Emerging Domestic Markets: How Financial Entrepreneurs Reach Underserved Communities in the United States by Fairchild Gregory

Author:Fairchild, Gregory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS020000, Business & Economics/Development/Business Development, BUS025000, Business & Economics/Entrepreneurship
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2021-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Targeted Private Equity I

Neighborhood Integration, Black Capitalism, and the Inception of Minority Private Equity

NOT LONG before I began kindergarten, my parents purchased their first home in the relatively new neighborhood of Dale City, Virginia, because of its proximity to Washington, D.C.—and, important to my parents—. Since their purchase was a new construction, a number of other military officers with young families were also moving in at the same time. Colin and Alma Powell—and their son, Michael, who was my age—lived just over the backyard fence and up the hill.

For my parents, the integrated community was an important factor in deciding where to bring up their two young children. And yet, in some ways, this represented a “walk of faith”—both had grown up in segregated neighborhoods. They believed that integration was good social policy, and so believed in this notion that their intent was to find a home and a school system for my sister and me that would allow them to test the possibilities.

Integrated housing was not easily found outside of military bases, even for recently returned Vietnam veterans. For families like the Powells and mine, this problem was addressed head-on when, in 1963, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara issued his directive to ensure immediate nondiscrimination in housing and schools, including off-base residential housing: “I am fully aware that the Defense Department is not a philanthropic foundation or a social welfare institution,” McNamara wrote in 1969. “But the Department does not intend to let our Negro servicemen and their families continue to suffer the injustices and indignities they have in the past.”1

This type of sentiment coming from the Defense Department’s leadership strengthened my parents’ commitment to the notion of integration. The military was able to apply economic force behind the policy by requiring that the owners of off-base real estate leased by the military agree to a racial nondiscrimination clause. Any property owner that declined to agree to the policy would not be able to lease to servicemen at all, of any race.2

As I read Secretary McNamara’s words now, they seem especially direct and powerful. That an organization in the executive branch would designate the immediate implementation of social policy, and require full compliance, is audacious in ways that few government agencies or businesses would attempt today.

Despite extensive criticism and public controversy, McNamara pressed on. In 1967, only a few years after his 1963 directive, McNamara followed with another direct order: All posts with five hundred or more servicemen were required to survey the available housing within their geographic footprint to ensure that there was no evidence of racial discrimination. Further still, the directive required installations to use the economic pressure of the military to force integration in communities that abutted those bases. McNamara’s directives underscore the important role of government policy, and sometimes explicitly social policy, in shaping our economic lives.

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