Ben Carson's HUD to the residents of Cairo, Illinois: We're done here. Get out.

Once a would-be metropolis, now only ‘barge work, a seed-oil processor, and a rice seed company’ remains.

The history of Cairo, Illinois, is the history of violent and entrenched racism in the American midwest. Once a destination for fleeing slaves seeking refuge in the north, the town would remain forever-segregated, that segregation enforced via both law and violence. During the civil rights era, the town became a war zone, with black residents coming under fire from white snipers shooting down from the surrounding levies. Every legal impediment to justice for black Americans, every business impediment, every threat, every retaliation: white Illinois would incorporate it all into their battle to keep the town segregated into the 1970s, and ‘80s, and ‘90s. At 70 percent black, the city remains largely segregated to this day.

Mother Jones has a long read on one of the final indignities foisted onto the city’s remaining residents. After recent widespread corruption and rampant racism in the local housing authority left the McBride and Elmwood public housing projects neglected and rat-infested, it was Ben Carson’s HUD that took a close look at the controversy, shrugged, and pulled the plug on efforts to even attempt making things right. The message they offered residents instead: Leave. Get out.

Instead, HUD announced it was condemning the two projects. Residents would need to be out by July 2018, and HUD would give them vouchers for new apartments. The nicer high-rises across town, which had been favored with more attention and resources over the decades, would stay open, and a few residents would move into units there or find other arrangements nearby—but most of the African American families living in the segregated projects would have to leave Cairo. HUD claimed the city of 2,560 was “dying,” and that it would be pointless to replace or renovate 80-year-old buildings in a dying city.

Want to stay in your hometown? Too bad. We’ve decided the whole damn place is a lost cause.

Every nuance of the decision is in keeping with the Ben Carson-led HUD’s new mandate. Distributing vouchers instead of actual housing; indifference to the needs of actual residents; indifference to the underlying segregation that continues to treat those residents unfairly, causing the entire chain of events leading up to this point; indifference to the core theoretical mission of HUD, to provide affordable housing in areas desperately in need of it; apathy as management technique, and contempt for those in poverty as the defining feature. Under Trump, the agency has itself become a haven for grifters—a place to dump Trump loyalists that the family can see no other use for but feels obligated to reward with a government paycheck, like Carson or Eric Trump’s one-time wedding planner. It stands to reason they would see no pressing need to remedy a situation caused by the rank corruption of others.

It is worth a read, both for the history of the town and the indifference of HUD in what may be the town’s final waning decades. It truly is the history of America, the threads of which continue to weave through every American town and government office to this day.

But it should not be ignored that in the end, this is likely what the racists of the local housing authority were trying to accomplish anyway when they were stripping funds from majority-black housing projects while a nearby majority-white project was given preferential treatment. Now McBride and Elmwood will be shuttered, and Ben Carson’s HUD is telling the black residents of those neglected buildings that they’ve got to pack up and leave.