University of Minnesota sociologist Rose M. Brewer, Ph.D. has been researching inequality, racism, and social justice since grad school. She was on the board of United for a Fair Economy, a Boston organization where she worked on wealth inequality. While serving, she and other board members focused on wealth inequality as it directly related to racial exclusion. In 2006 this research culminated in “The Color of Wealth: the U.S. Racial Divide,” detailing the history of the U.S. racial wealth gap.
While Brewer and colleagues have been writing about this persistent gap for decades, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 article published in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” brought new attention to the subject. “Essentially, I would say the core piece of the GI bill was a driver of the racial wealth gap,” says Brewer.
With WWII ending, policy conversations began to center around honoring returning soldiers for their services. Approximately one million were African Americans whose service during both the First and Second World Wars was segregated by task and rank. They included duties like delivering supplies, driving delivery trucks, and serving as cooks. Just as they had during slavery, Blacks were doing the menial tasks that fueled the U.S. war effort.
“The Second World War was the most significant shift in terms of how the country thought about giving housing, education, and other resources to returning vets,” explains Brewer. This included policies that ensured educational scholarships, low-cost housing loans, access to health care, and other benefits.
Access to these resources was blocked for Black veterans by a provision allowing states to administer benefits. The limited amount of constructed housing for them was in segregated areas with lower property values. And though the GI Bill broadened employment opportunities, especially for those who received education and training, most Blacks had to receive training from historically Black colleges and universities. “HBCUs were overwhelmed with the requests for admission. They just didn’t have the resources to bring in hundreds of thousands of Black GIs for training,” Brewer explains.
Some turned to the more accessible Northern colleges. Then, as now, a college degree was the surest route to well-paying jobs, professions and occupations. “That could move you not only in the middle class but could actually make some of those folk wealthy,” says Brewer.
A limited number of Blacks were able to move themselves into prominent professional positions, but the vast majority were excluded. “Segregation, racism, white supremacy kept us out,” explains Brewer “It was just the public discriminatory policies of the government—redlining, blocking some areas only for Blacks, and you couldn’t get loans.”
In Minnesota, this was done through restrictive covenants, clauses in the deed that prevented the home from being sold to African Americans and Jews. Even those who were able to obtain the resources to buy a home couldn’t buy in prominent areas.
“Even though on paper Minnesota was more open, the practices were the same as throughout the country, and that included bankers and realtors who absolutely refused to sell to Black folks who were looking for homes,” Brewer says.
The economic gap between Whites and Blacks only broadened. “This is a significant aspect of how the white middle class came to be,” explains Brewer. “They got access to housing that acquired equity, it built wealth for them, and they were able to pass it on to their progeny.”
Instead of being honored for their part in Germany’s defeat, Black veterans returned to the same type of exclusionary practices in the U.S. Medgar Evers was a WWII veteran who returned to a Mississippi that hadn’t changed in his absence. As a response to fighting for equality for Blacks in the U.S., he was assassinated.
“There are a whole slew of those kinds of activists that had been deployed to Europe to fight for the rights of the German Jews in that period against Hitler but returned to find Jim Crow still in place.”
The NAACP tried shifting the laws to make the benefits accessible for Blacks, but there was no commitment from the government to enforce them. Currently, “Discrimination is technically off the books, but the exclusions still continue,” explains Brewer. “That still bedevils the country, and it certainly bedevils the state of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis with the divide between homeownership being as dramatic as it is.”
In November of 2021, U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) introduced the G.I. Bill Restoration Act, legislation to compensate the descendants of veterans whose parents or grandparents were denied grants, loans, and educational opportunities offered through the GI Bill. The bill is currently in Congress.
In comparison, a white co-author of Brewer’s book whose father purchased a house through the GI bill passed it down to her and her siblings. The equity in the home allowed them to pay for their college education and buy houses of their own.
Economists have been trying to calculate the income Blacks have missed out on due to slave labor, blocked access to benefits from the New Deal, the GI Bill, and other exclusionary practices. “I think it’s incalculable about how much was lost when so many were not able to access those resources and ultimately in their passing on to their progeny and their descendants,” says Brewer.
If passed, Warnock’s legislation would provide housing support and educational benefits that were promised to all veterans, to be accessed by their descendants. But there was no success when pushing for this legislation again in 2023. “It’s still there. Just as the George Floyd legislation, it hasn’t moved an iota.”
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