Teachers. Subscribe now and amaze exactly 0% of your friends, but you'll get great discounts and news!
Red Lining: Segregation in the North
Listen to the audio version.
Click here for the worksheet
When most people picture segregation, they think of the Jim Crow South — “White Only” signs, separate schools, and governors shouting on courthouse steps. But the North had its own version of segregation, quieter but just as powerful. It didn’t need laws to draw boundaries. It had banks, zoning boards, and school maps that did it for them.
The Great Migration: The Northern Promise That Wasn’t
Between 1910 and 1970, more than six million African Americans left the South in what became known as the Great Migration. They were escaping lynch mobs, debt, and laws designed to keep them poor and powerless in the South. Northern cities — Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, New York, and others — promised good jobs and better lives.
At first, that promise seemed real. But soon families learned that the North had its own version of the color line — polite and professional, but segregation all the same.
Realtors suddenly “lost” listings when Black buyers called. Banks rejected loan applications that looked perfectly fine. Landlords claimed apartments were “already taken.” It was a quiet kind of segregation.
Top: An unnamed family in North Carolina prepares to move North.
Bottom: Map of the Great Migration
Listen to the audio version.
Drawing the Lines
In the 1930s, the federal government created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) to rescue the housing market during the Great Depression. The agency made detailed color-coded maps of American cities to guide bank lending: Green meant “best,” blue meant “still good,” yellow meant “declining,” and red meant “hazardous.”
Those red zones almost always marked Black and immigrant neighborhoods. Banks either stopped issuing loans there or raised the interest rates, while white middle class neighborhoods got easy credit and government-backed mortgages. The process became known as redlining, and it shaped American cities for generations.
In Detroit, the color lines turned into concrete, literally. In 1941, a developer built a six-foot wall along Eight Mile Road to separate a new white subdivision from the Black community next door. The Federal Housing Administration refused to insure mortgages unless the builder showed a clear racial boundary. Once the wall went up, the loans were approved — proof that segregation in the North wasn’t accidental.
Map of Brooklyn showing color coded neighborhoods "Red Lining"
Listen to the audio version.
The Fine Print of Racism
White homeowners found other ways to keep neighborhoods closed off. Many properties included restrictive covenants — legal clauses banning the sale or rental of homes to anyone “non-Caucasian.”
When J.D. and Ethel Shelley, a Black couple in St. Louis, bought a house in a white neighborhood, their neighbors sued to have them removed. The case reached the Supreme Court. In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Court ruled that such covenants couldn’t be enforced by law, but it didn’t stop people from using them.
Realtors kept the system alive through a practice called realtor steering. If a black family wanted to move into a white neighborhood, the listing suddenly became “off the market”. Realtors would often steer people away from neighborhoods that didn't match their racial background.
Developers and homeowners across the country did the same thing. In Levittown, New York, buyers had to sign deeds promising to sell only to white families. In Los Angeles, actress Hattie McDaniel was sued by neighbors for purchasing a home in a restricted area. And in Chicago, banks flat-out refused mortgages to Black buyers.
The language changed over time, but the message stayed the same — Black families could work in Northern cities, but they weren’t welcome to live wherever they chose.
Detroit "Eight Mile" Wall.
The "Eight Mile" wall is still standing today.
Listen to the audio version.
Separate Desks, Same Excuses
While most Northern and Western states didn’t have segregation written into state law, some towns and districts passed their own local rules to keep students apart. Those cases were exceptions. The vast majority of Northern schools practiced de facto segregation — separation that came from housing patterns, not legislation.
Then came Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional, declaring that “separate but equal” was never equal at all. The decision targeted the Jim Crow South, but it sent shockwaves through the North too — where school boards insisted they had no segregation “by law,” just “by neighborhood.”
Schools used addresses to do the dividing. When Black families moved into a district, white families moved out. Tax money followed, and so did resources. This became known as "white flight". Over time, district boundaries hardened into invisible color lines that worked every bit as effectively as official laws in the South.
By 1960, more than 90 percent of Black students in Chicago attended majority-Black schools. When parents demanded better conditions, the superintendent parked trailer classrooms outside overcrowded buildings rather than redraw district lines. Families called them “Willis Wagons,” after the city official who swore segregation didn’t exist.
In Boston, district maps kept Black students in Roxbury and white students in South Boston. When a court ordered busing in 1974, mobs hurled rocks at buses carrying Black children. Confederate flags waved in Massachusetts.
And in Detroit, federal courts ruled that desegregation couldn’t cross district boundaries — meaning city schools, mostly Black, stayed overcrowded while white suburban schools thrived.
