Of 3200 government-secured home loans issued to veterans in Mississippi in 1947, only two went to Blacks. In New York and New Jersey, with 67,000 such mortgages, Black veterans received fewer than a hundred. These policies considerably widened the wealth gap between Black and white families, which persists to this day. Even at the height of the civil rights movement, the power in Congress of segregationist southerners such as Richard Russell, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Carl Vinson, his counterpart in the House of Representatives, made efforts to purge the military of racism all the more difficult.
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