In Extremis: Candyman and Housing Discrimination

Disclaimer: Independent Legal Advice, Independent Legal Advice, Independent Legal Advice, Independent Legal Advice, Independent Legal Advice… it does not just appear. Please seek it out and do not rely on this article. If you are dealing with housing discrimination please contact a civil rights organization or a lawyer in your area.

Bernard Rose’s 1992 Candyman(1) was one of my favourite horror films as a child. The movie is visually sensuous in an off-putting way, like emerging from a graffiti mouth and kissing bees. The story centers on Helen (Virginia Madsen), a white semiologist who visits the Cabrini-Green projects in Chicago to write her thesis with her friend Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons). Things do not end well, as she continues to try to invalidate the story of Candyman (Tony Todd), and he returns with a vengeance to keep his legacy alive.

When I saw this as a child, I did not realize that the film relies on perpetuating white fears of horrific violence in black communities. I was 8—I thought the guy with the hook was cool and scary. Would it be appropriate for me to discuss the 1966 case of Gautreaux et al. vs. Chicago Housing Authority, a historic lawsuit where the Chicago housing authority was found liable for conceiving of and carrying out Chicago’s public housing program in a racially discriminatory manner, including creating race-based quotas perpetuating racial segregation?(2) It might not be, as it is not my story, but I think it is important to understand that case before evaluating the legacy of this film.(3)

Housing discrimination refers to patterns of discrimination that affect a person's ability to rent or buy housing. It can be done directly by an individual decision-maker or indirectly through structural discrimination that limits opportunities for specific groups. Examples of housing discrimination include:

1. Outright denial of accommodation,
2. Differential treatment in terms of statutory obligations (like keeping an apartment up to code based on the tenants)
3. Negative impacts resulting from seemingly neutral rules (like a no pets policy that affects guide dogs); or
4. In the case of public housing—determining who to grant requests for housing to and where they are granted.

In 1966, the American Civil Liberties Association launched a claim that the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had created discriminatory quotas in four primarily white housing projects and had intentionally chosen historically black neighbourhoods as the location for low-income housing. The matter was not heard at a trial; instead, it was determined on summary judgement on the evidence. Summary judgement is when a motion is brought by a party to dismiss the pleadings (the statement of what was done wrong or the defence to that statement) based on the claims made or the evidence already collected by the parties. A matter cannot be summarily dismissed on the evidence if there was still contradictory testimony or the evidence could not be determined without a trial. Here the parties agreed on the evidence—they just interpreted the law differently.

There were four housing projects built-in 1944 in primarily white neighbourhoods: Trumbull, Lathrop, Lawndale and Bridgeport. 90% of the applicants for public housing in Chicago were black. Only 7%, 4%, 6%, and 1% of the population of these four projects in December 1967 were black. Reading this now, anyone with basic math comprehension can see the problem—but Harry Schneider, Deputy Executive Director of CHA, acknowledged that there were strict quotas in force and that if the number of black families in these projects rose to the maximum, any further applications would be put on hold. The CHA’s argument focused on the history of violence that occurred during the desegregation of communities—an interesting tactic previously trotted out in Detroit Housing Commission v. Lewis.(4) Like in that case, it lost here because denying someone’s fourteenth amendment rights to equal treatment based on the laudable goal of safety should still fail when unfounded in the evidence.(5)

Similar arguments were made in defence of the second claim: that housing sites for developing low-income housing were placed in predominantly black neighbourhoods. The evidence was that Aldermen voted with their constituents’ interests in vetoing the placement of low-income housing in white neighbourhoods, with no racial animus to their vote. However, the CHA failed in their pleadings and evidence to suggest that there were no racial criteria used in the placements of housing and admitted to their intent to use those criteria providing two reasons to reject their defence.(6)

The court dismissed the claims of the CHA and ordered the parties to formulate a comprehensive plan to prohibit those practices and remedy the unconstitutional site selection and tenant assignment procedures. The court went on to note that because of these practices, white applicants for housing would refuse to move into black public housing. Apparently, privileged beggars can be choosers. The court ended by stating:(7)

"Second, existing patterns of racial separation must be reversed if there is to be a chance of averting the desperately intensifying division of Whites and Negroes in Chicago. On the basis of present trends of Negro residential concentration and of Negro migration into and White migration out of the central city, the President's Commission on Civil Disorders estimates that Chicago will become 50% Negro by 1984. By 1984 it may be too late to heal racial divisions."

