Community is not only a group of people coming together—it is the feeling of safety and of home.
For many Black residents, the legacies of enslavement, redlining, and gentrification have barred them from experiencing the comfort and access that is afforded to the white communities that are unaffected.
The motivations of slavery have never completely gone away. Redlining, for example, originated as actual red lines were drawn on maps that identified predominantly-Black neighborhoods as “hazardous.” Starting in the 1930s, the government-sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Federal Home Loan Bank Board used these maps to deny lending and investment services to Black Americans.
The historic documentation of neighborhood gentrification began in the 1960s and has accelerated in the new millennium, as the gap between white and Black wealth has become the greatest since 1989.
