If Houston is progressive, why does segregation persist?

This city, once nicknamed “Heavenly Houston,” has long touted its harmonious racial and ethnic diversity. But the real story is of course more complicated. In the recently published “Houston and the Permanence of Segregation: An Afropessimist Approach to Urban History,” historian David Ponton III examines postwar Houston, arguing that our conception of the city as a paradigm progressive ignores the persistent presence of segregation. Senior editor Leah Binkovitz sat down with the University of South Florida professor to discuss Houston’s past, present and future. Their conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: Why Houston? This is a book about segregation in the post-war period, a time in history when we generally think of the end of legal segregation. What makes Houston the right place to talk about it?

A: Much of urban history has focused on the big cities we know well: Los Angeles; Philadelphia; Oakland, California; Washington DC; New Orleans; Atlanta. Houston has been left out of the story of what’s happening in post-war America in terms of residential segregation.

Houston did not experience the economic fallout of the post-war period. Its economy was actually growing while other economies were struggling. Houston did not experience a population decline, while these other cities experienced population declines. And Houston did not have a bifurcation between a black urban core and a white suburb. Houston already had black suburbs, some of which were subsidized by the federal government.

Houston cannot be explained by these other mechanisms the way other cities can. But the results were the same. There has very clearly been hypersegregation of black Americans across the country, including in Houston. This means that the mechanisms, while important to understand, do not constitute an explanation. And if those aren’t explanations, Houston begs the question: why does segregation persist, right?

Q: What alternative explanation of Houston’s segregation do you explore in the book? (Spoiler alert: It’s sort of in the title.)

A: What remains are the kinds of things we see emerging in these intimate stories in the book: a persistent anti-blackness. So even today in Houston, one of the most diverse metropolitan areas in the country, the Kinder Institute continues to see slowly decreasing levels of segregation, except for one group in particular, the population black from Houston. In fact, the Kinder Institute noted that Black people in Houston continue to live “significantly segregated” from their white and Asian counterparts.

Q: Residential segregation is certainly the most visible result, but in the book you talk about all kinds of segregation. Why is segregation important? What does it do?

A: Segregation looks like separation. But it’s also a very intimate relationship. You have to have closeness and closeness.

Take, for example, the story of Green Pond. There is a young white boy, 12-year-old Billy Bodenheimer, living in Montrose in 1959. He was found sexually abused and murdered in an icehouse. The municipal police are investigating this matter. They come down to this Green Pond neighborhood, which is in the area near where the River Oaks Mall is now.

Neighborhoods like River Oaks were developed near established black neighborhoods like Green Pond because developers thought, “we want to be separate from this poor black population, but we also need to be close enough to them so they can work for us as such.” domestic workers, etc. So here you have this poor black neighborhood nestled between middle class Montrose, Black Fourth Ward and the very wealthy River Oaks.

And this young boy dies. In previous weeks, there had been reports of a white man in his 20s who attempted to lure young white girls into his car. There was another case where a young black girl was found sexually abused and killed nearby. And multiple reports of this same description, of this white man preying on local children.

But instead of investigating, the police went to Green Pond and picked up these seven young black men and boys. They put them in the cooler. They call it racist insults. And the young men are found guilty of this crime.

Residential segregation therefore translates, through this structured intimacy, into a separation of powers within the criminal justice system.

Q: Houston is very proud of its diversity. For some, I think this will be a difficult narrative to reconcile with what they see: Is the city still this segregated? What kinds of reactions have you had to this work so far?

A: In response to hesitation people might have in accepting this: First, let’s look back at Houston’s past, boosterism even during the Jim Crow era. People described Houston as a heavenly place. It was seen as a place where, even in the Jim Crow South, black people could create wealth for themselves; they could start businesses; they could survive. Where there wasn’t racial violence or intimidation from white Houstonians, you wouldn’t face the kind of violence we’ve seen in places like Alabama or Mississippi in rural areas. Houston has always prided itself on being a progressive place in the South. I don’t want to neglect this either. Houston East a special place.

That being said, that’s part of the story’s work, right?

Houston was a better place to live for many black Texans, and yet they were also hypersegregated. They still experience high rates of police brutality. They had the lowest paid jobs. Today, there are black people living in River Oaks, but they are very few in number.

Second, look around your street: who do you live next to? Look at your child’s class: who does he go to school with? We are facing segregation, and it is staring us in the face.

The question is not whether the argument is correct. The question is: Does your daily life reflect a truly integrated Houston? Or are we wrong?

Q: You open the book with Christia Adair, a 20th-century black civil rights organizer and suffragist. You highlight all of her accomplishments, but you also note that she was always limited – sometimes literally – in what she could accomplish or even dream due to some of these underlying dynamics.

You write that she went to the department store and forced the salespeople to allow her to try on a corset. It’s kind of the perfect metaphor, right? She protests the demeaning views of black women as too dirty to try on clothes, but she does so by adhering to a different kind of restrictive ideology.

This is largely a book about Houston’s history, but you also argue that we need to dream new dreams for the future. How? I still struggle to understand what a truly off-the-beaten-path dream looks like.

A: I am with you, Léa. We’re both going to struggle with the dream part.

At the end of this text, I want people to say that this whole system of segregation was built and we spent a lot of money to build it; and the system of police brutality, and we spend a lot of money to maintain it. And there is this system of disengagement from public education, which ironically is very expensive. We have invested in these structures that make life harder for poor Houstonians of all racial groups as well as black Houstonians as a racial group.

But there really is no limit to how differently we can dream. Imagine the craziest thing possible. What would it look like to create a Houston that reflects the things you want most?

Leah Binkovitz is executive editor of the Houston Chronicle.