[ Horns blaring ]
1966. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders
took their fight for equality north,
to one of the most segregated cities in America:
Chicago.
-Clean your face the next time before ya come here!
-On top of their agenda?
Improving housing conditions and ending
housing discrimination.
-Back to the jungle, you guys! Back to the jungle!
Go, will you?! -They're all awful.
They're all Black bastards. -Don't ever come back!
-I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama,
a mob as hostile and as hate-filled
as I have seen here in Chicago.
♪♪
-Many Black residents were concentrated
in the worst neighborhoods,
with the poorest in vast government housing projects.
-The world of the people who live here
bears very little resemblance to the American dream.
-Valencia Morris and her three daughters
would eventually live in one of them.
-There was garbage, junk, on the outside of the buildings.
Even in kindergarten, first grade,
my daughters would get beat up on the way home from school.
They were becoming, not violent,
but, on the defense.
-She said, "Listen.
Either you're gonna learn how to fight back
or you're gonna keep getting beat up.
I can't help you."
My mom was starting to see
how the environment was beginning to change us
and so she was desperately looking to leave.
-A group of public housing residents
who wanted to live in better neighborhoods
with more resources turned to Alex Polikoff,
a volunteer lawyer for the ACLU.
-You had virtually no options.
We'd had some 18,000 public housing apartments
built almost exclusively in Black neighborhoods.
There was pervasive housing discrimination
in the private market.
Realtors would not show you white neighborhoods.
If you got to a white neighborhood,
a landlord wouldn't rent to you.
-Polikoff filed one of the country's first
public housing segregation lawsuits,
named Gautreaux.
-The suit asks the court to order that public housing
be built in white neighborhoods, like this one.
-I was pessimistic about the chances.
Everybody knew why the projects
were being built in the Black neighborhoods,
but very few people would say so.
This was the way things were.
-The mere suggestion
that residents of these buildings be dispersed
has been bitterly resisted by white neighborhoods.
-Well, it's gonna bring down the value
of everybody's property.
-Why do you think that?
-Well,
[laughing] I don't know why.
-Yeah. -I just, um --
You see those other projects they have
and they don't take care of 'em.
-But the lawsuit came at a time
when the problems and inequality in the inner cities
were becoming national priorities.
And then...
-Dr. Martin Luther King,
the apostle of nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement,
has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.
One hundred cities rage with riot.
Thirty-nine die.
Twenty thousand are arrested.
-Seven days after King's assassination,
the government banned racial discrimination in housing
and, when the Supreme Court ruled
in Polikoff's favor eight years later,
the government would have to start
providing public housing
in white Chicago neighborhoods,
including the suburbs.
-The effect of the case will be far-reaching,
even beyond busing, perhaps even changing
the structure of America as we know it.
[ Ring ] [ Indistinct conversations ]
-Leadership council.
-One part of the solution was an experiment in integration
that had never been tried before:
giving vouchers to a few thousand families
from the Chicago projects
and helping them rent apartments in the suburbs.
-You had to use your voucher to move
to a predominantly white, middle-class community
and such communities have good schools.
They have low crime.
They're close to job opportunities.
This was a hopeful moment
because a new doorway had opened up,
in terms of how to deal with segregated neighborhoods.
-The Morrises were one of the first families to move.
-I immediately called
and asked them to put my name on the list.
♪♪
I couldn't believe how beautiful it was, how quiet it was.
When I saw the apartments, it was unbelievable
because I had never seen a dishwasher before.
-But life as one of the town's only Black families
wasn't always easy.
-I would go out in the morning to get in my car
and there would be rotten eggs
thrown on the windshield and all over the car.
-My mom's advice was, "You have to win, period.
Keep your head up,
keep your mouth shut, and win.
-My mom would insist that we had the top grades.
Whatever we did,
she would talk to us as if we were going to succeed.
-There was so much that we were able to do.
Our high school had a full-size professional stage.
We had a music program.
We had all of the state-of-the-art
sports equipment you could ever want.
-By the time Kiah Morris was a teenager in the 1990s,
the media was taking notice
of how new neighborhoods could help families succeed
and the Morrises were profiled
on national television.
-Are you glad your mother did what your mother did?
-Yes. -Oh, yes.
-On the American agenda tonight, the power of new surroundings.
-The Gautreaux program was designed
to promote racial integration,
but it also breaking the welfare cycle.
-The social science research was startling.
Mothers got jobs.
Children who went to school went on to college.
-The residents deserve decent housing.
-Henry Cisneros, the new secretary
of Housing and Urban Development,
hoped programs like Gautreaux
could replace government-owned housing across the country,
especially the high-rise projects.
-It was as segregated
as you could define the word segregation in America:
dilapidated buildings,
unlivable places.
Some of them were national stories.
-Gang snipers and drug dealers,
broken elevators, leaky ceilings,
and squalid living conditions.
