How Local and Federal Laws Disenfranchised a Generation of Black Homeowners
Bernadette Atuahene on the Lasting Material and Psychological Impact of Racist Post-War Housing Policies
In 1946, Anthony Ficano, age fourteen, came to America on a Red Cross boat. A few years later, while helping his father at the radio station, he met Lena Bucci, who had accompanied her father to purchase ad time. Anthony and Lena were instantly enamored with each other, and they became a couple while Lena was still attending St. Rita, a Catholic high school on the city’s northeast side.
St. Rita School opened in 1926, with students in six grades, and by 1954, it had over a thousand students enrolled across all grades. The Sisters of St. Joseph, who ran the school, also had a rapidly growing congregation known for its commitment to eradicating segregation. The parish was also known for its anti-blockbusting stance, as it combated real estate agents and other housing intermediaries who coaxed white owners into selling their property rapidly and hence at a cheap price in order to resell the properties to Blacks at a higher price, making a handsome profit.
Unlike newly arrived European immigrants, Blacks, whose families had been living in America for centuries, were living the American nightmare.Soon after Lena graduated from St. Rita in 1950, she got engaged to Anthony, and family and friends gathered at the Buccis’ east side home for the engagement party. Upon entering, guests placed their coats and purses in the upstairs bedroom and then joined the festivities underway in the basement. While Italian wine and food flowed freely and jubilation abounded, a burglary was afoot. “Somebody came in and they stole a lot of the women’s purses and the money out of it,” Robert said, retelling an incident that has since become family lore. “So my grandfather actually found out how much was stolen and he repaid everybody.”
Lena and Anthony married on October 22, 1950, and the newlyweds lived with Paris and Mafalda in their rented home. Two years later, Lena gave birth to their first and only child, Robert (Bobby) Ficano, at Holy Cross, a nearby Catholic hospital. This momentous event transformed Paris and Mafalda into Grandpa and Grandma Bucci, the titles and roles they most treasured.
The Buccis finally saved up enough money to purchase their first home in 1954, and they moved in, together with Lena and her new husband and child. Like most whites, they chose to move out of Detroit to the suburbs, where the houses were newer and cheaper and the neighborhoods were almost completely white. The Buccis purchased a home for about $6,000 in a western suburb adjacent to Detroit called Redford Charter Township.
Located on Winston Street, the home was a modest brick structure with two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a basement. “I didn’t realize how small it was until I went back as an adult,” Robert mused, noting how even humble homes can seem like mansions through a child’s eyes. “Some of my favorite memories in the Redford home were of playing baseball with the neighborhood kids. I loved baseball.”
Most of little Bobby’s baseball buddies came from families who had recently immigrated from Europe, including the German family next door and the Polish family with eight children who lived a few houses down. In 1950, Redford had a population of about 19,000 people, 99.87 percent of whom were white. This was not a fluke. Racial covenants prohibited families like the Browns from occupying or purchasing these suburban homes. At the same time, white working-class families, like the Buccis, used government-insured loans with low down payments and affordable monthly mortgage payments to buy suburban homes and take part in the American Dream. In contrast, between 1945 and 1959, African Americans received less than 2 percent of federally insured home loans.
Unlike newly arrived European immigrants, Blacks, whose families had been living in America for centuries, were living the American nightmare. Orsel and Minnie McGhee’s experience is illustrative. In 1944, the McGhees—fed up with paying higher prices for the lower-quality housing in congested, redlined neighborhoods—moved with their two sons into 4626 Seebaldt Street, in a majority-white community on Detroit’s west side. Even though the McGhees could afford the rent, they were legally barred from living there by a racially restrictive covenant in the subdivision, which stated: “This property shall not be used or occupied by any person or persons except those of the Caucasian race.”
To push the McGhees out of their new home, white neighbors assailed them with threats and racial abuse. But the family did not budge. The neighbors, undeterred, turned to the courts, filing a case called Sipes v. McGhee. Twenty-four neighborhood organizations, joined by the North Redford Association and the Northwest Redford Improvement Association—the active neighborhood associations in the Buccis’ new suburban community—filed a brief, encouraging the court to uphold the racial covenant.
