ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — “…We must honestly see and admit that racism is still deeply rooted all over America,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his speech "The Other America."
He last gave that speech in 1968, but his words still ring true today.
According to the federal reserve's most recent data, the typical white family has eight times the wealth of the typical Black family. And many experts say the root of that problem is our nation's history of racist real estate practices.
CBS News on Thursday highlighted its own 1964 special hidden-camera report that followed Corbett and Sallye Rachal, a Black couple looking to buy a four-bedroom home in Bergen County, New Jersey.
Footage shows the Rachals being turned away by one real estate agent after another while white buyers were offered the exact homes the Rachals were looking to buy.
“Well I have to call him and tell him that...that you are colored," one real estate agent can be heard telling the couple.
As CBS reports, the Rachals experienced a practice known as "steering."
The National Association of Realtors defines steering as "the practice of influencing a buyer’s choice of communities based upon...race, color, religion, gender, disability, familial status, or national origin."
Steering was used as a way to exclude Black buyers from white neighborhoods, and before the Fair Housing Act of 1968, it wasn't only common, but legal.
Now, generations later, white families are enjoying the money made off of family homes that have only grown in value over time while Black families whose relatives weren't allowed to buy those homes are left with a fraction of that real estate wealth.
Those racist housing practices are illegal now, but it doesn't erase the wealth gap that was created in our not too distant history.
Even still, Black families are targeted by housing policies, including one introduced by the city of Tampa in 2013.
A Tampa Bay Times investigation found a police program designed as a way for landlords to keep violent crime off their properties resulted in more than 100 people getting kicked out of their apartments for crimes as small as shoplifting or driving with a suspended license, the Times reports.
And police records show that roughly 90 percent of the 1,100 people flagged by the program were Black, despite Black residents making up only 54 percent of all arrests in Tampa over the past eight years, according to the newspaper.
Following the Tampa Bay Times investigation, the city announced it would make changes to the program, including only informing landlords only about “certain serious drug and violent felonies.”
However, those opposed to the program think it should be ended altogether.
Members of Tampa City Council, the Tampa Bay Times, the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and the NAACP Hillsborough County Branch sent a letter to Tampa Mayor Jane Castor calling for the end to the program, the Times reports.
“Put simply, the Program does far more harm than good, and that harm is borne almost exclusively by Black people,” the letter states. “By tightly weaving together housing policy and the criminal legal system, the Program compounds the over-policing of people of color in Tampa and causes catastrophic consequences for tenants of color.”