-And we made people live there.
The juxtaposition of that reality
and a solution like Gautreaux made it very clear to me
we needed to work at this, precisely at this point.
-Cisneros promoted a pilot program in five cities.
Unlike Gautreaux, it was primarily designed
to target poverty, not segregation,
but it shared the same concept:
moving public housing families to wealthier neighborhoods.
-We're gonna provide you help finding an apartment,
getting your children placed in school.
-Soon, moving families from the projects to the suburbs
created another public backlash.
-Twice this week, parts of East Baltimore County
have gathered to try to stop MTO, Move to Opportunity.
-Let's put a stop to it, folks!
-The people who would be sent out
would be those who needed serious counseling,
would need to be taught to take baths and not to steal.
-And, 10 years later,
when Lawrence Katz studied the nearly 5,000 families
in Moving to Opportunity who did move,
the results were disappointing.
-We're seeing very little in terms of
the economic outcomes for the parents
and very little
in terms of things like test scores for the kids.
-The early success of Chicago's Gautreaux program
looked like a fluke and both Gautreaux
and Moving to Opportunity came to an end.
No new families would be moved.
-The conventional wisdom became "Mobility doesn't work."
Government was not willing to consider it as a policy.
-By then, the Morris family had already left the suburbs
and moved to a middle-class neighborhood in Chicago.
-I needed to just be around a diverse community.
I wasn't necessarily accepted
by all of the white friends that I had
and I was too white, on some levels,
for the Black kids that had moved
into the community since then.
-She grew up in the suburbs,
so, as far as knowing African Americans,
she didn't really know how we are, so I said,
"I need to get back into Chicago before she loses her identity."
♪♪
[ Explosions ]
-Since then, many of the high-rises have come down
and vouchers have became the largest part
of the country's public housing program,
but the vouchers often don't come with enough money
or assistance to help families live in better neighborhoods
and, in many cities, racial, and economic, segregation
remain a problem.
-All of the other forms of segregation
that exist in our society begin with,
"Where do you live?
Where do you stay?"
And the effects of that segregation
may be harsher than ever.
-In some places, poverty got even more concentrated.
-People don't feel that they have full access
to what most Americans and what people here would call
the American dream.
♪♪
-In 2014, Lawrence Katz saw new research
on the importance of neighborhoods
and decided to find out what happened
to the children from Moving to Opportunity
and, now that the youngest children had grown up,
he discovered something policymakers hadn't predicted.
-We're seeing them
earning 30% more =
than a kid who didn't get the opportunity
to move to a better neighborhood.
We're seeing college-going rates increase dramatically.
We couldn't see that when the kids weren't old enough.
-It turned out the program wasn't a failure at all.
-Neighborhoods and childhood development
are long investments and one has to have some patience.
Most things that are investments take a while to pay off.
-I am publisher and editor of The Brooklyn Reader.
My middle sister, Jamillah,
is a professor in Central Illinois.
-And, in 2014, her youngest sister, Kiah,
became the second Black woman
to be elected to the Vermont legislature.
-I'm proud and honored to be the first person of color, ever,
to come out of Bennington County.
I'm the first Black woman to be elected
into the House in 25 years.
If we were not given this opportunity,
would I be here today?
And there were specific requirements.
There's someone that deserves that chance, to have the energy
to do the hard work that it takes to get ahead,
and you can't do that when you're
under the weight and the oppression of poverty.
You just cannot.
♪♪
-There are a lot of things that I can feel proud about
and I know, in the back of my mind,
that it has nothing to do with me, necessarily.
It had to do with my circumstances.
When my mother gave me the license to start fighting,
that was gonna probably be my life.
I would've been someone completely different.
It would've been a big waste of a person.
♪♪
-But, Kiah Morris says, it'll take more
than new neighborhoods to create change.
In late 2018, she resigned from the Vermont legislature
after more than a year of racial harassment
by a reported white nationalist.
-For two years,
[crying] we lived in my husband's childhood home,
feeling unsafe.
-She says not enough has been done to fight the problems
that led to the Gautreaux housing program,
in the first place.
-There's no way that we can look
at what's happening in our country right now
and say that we've dealt with the issues of racism.
We didn't do the work in the Civil Rights Movement.
That work did not get completed.
We never dealt with the underlying racism
that established segregation, to begin with.
-Nobody picks where they're born
or chooses where they're raised as a child.
You play the cards that you're dealt with.
I just think it's unfortunate that the cards in our hands are,
after 30 [scoffing] years, still...unequal.
-Today, it's the potential economic benefit
of new neighborhoods that's getting attention.
Lawrence Katz is working with cities
trying new experiments in moving public housing families,
using detailed data on income and incarceration rates
to find the neighborhoods most likely
to help children escape poverty.
We're losing people who could inovators
We're losing people who could be artists
and we could have a much more vibrant society,
if we had less concentration of poverty and social problems.