Link to the full Poverty & Race Journal (May-September 2026)
by Florence Wagman Roisman
Without doubt, Arnold Hirsch was one of the most influential historians of his generation. He was closely associated with the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC): as his family write in the Acknowledgements to Segregating Cities, PRRAC “was crucial to Arnie’s turn toward federal housing policy beginning in 1996 and also facilitated his work as an expert witness in the civil rights case Thompson v. HUD.”
Starting in 1996, PRRAC commissioned studies by Hirsch and his close colleague Raymond Mohl, “drawing on National Archives materials, documenting the impact of federal housing and transportation policy/programs [and] . . . state and local government actions that paralleled the federal government role, creating teaching materials, and developing an appropriate multipronged advocacy plan: wider public education as to how existing metropolitan racial patterns and disparities came about; public . . . hearings; remedial legislation; and possible litigation.” This PRRAC project, titled “Housing and School Segregation: Government Culpability, Government Remedies,” expanded to include research by David M.P. Freund.
The interests of these scholars were consistent with those of PRRAC: to combine rigorous historical and social science research with effective advocacy, largely to redress grievous racial injustices that had been imposed by federal, state, and local governments and, as Professor Thomas Sugrue shows so convincingly in the Introduction to Segregating Cities, by exclusionary and violent white communities.
Of the 13 chapters in Segregating Cities, six clearly are connected to PRRAC. Chapter 7 originally was published as a report by PRRAC; Chapters 5, 6, 8, and 9 were financially supported by PRRAC; and Chapter 10 was adapted by Hirsch from his expert testimony in the important Baltimore public housing desegregation case, Thompson v. HUD, 348 F.Supp.2d 398 (D.Md. 2005), which was related to PRRAC. Another expert witness for the plaintiffs in that case was Professor john a. powell, a founding and continuing PRRAC Board member who directs the UC Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, whose then Director-Counsel, Ted Shaw, also was a founding PRRAC Board member, continues to be represented on PRRAC’s Board. LDF also was co-counsel in Thompson with the ACLU of Maryland, Brown, Goldstein & Levy, and other firms. The national ACLU also long has been represented on PRRAC’s Board. Study of Hirsch’s papers and PRRAC’s probably would disclose many other connections between Hirsch and PRRAC; that research has not been undertaken in preparation of this essay.
It probably was the PRRAC relationship that led Hirsch – and Raymond Mohl – to their involvement with litigation and their roles as expert witnesses. Part of what PRRAC aimed to do was continue such work as Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark and Robert Weaver had performed in employing social science in the service of legal advocacy. While the work of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark is well known, the research of Dr. Robert Weaver used in the service of advocacy deserves more attention. The research of the Doctors Clark was crucial to Brown v. Board; the sociological research of Dr. Weaver was crucial to the restrictive covenant cases, Shelley v. Kraemer and Hurd v. Hodge.
Raymond Mohl has written about how his historical research was used in litigation as well as in the 1996 report he wrote for PRRAC: “Federal Highway Policy and Housing Impacts, 1930s to the 1960s.” Raymond A. Mohl, The Second Ghetto Thesis and the Power of History, 29 J. Urban Hist. 243, 253 n.18 (2003). Mohl discusses working on Adker v. HUD, a public housing desegregation case in Miami, and a voting rights case there; counsel in the Adker case included Tom Henderson of the national Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Tom also had been a PRRAC Board member. Mohl’s experience of the historian’s role in litigation probably mirrors the experience of his colleague, Arnold Hirsch, who testified as an expert witness in a Louisiana voting rights case as well as in Thompson v. HUD. Indeed, the cross-fertilization of the PRRAC-related experts and these civil rights litigators is shown in Hirsch’s footnote references in his 2005 report for PRRAC (Chapter 7 to material from Adker v. HUD and his expression of thanks to Tom Henderson for providing those documents. There is also a footnote in Chapter 7: in which Hirsch thanks Barbara Samuels, lead counsel in Thompson, for “uncovering a source” he cites from the Baltimore City Archives.
As Professor Sugrue discusses, Hirsch expansively explains racial segregation as being rooted in individual prejudice and real estate and financial industry practice as well as government action, but the focus of the PRRAC-related material in Segregating Cities is reflected in the subtitle to Part II, which comprises them: “Segregation and the State.” Here, Hirsch details the ways in which federal housing law and policy interacted with state and local actors to impose “[s]tate-supported segregation” through public housing, urban renewal, and Federal Housing Administration programs. Two especially resonant themes in these chapters are the valiant efforts of the Racial Relations Service (RRS) to battle U.S. apartheid and then the governmental attempts to entrench residential segregation in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board (showing the close connection between school and housing segregation).
Hirsch draws a detailed portrait of the Racial Relations Service (RRS) at the Housing & Home Finance Agency, encompassing public housing, urban renewal, and Federal Housing Administration development, addressing racial issues first under the aegis of Clark Foreman and then Dr. Robert Weaver and Drs. Frank Horne and Corinne Morrow. Hirsch has here the beginnings of an article, if not a book, about the RRS. The demise of the RRS may be especially interesting now as the civil rights agencies of the federal government are being destroyed by the current administration.
Hirsch’s work builds a cumulative, damning picture of housing law and policy from 1933 to 1960, using federal, state, and local power and money to displace Black people and other people of color from what housing they had and tightly “containing” them within narrow bands of existing, under-resourced areas. Hirsch’s research in the archives supports his thesis that the urban renewal proposal in what became the 1954 Housing Act – “passed by Congress within weeks of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision – enabled and empowered local authorities to adopt renewal plans that guaranteed continued separate and unequal development.” The quotation is from Chapter 7; for other discussion of the relationship between urban renewal and school segregation read Wendell E. Pritchett’s article, “The “Public Menace” of Blight: Urban Renewal and the Private Uses of Eminent.”
What Hirsch’s studies for PRRAC show clearly and in painful detail is that federal, state, and local housing officials worked very hard to build residential racial segregation into the housing and development programs that remade the face of the United States between the New Deal and the 1960s. n
Other Resources:
Chester Hartman, Between Eminence & Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning 54 (Rutgers, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research 2002);
PRRAC Annual Report for 1997;
David M.P. Freund, Democracy’s Unfinished Business: Federal Policy and the Search for Fair Housing, 1961-1968, in Poverty & Race in America: The Emerging Agenda 173 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2006);
Raymond A. Mohl, The Second Ghetto Thesis and the Power of History, 29 J. Urban Hist. 243, 253 n.18 (2003).
Wendell E. Pritchett, The “Public Menace” of Blight: Urban Renewal and the Private Uses of Eminent Domain, 21 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. 1 (2003).
Florence Wagman Roisman, the William F. Harvey Professor of Law at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law (and a Chancellor’s Professor there) was a founding Board member of PRRAC. For research assistance with this essay, she is grateful to Dionna Shanay Weatherly.
Several quotations in this essay are from Professor Sugrue’s Introduction or the family’s Acknowledgements in Segregating Cities.
