Redlining, the Riot, and the Long History of Race in Erie

In July of nineteen sixty-seven, Erie joined a long list of American cities that summer where decades of accumulated grievance finally broke open on the street. The flashpoint was the corner of East Eighteenth and Holland, in a neighborhood that had been systematically starved of resources and opportunity for most of a century. Several nights of arson and brick-throwing followed across the east side, part of what historians now call the Long Hot Summer, a wave of more than a hundred fifty uprisings in cities across the country.

To understand what happened, you have to go back further. Pennsylvania ended slavery in eighteen forty-seven, just fourteen years before the Civil War. Only two decades after that, the local Ku Klux Klan chapter was openly endorsing mayoral candidates from their Erie headquarters and making headlines doing it. Redlining, the federal government's practice of denying mortgage loans in Black neighborhoods, locked families out of homeownership and wealth-building for generations. Highways built through the city in the nineteen fifties and sixties cut directly through the strongest African American neighborhoods, demolishing blocks of housing and community anchors to serve commuters passing through.

In June of nineteen sixty-three, four years before the riot, roughly one thousand people, both Black and white, had gathered in Perry Square to protest the city's failure to address job discrimination. The march was peaceful. The underlying conditions did not change. When the riot came in sixty-seven, it was not a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention.

This is incomplete history, and the record of what exactly happened in July of sixty-seven, what specific incidents preceded it, and what precise policy failures caused it, is not as fully documented as historians would like. What is documented is the pattern that preceded it, and the pattern that followed: Erie's neighborhoods remain largely segregated today, a legacy of those decisions that were made in offices far from the streets they shaped.