PBS put together an interactive map of segregation in Chicago from 1940-Today Click to explore.
In 1963, 225,000 students walked out of class to join Martin Luther King Jr and other civil rights leaders in protest over segregation in Chicago.
Listen to the audio version.
Work, Wealth, and Everyday Walls
Factory jobs in the North looked open to everyone — until you checked who got promoted.
In Detroit’s auto plants, Black workers were the last hired and first fired. Unions kept them out “to protect seniority.” Office managers quietly tossed out applications from anyone living in a redlined neighborhood.
Restaurants, hospitals, and movie theaters didn’t need “White Only” signs — they just used “membership policies” or “dress codes.” And across Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, small sundown towns warned Black travelers to leave before nightfall. The message didn’t need to be written down.
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized protests against discrimination in the workplace. Seen here is one protest in Seattle, WA.
Listen to the audio version.
Dr. King Heads North
By 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. had faced down angry sheriffs in Birmingham and violent mobs in Selma. But when he brought his movement to Chicago, he found a different kind of resistance to racial integration — polite, well-dressed, and deeply entrenched.
King moved into a small apartment on the city’s West Side to experience what tenants faced daily: broken heat, rats, and rent that swallowed half a paycheck. He launched the Chicago Freedom Movement, demanding open housing and equal opportunity.
Many Northern whites supported civil rights — as long as it was in the South. When King led a march through Marquette Park, a crowd attacked with rocks and bottles. Later he said,
“I’ve been in many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen — even in Mississippi and Alabama — mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I’ve seen here in Chicago.”
King began using the term de facto segregation to describe the system — segregation that survived through custom, money, and fear instead of laws. “It’s much harder,” he explained, “to root out the prejudices of the heart than the injustices of the law.”
He met with Mayor Richard J. Daley, who promised progress but quietly buried every reform. King left Chicago calling Northern racism “less honest but just as deep” — a problem built not on hatred alone, but on indifference.
Bennington Banner article reporting on Chicago protests.
Bennington, Vermont • Tue, Sep 6, 1966 Page 9
Listen to the audio version.
The Lines That Never Faded
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made housing discrimination illegal, but by then, the map was already drawn. The old redlining patterns didn’t completely fade.
Neighborhoods once marked red still today have lower property values, higher poverty, and shorter life expectancies. A 2018 study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) found that 74% of neighborhoods once graded “hazardous” by federal redlining maps still struggle economically, while 91% of formerly “greenlined” neighborhoods remain middle- or upper-income. Homes in redlined areas are now worth, on average, less than half the value of homes in areas that were once favored for investment.
Public health data show the same pattern. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that residents of historically redlined neighborhoods live up to 20 years less than those in nearby non-redlined areas, even within the same cities.
Schools follow the same lines. According to the Century Foundation, as of 2019, one in six public school students in the United States attends a school where more than 90% of classmates share their racial background. In Northern cities like Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia, school boundaries still mirror housing patterns drawn nearly a century ago.
The racial wealth gap keeps the pattern alive. White median household income in the U.S. sits around $81,000, compared to $53,000 for Black households. Those numbers shape everything from property taxes to school funding to access to healthcare.
In the age of AI, the red lines evolved into algorithms. Modern credit systems, appraisal methods, and lending algorithms rely on data built from decades of inequality. Studies from the Brookings Institution show that homes in majority-Black neighborhoods remain undervalued by about 23%, even when similar in quality and location to homes in white neighborhoods. The tools have changed, but the outcomes often trace the same old patterns.
Source: KQED https://www.kqed.org/news/11878403/segregation-is-getting-worse-in-the-us-the-bay-area-is-no-exception
Journalist Matt Mulcahy from Syracuse, NY reports on a long buried districting map from 1919 shows the legacy and impact of Redlining in Syracuse, NY.
Source: WSTM NBC 3
Listen to the audio version.
Why It Matters
Segregation in the North crept into zoning codes, mortgages, and school maps. That quiet kind of racism was harder to see, which made it harder to fight. It shaped who could buy a home, where their kids went to school, and what kind of future they could build.
For families who lived inside those red lines, the cost wasn’t just financial. It meant overcrowded schools, fewer jobs, and neighborhoods cut off from opportunity. And for the country, it meant generations of lost talent — people denied the chance to live where they worked, or to pass on the kind of stability that builds generational wealth.
Dr. King called Northern segregation “less honest but just as deep.” He wasn’t wrong. The signs came down, but the system stayed — buried in paperwork, real estate listings, and the way we still talk about “good” or “bad” neighborhoods. The story of redlining isn’t ancient history. It’s a blueprint that still shows through the paper.
Test Page