We are witnessing people who condemn racism with racist language. We are seeing people reject oppression with oppressive behavior. The Black Lives Matter movement has set itself up as the great arbiter of truth. When they call someone or something racist, we are all supposed to believe it. Never mind that their words and language are entirely repugnant and racist. Antifa and the BLM movement is nothing but a vehicle to overthrow millions of Americans’ freedoms. BLM promises us that the solution to our racist past is a new form of government with them in charge. They claim we need more government control. NO, thank you!
The most shocking racism in the world is oppressive government control. That is what socialism is. A prime example of oppression was the construction of the Pruitt-Igoe buildings in 1954 here in St. Louis, thirty-three eleven-story buildings built on fifty-seven acres located just two miles from the Arch. This was possible because of the 1949 Housing Act passed under the Truman administration. This act gave the government the right of eminent domain, where the government exercises a strong arm of taking private property for public use. The Eisenhower administration funneled money to the city of St. Louis for their construction. Amity Shlaes says, “No urban renewal construction, captured more of the ambition and failings of government intervention in housing than that in St. Louis. Thousands of people lost their homes as entire neighborhoods were obliterated.[i] The government’s thirty-three concrete towers, each with elevators that stopped on every other floor, comprised the dream to cure poverty as this project was repeated in many other cities.
This new dream cure became a dream crusher as it displaced families first by moving them from their homes and then allowing only one parent—the mother and children to move into the towers. Tens of thousands of families lost a father. If they came for a secret visit, the family had to lie, but most fathers simply moved away and didn’t return. The project was run like something out of Stalin’s Russia, no fathers allowed, no television, no phone. Social workers policed the apartments for conformity. Who could have imagined a rationale for such stupid rules? Very quickly, the project descended into crime-ridden, dangerous places to live. The decay was evident. Even Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s couldn’t save Pruitt-Ignore. By 1976 Pruitt-Igoe had all been torn down. About thirty of the fifty-seven acres are still barren today.
Someone who saw the travesty of what was happening was John Shocklee, a priest who began to buy up dilapidated houses and rehab them for families. Seeing Shocklee’s success, Pulaski Bank and other individuals and businesses joined him in standing up to government racism. Shocklee’s work occurred in the shadow of Pruitt-Igoe, as he helped blacks own their homes despite the overwhelming presence of a massive Federal/City government that could care less.
We hear that racism is rampant, and the whites of this country must pay. I submit to you that racism has always been present, but the biggest racists have been the government policies. The Pruitt-Igoe project was an anti-family racist policy that prohibited fathers from being with their own families. We need laws and policies that support the family, encourage private ownership, and create private businesses and jobs. We need less government, not more. The less government we have, the more we thrive. Less government means we embrace freedom and our fellowman’s needs the way John Shocklee did when he built homes for people booted out by their own government.
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