Shame of Chicago, Shame of the Nation

Shame of Chicago, Shame of the Nation is a four-part documentary series that lays bare the true stories behind how Chicago and its suburbs devised the nation’s most sweeping system of racially segregated communities and how these policies diminished the lives of generations of Black families, creating the vast racial wealth gap that persists to this day. Currently airing on WTTW, Chicago's local PBS Station. 

---

Episode 1

The Color Tax

While the white middle class was rapidly expanding and benefiting from federal policies that promoted their home equity, Black families were forced to purchase residences via contract sales, paying premiums for homes that they could lose after missing just a single payment. This episode explores the devastating impact that these contracts had on Black wealth-building and racial comity in Chicago, and their role in jumpstarting a wealth gap that continued to widen as white affluence grew.

---

Episode 2

The Chicago Plan

When violence failed to keep Blacks from seeking better housing, Chicago’s realtors developed a plan to promote restrictive covenants, which legally prevented white homeowners from selling to Black buyers. Chicago’s racial violence subsided, prompting other U.S. cities to copy their racist real estate practices. When the Great Depression hit, putting almost half of the nation’s mortgages underwater, the federal government made a fateful decision. To devise national housing policy, it looked to private-sector “experts” among Chicago’s realtors. Realtors wrote the rules and investment maps for the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), which locked in the profoundly damaging practice of redlining for generations to come.

---

Episode 3

A Million In Captivity

This episode tells the story of the intentional creation of a vast spatial gap in Black and white experience in the late 1950s and 1960s. Revealing how the original vision of public housing advocates in the New Deal era came up against the determination of mayors, real estate firms, and homeowners to prevent an integrated city, “Suburbs for Whites, Public Housing for Blacks” chronicles the ensuing consequences, which produced concentrated poverty in poorly constructed, high-density developments cut off from the wealth building opportunities and massive government subsidies that underwrote the suburbs.

---

Episode 4

We've Found the Enemy and It's Not Us

The final episode of the Shame of Chicago, Shame of the Nation documentary series tells the story of how an interracial group of working-class homeowners on Chicago’s west side fought unscrupulous realtors and bank redlining, leading them to Washington, D.C., where they forced the passage of groundbreaking legislation. The series thus closes by highlighting the efforts of visionary advocates and organizers to redress enduring racial injustice, make African American communities whole, and enable a better future—even as it conveys the continuing toll of the racial wealth gap created by over a century of housing segregation.

---