Despite its nominal rule of respecting the prior racial composition of neighborhoods—itself a violation of African Americans’ constitutional rights—the PWA segregated projects even where there was no previous pattern of segregation. At the time, many urban neighborhoods contained both black and white (mostly immigrant) low-income families. The neighborhoods were integrated because workers of both races needed to live close to the downtown factory jobs to which they walked.† The PWA designated many integrated neighborhoods as either white or black and then used public housing to make the
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