Frog Hollow. Susan Campbell
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said a 1915 Courant feature story on the group. “The men must have qualities not possessed by the average member of the force,” including confidence and steely nerves.6
Those skills would serve officers well in a neighborhood that sometimes bristled with racial tension. African Americans who moved north to work in the tobacco fields also looked for work in the hollow’s factories. But while the police force was watching over a neighborhood that was relatively racially diverse, that would change as factories grew and housing for (overwhelmingly white) blue-collar workers went for a premium. Over time, black residents began to leave the hollow for houses in the north end of Hartford, which remains roughly 64 percent African American and 31 percent Hispanic. They did not necessarily move by choice. Public policy, unspoken and otherwise, pushed them out.
The creation of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934—lauded for making home ownership accessible—helped dig deep moats around certain neighborhoods, including Frog Hollow.7 This was the birth of redlining, the use of discriminatory banking, insurance, and lending practices that keep certain people from climbing up the ladder and out. In Frog Hollow those people included African Americans, some of whom had been in the area since colonial times, and recent immigrants. The federal government would not insure mortgages in neighborhoods like Frog Hollow.8
The housing bubble of the 1920s and then the Great Depression had turned bankers into conservative lenders. Something was needed to loosen the purse strings after home ownership sunk to 44 percent nationwide—and substantially less in urban areas such as Hartford.9 Mortgage rates hovered around 7 percent. Would-be buyers were expected to put down half the cost of the home, and generally mortgage loans were due within five years.10 Created by the National Housing Act of 1934, the Federal Housing Administration was meant to bolster the stagnant housing market of the early ’30s.11 It did that, but mostly only for white people.
As rural southern African Americans headed north to the factories and immigrants settled in Frog Hollow, a federal organization called the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation published a map that ranked Hartford’s neighborhoods on a scale of A to D. Neighborhoods that examiners believed would be peopled with residents likely to repay a mortgage were marked “A.” Neighborhoods that were considered riskier for mortgage defaults were rated “D” (and colored red on the map). The HOLC was trying to judge the desirability of neighborhoods in more than two hundred cities around the country so that the Federal Home Loan Bank could make decisions on which mortgages could be viable.12
Residential Security Map of Hartford Area 1937, Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. Retrieved from “On the Line: How Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and Its Suburbs,” https://ontheline.trincoll.edu/book/
The effect on neighborhoods was instantaneous, and it didn’t stop after the Depression. In fact, old redlining maps served as a harbinger of the devastation to come. Neighborhoods where mortgages were not backed were—and are—neighborhoods that remain economically vulnerable. Researchers at a University of North Carolina interdisciplinary group took old FHA redlining maps and laid them over the modern-day maps of certain cities in California. Their website shows that the effects of redlining remain.13 The discrimination that was codified in federal policy indelibly and adversely affected those neighborhoods.
The bulk of Frog Hollow was rated “C,” the next-to-lowest ranking. One appraisal report described the land as “slightly rolling,” and favorable influences included “nearness to places of employment.” However, the buildings, said the report, were older and business and industry were encroaching into residential areas. As for the inhabitants, most were factory workers, according to the report; the families were “mixed” racially and the number of “relief families” was “quite a few.” The report said the neighborhood was “very old and congested” and suggested that lenders should “exercise utmost caution.”14 From the 1937 map, green-tinted “A” areas—the highest ranking—were nonexistent in Hartford, though there were a few scattered blue (B) areas in the extreme north and south ends of the city.
The corporation ranked blocks with larger minority populations with a “D” as the riskiest neighborhoods for issuing mortgages. Even the presence of a small number of minority families could drop the ranking of a neighborhood to a “C.” Defaults were assumed to be most likely where people of color lived. The effect was the equivalent of shutting the door on black home ownership. As those rent neighborhoods deteriorated, residents who could afford to began to move to the suburbs, taking with them their taxes and support of local schools.15
Meanwhile, the former Hartford residents who had moved to the suburbs pulled the rope up after themselves by writing racist covenants that excluded black residents, thereby pushing suburban dwelling even further out of reach and consigning generations of families of color to low-resource neighborhoods. The Federal Housing Administration, while encouraging more home ownership, allowed illegal restrictions on mortgages in favor of whites. In 1955 one writer said: “From its inception the FHA set itself up as the protector of the all white neighborhood. It sent its agents into the field to keep Negroes and other minorities from buying houses in white neighborhoods. It exerted pressure against builders who dared to build for minorities, and against lenders willing to lend on mortgages.”16
After redlining and withholding resources from vulnerable neighborhoods, the FHA called for restrictive covenants in the suburbs that helped keep neighborhoods homogenous—and white. Racial or ethnic mixing was considered “undesirable encroachment.”17 The FHA protected “all-white neighborhoods” and its field agents were charged with keeping “Negroes and other minorities from buying houses in white neighborhoods.”18 What had been a relatively integrated city became divided strictly by race, and then again by class.19 All this happened with the support of—in fact, the blessing of—the federal government.
By this point, the Frog Hollow neighborhood had peaked in population, and the apartments that had been home to factory workers stood empty. And then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Prior to December 1941, city officials polled personnel managers, who all said that Hartford needed more housing for its workers. Though manufacturing was moving elsewhere, the town continued to grow from a population of 138,000 in 1920 to 165,000 in 1930. The immigration wave slowed, but southern African Americans were streaming into the city.
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