Well, the numbers never did reach 50% and racial division was not healed by 1984; furthermore, despite the parties having 30 days to draft their agreement the matter was not settled until 2019!(8)  If CHA carries out the requirements of the Settlement Agreement, the case will end on July 31, 2024, almost 60 years after it began. The Settlement specifically incorporates the requirements made in 2000 and 2015 known as the “Cabrini Orders” that dealt with tearing down dilapidated buildings, providing mixed-income redevelopment, and family housing throughout Chicago. You can read the Settlement Agreement here.(9)

What does all that have to do with a black man covered in bees? You don’t need to be a semiologist to see. Helen and Bernadette are writing their thesis about the use of urban legends to cope with the hardship of Cabrini-Green’s living conditions. The film’s urban legend is directly connected to a lynch mob killing a black man for fathering children with a white woman. Fear of violence/ lynching was cited above as one of the reasons to justify segregation in the Gautreaux case. Helen, like the filmmakers, is obsessed with the legend and not with the actual experience of those living in the Cabrini-Green projects. We follow Helen’s stories and her fears; everyone else in the community is ultimately disposable. The setting itself becomes part of the horror and Helen is absorbed into the Graffiti as she joins the local folklore.

The film is not centred on the experience of coping with hardship—that is a throw-away plot point—and it exacerbates some of the fears that led to harmful conditions like white flight, segregation, and eventual gentrification. The film instead invents a fictional serial killer without concern that this is a real place where people lived their lives. Bernard Rose chose Cabrini-Greens to retell Clive Barker’s story based on white “fears of African American and poor communities”.(10) Most of the articles you read will focus on how dangerous it was to film on location. The legacy of this film is remembering Cabrini-Green as a place of terror and violence.

When we look at the film through the lens of the Gautreaux case, we see a community that has been deliberately segregated and ghettoized. That court case and a litany of other cases across the US are all about limiting the opportunities of black people to “protect” white people. They are about white fears and catering built environments to those fears. In 1992 the same year as the film was released, 7-year old Dantrell Davis was gunned down, one of the 943 homicides that year in Chicago.(11) The focus became on cracking down on policing and developing a long-term development plan for the ageing buildings and conditions of poverty. Had the city listened to the court in Gautreaux, the shift to a more integrated and funded public housing system might have occurred far sooner. We see that a film that mythologizes the housing conditions of the black community in Chicago was more palatable than the real story.

For many people, this film was profoundly impactful in creating a slasher icon, but like Cabrini-Green itself, it has a traumatic past. Nia DaCosta’s choice to focus on gentrification emerging from the torn down remains of the Cabrini-Green continues to reflect the lingering anxiety of integrated housing and its effect on the black community in Chicago. Shifting the narrative to a black male perspective as opposed to a white female lens has the potential to significantly redefine the mythos. I hope that her upcoming Candyman can redefine that legacy and focus the story to a more richly told black narrative that is worthy of being immortalized.(12)

1. Please note, the name of this film is only used 4 times in this article, including the title… just in case.
2. Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, 296 F. Supp. 907 (N.D. Ill. 1969), law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/296/907/1982538/. Accessed August 22 2021.
3. Note that I am not going to discuss red-lining: the practice of outlining areas for mortgage lenders where black communities existed as a means of underfunding housing loans. That is an expansive topic and has been covered better in articles such as Moser, W. (2017, August 22). How redlining Segregated Chicago, and America. Chicago Magazine. chicagomag.com/city-life/august-2017/how-redlining-segregated-chicago-and-america/. Accessed August 22 2021.
4. Detroit Housing Commission v. Lewis, 226 F.2d 180 (6th Cir. 1955).
5. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee County, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954).
6. Jones v. Georgia, 389 U.S. 24, 88 S. Ct. 4, 19 L. Ed. 2d 25 (1967); and Cypress v. Newport News General and Nonsectarian Hospital Assn., 375 F.2d 648 (4th Cir. 1967).
7. Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, 296 F. Supp. 907 (N.D. Ill. 1969), law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/296/907/1982538/, page 915. Accessed August 22 2021.
8. Business and Professional People for the Public Interest. (2020, January 29). Gautreaux settlement agreement. BPI Chicago. www.bpichicago.org/programs/housing-community-development/public-housing/gautreaux-settlement-agreement/. Accessed August 22 2021.
9. Chicago Housing Authority. (n.d.). GAUTREAUX settlement. GAUTREAUX SETTLEMENT | The Chicago Housing Authority. www.thecha.org/residents/public-housing/gautreaux-settlement. Accessed August 22 2021.
10. Dukmasova, Maya. “Documenting the Rise and Fall of Chicago's Cabrini-Green Public Housing Projects.” In These Times, November 16, 2015. inthesetimes.com/article/70-acres-cabrini-green-documentary-chicago-housing-authority. Accessed August 22 2021.Please read a more nuanced take by a black writer on the effect these depictions of violence had on the community by Council, Sierra. “Decades Later, Some Wonder If Cabrini-Green's History Is Being Erased • The TRiiBE.” The TRiiBE, February 6, 2020. thetriibe.com/2020/02/former-cabrini-green-community-members-fear-their-cultural-footprint-is-being-forgotten/. Accessed August 22 2021.
11. Dumke, M. (2012, October 15). The shot that brought the projects down. Chicago Reader. chicagoreader.com/blogs/the-shot-that-brought-the-projects-down-part-four-of-five/. Accessed August 22 2021.
12. As I said, I am a white Canadian, and so I urge you to read books like “Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul” by Leila Taylor for a deep analysis of blackness in American Gothic storytelling, which I relied on for this piece.