Goldfish Learn To Drive

Baked-in segregation 
Some years before the military integrated the 
troops, Vince Mereday, a Black U.S. sailor who 
served during World War II, passed his pilot’s test 
while stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Training
Center outside Chicago. But Black service mem-
bers at Great Lakes were forbidden from attending
flight training. So Mereday worked as a mechanic 
during the war, recounts race and ethnicity 
scholar Richard Rothstein in his 2017 book The 
Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our
Government Segregated America. 
Discrimination against Black people per-
sisted even after the war. At the time, real estate 
developer William Levitt was building his name-
sake Long Island, N.Y., suburb for returning
veterans. Mereday’s uncle received a contract to 
deliver drywall to the Levittown construction 
site. Yet the developer denied Mereday’s appli-
cation to buy his own home there; so instead, he 
bought a house in a predominantly Black suburb 
To avoid jeopardizing the 
generous government 
subsidies he received 
to build tracts of homes 
on Long Island, N.Y., for 
veterans returning from 
World War II, developer 
William Levitt accepted 
applications only from 
white homebuyers.
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SCIENCE NEWS 
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February 12, 2022
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MILITARY LESSONS ON INTEGRATION
near Levittown, called Lakeview. 
Mereday was the victim of segregationist hous-
ing practices that seeped into official government 
policy in the early 1930s. Vowing to lift the nation 
out of the Great Depression, President Franklin 
Roosevelt created a new federal agency called the 
Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, or HOLC, to 
address the country’s foreclosure crisis. 
Agency appraisers traversed the country rank-
ing neighborhoods from A to D, in increasing
order of perceived foreclosure risk, to deter-
mine who could receive loans. In the resulting 
color-coded maps, A neighborhoods were green,
B neighborhoods were blue and C neighborhoods 
were yellow. The presence of Black families all but 
guaranteed that a neighborhood would receive a 
D grade. Those D neighborhoods were depicted 
in red — hence the term “redlining,” a discrimi-
natory practice in which mortgage lenders deny 
home loan applications based on the racial or eth-
nic characteristics of applicants’ neighborhoods. 
In 1930s St. Louis, for example, none of the city’s 
roughly 94,000 Black residents lived outside a 
neighborhood that received a D grade. 
“It wasn’t good enough to just be a white neigh-
borhood to get a good grade. The appraisers 
had to believe that there was no risk of integra-
tion,” says sociologist Jacob Faber of New York
University, who documented that history in 2020 
in the American Sociological Review. “ ‘Infiltra-
tion’ was actually the term that they used.”
The color-coded maps would later underpin
larger federal housing programs, includ-
ing loans issued through the Federal Housing
Administration and the Department of Veterans 
Affairs. 
Mereday and other Black service members 
were stuck. Levitt wouldn’t allow Mereday to 
buy a home in Levittown, in part because by inte-
grating his new development, Levitt would have 
lost his federal government subsidies, Rothstein 
writes. But because Mereday bought a home in a 
predominantly Black, “risky” suburb, he couldn’t 
get a zero–down payment, low-interest VA loan.
“His experiences of discrimination in the Navy 
and in the housing market permanently embit-
tered him,” Rothstein writes.