Housing the black body: Value, domestic space, and segregation narratives

"Iron Ring in Housing," a 1940 article from The Crisis on the significance of the Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee, begins by insisting: "There is no right more elemental nor any liberty more fundamental in a democracy than freedom to move where and when you please" (205). Linking together mobility and housing, the article connects these two issues to the rights and privileges of citizenship in a democracy. Hansberry takes on residential segregation by confronting that practice not merely as a restriction on domestic space but mainly as a constriction of civic identity. The case intimates that, given the centrality of segregation to restrictive practices affecting citizenship, the relationship of African Americans to places of residence and to domestic space in general is indicative of their relationship to legal structures. The social and legal developments that directly and indirectly encouraged segregated housing during the mid-twentieth century created the conditions for African Americans to feel estranged from their domestic spaces.¹ The feelings of frustration and dissatisfaction with the "kitchenette" apparent in the poem by Gwendolyn Brooks embody the housing problems to come for many African American communities, and such sentiments factor into the representations of domestic space in mid-twentieth-century African American narratives.