The racial covenants invented by real estate agents in the early 1900s shaped the way Americans view freedom today. (via @latimesopinion) latimes.com/opinion/story/…
“Residential segregation is not natural, normal or historic. It was an early 20th century marketing invention of Realtors, a way to sell homes. Like many American innovations, it flourished first in California.”
“At the beginning of the 1900s, racially segregated neighborhoods did not exist in American cities.”
“By 1917, an African American resident described a very different Los Angeles due to race-restrictive covenants: ‘We were encircled by invisible walls of steel. The whites surrounded us and made it impossible for us to go beyond these walls.’”
“Newly established all-white real estate boards, including the Los Angeles Realty Board, the largest in the country, organized the industry and came to control the vast majority of home sales.”
“People of color, effectively excluded from 95% of housing, had to pay 20% more for the same quality unit in cities nationally. By the 1920s, the ‘invisible walls’ of America’s racial ghettoes had been firmly established.”
“By calling an owner’s right to discriminate ‘freedom of choice,’ and linking it to freedom of conscience and religion, realtors elevated this single narrow right to an absolute, without regard to the rights of buyers or tenants.”
“‘Freedom of choice,’ blazoned by Realtors on L.A. freeway billboards half a century ago, divides America today.”
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