The Federal Housing Authority guaranteed the developer’s financing on the condition that none of the seven hundred new homes be sold to anyone “not wholly of the Caucasian race.” Barred by law from living in most of the rapidly developing county, Black workers and their families were forced into an area known as North Richmond. North Richmond was an unincorporated area—meaning, not an official town at all, with no government services whatsoever: no roads, streetlights, water, or sewage. The African American wartime workers had to fend entirely for themselves while their white co-workers had
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