The brief, which is baldly discriminatory yet couched in the language of freedom, reads as follows:
In certain of the briefs which have been filed, which we have examined, it appears that various contentions have been made having to do with discrimination in relation to the negro. In order to consider the status of the negro, it is fundamental that he exists in this country as a free member of a free society. The greatest right which a free member of a free society possesses is his free right to contract. This free right to contract has been exercised by an overwhelming majority of the owners of homes in a subdivision area entirely white, which the negro now seeks to destroy. If the argument of the negro is to be considered, then it would appear that in order for the negro to exist as a free member of the free society, he must destroy the freedom of contract of other members of the same free society. This obviously cannot be the case, and consequently, those of the Caucasian race who have exercised their free right to contract work no discrimination upon the negro.
The brief concludes by saying, “The court well knows that if violations are permitted that soon the general character of the entire area will change and those who have acquired their homes in reliance upon use and occupancy restrictions will be forced to seek other locations and will suffer irreparable, economic loss.”
The case traveled to the Michigan Supreme Court, which in 1947 affirmed the lower court decision, mandating that the McGhees evacuate their home within ninety days. With the NAACP’s valiant lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, on their side, the McGhees appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which bundled their case with one from St. Louis called Shelley v. Kraemer. In 1948, Shelley outlawed racially restrictive covenants, declaring that the Constitution prohibited states from enforcing these discriminatory private contracts. Despite this landmark decision, real estate professionals and others continued to insert racial covenants in residential deeds for decades more because, although they were not legally actionable, the covenants still sent a powerful signal, letting Blacks know they were not welcome.
The federal government has never taken responsibility for the fact that…it manufactured the blight that its urban renewal programs sought to erase.Adding to the register of racist policies, two federal programs systematically destroyed the communities where racial covenants sequestered Blacks. First was the Housing Act of 1949, which facilitated urban renewal programs already underway. Through the 1950s and 1960s, local governments used the powers granted by this act to designate certain communities as blighted.
Then, using their eminent domain powers, they transferred the properties they seized to private companies at heavily subsidized prices in exchange for the promise of redevelopment. The evicted Black families received meager relocation assistance. By 1970, urban renewal had uprooted over 5,500 Black families in Detroit. This racist policy also uprooted Black families in many other cities, including 14,600 in Chicago, 9,700 in Philadelphia, 6,400 in Baltimore, 5,800 in St. Louis, 3,600 in Atlanta, 1,800 in Birmingham, and 1,400 in Memphis.
The federal government has never taken responsibility for the fact that, by cutting off investment in Black neighborhoods through redlining, it manufactured the blight that its urban renewal programs sought to erase. This seemingly righteous work of eradicating blight had unholy consequences because razed alongside the “blight” were also long-accumulated social capital and “unblighted” residences. Gone, too, were the productive enterprises and vibrant cultural spaces—such as the jazz and blues clubs, barbershops, and grocery stores.
Additionally, the Highway Act of 1956 worked in conjunction with urban renewal to further raze “blighted” Black communities. This time, however, in the name of progress, authorities built freeways, which often ran right through Black communities, destroying them while also facilitating white suburban exodus.
For example, in Detroit, by 1958, construction of the John C. Lodge Freeway (M-10) destroyed approximately 2,200 buildings in an overwhelmingly Black neighborhood. By the end of the 1950s, construction of the Edsel B. Ford Expressway (I-94) leveled about 2,800 buildings in another mostly Black community. The Highway Act also affected Black communities in cities across the country, including New York, Miami, Chicago, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Oakland, Nashville, Baltimore, and Atlanta.
The demolition of Black communities through the Highway Act and urban renewal further restricted the already limited housing supply for Blacks, leading to even higher prices for even more substandard housing. Displaced families could only relocate from one distressed and segregated neighborhood to another one. The newly reconfigured communities were vulnerable to crime and physical decay because the anchoring social networks and social trust necessary to counter these ills vanished along with the old neighborhood.
Social psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove found that these uprooted populations often suffered from what she calls root shock: “the traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem.” The intergenerational consequences of root shock include anxiety, psychological trauma, enfeebled communities more vulnerable to negative forces, chronic illness, and even death.
__________________________________
Excerpted from Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America by Bernadette Atuahene. Copyright © 2025. Available from Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group.