling's history or how white supremacy and racial inequality prepared the good life bestowed on me.
I spent my childhood and adolescence in these neighborhoods. My parents' house bordered the "B4" area. It failed to get an A rating because five Black families had moved to that neighborhood.
National Road, along which enslaved people were marched to auction downtown and “sold down” the Ohio River, runs through these neighborhoods.
The Baltimore & Ohio (B & O) railroad runs along Wheeling Creek towards downtown. Enslaved people helped build the railroad which contributed to Wheeling's wealth and its significance as a major hub in the slave trade.
My family were able to secure for themselves a prosperous, high quality of life in the best neighborhoods in my city because they were white. That translated into a high quality of life for their children and grand-children who were for the most part able to get college educations, which tended to guarantee decent living standards. When I went to college and law school, my family was able to help defray tuition costs, so that my debt load was not as onerous as it could have been. My family helped me finance the purchase of a small home in Atlanta, Georgia, when I was 30, and when I sold that house several years later, I was able to pay off my student loans. That helped me save money to buy a house in another neighborhood later on.
I've worked hard, but I never had to contend with the burden of racism, and I always had a leg up, because I benefited from growing up white in a city founded under slavery, a city that still struggles with the legacy of apartheid and white supremacy.
I have directly benefited from growing up in a society that values white lives, but which devalues Black lives and has often denied their very humanity. Because of that, even though I didn't participate in slavery or redlining, I have a responsibility and a duty to work to redress the evils those institutions caused and are still causing today.
I have my grandmother, Florence, to thank for telling me, long ago, as her father had told her, that not everyone had it as good as I did, and that some people were treated unfairly because of the color of their skin. I've been pulling on that thread ever since…
My grandmother's home in the all-white, "A" rated Oakmont neighborhood of Wheeling, WV in the early 1940s.
