How Did HUD Secretary Become The ‘Black Job’ Of Presidential Administrations?

The announcement Friday that President-elect Donald Trump had tapped motivational speaker and former NFL player Scott Turner to lead the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was unexpected. But, in a way, choosing Turner was also not entirely unanticipated.

While no one could have reasonably foreseen Trump’s selection of Turner, a former NFL player – especially amid the mounting criticism that there were no “Black jobs” in the upcoming presidential administration – it was all but a given that a Black person would be nominated to be HUD secretary.

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After all, HUD is the federal agency that has had the highest number of Black secretaries of all Cabinet-level departments. That number will grow to eight if Turner is confirmed next year.

But how did we arrive in a place where there is one Cabinet position that has seemingly been earmarked for Black people since its inception? In other words, how did the HUD secretary become the “Black job” of presidential administrations?

Why was HUD created?

When President Lyndon B. Johnson created HUD in 1965, he appointed Robert Weaver to be its first secretary the next year. As such, Weaver – a Howard University-trained longtime government operative in the housing sector for whom HUD headquarters was renamed – became the first Black person to ever lead a Cabinet-level federal agency, setting off what would eventually become somewhat of a predictable political trend as future presidents took office and also chose Black HUD secretaries.

But it wasn’t always that way.

HUD was founded by LBJ’s administration “to allow the federal government to tackle urban problems including substandard and deteriorating housing in a coordinated manner,” according to the agency’s website. Those “problems” also notably included racial discrimination against Black would-be residents and tenants as racist landlords and real estate holders refused to do business with them. As such, the federal government tapped a Black person to deal with what they likely viewed as a Black problem

Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. three years after HUD was created, the ensuing riots sparked the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which allowed the federal agency to enforce housing discrimination laws. As a result, that same year, the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) was established to address homeownership affordability. To this day, Ginnie Mae “serves Black borrowers at triple the rate of the rest of the market,” according to a report released last year.

HUD secretaries

But while Weaver was the face of HUD at that time, LBJ replaced him the following year with Robert Wood, beginning a streak of four consecutive non-Black HUD secretaries under two presidencies (Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford) that have been largely remembered in the annals of history as not very beneficial for Black America, to put it kindly.

In fact, even though HUD is generally viewed as the Black Cabinet position, there have been 11 more white HUD secretaries than those who are Black. Aside from Weaver, there have been just six other Black HUD secretaries it its nearly 60 year existence: Patricia R. Harris, Samuel R. Pierce, Jr., Alphonso Jackson, Ben Carson, Marcia Fudge and current acting secretary Adrianne Todman.

But the concept on which HUD was first established has consistently made it so that the baseline expectation for presidential administrations, particularly in recent years, is that the agency be helmed by a Black person – even if that president is considered to be an unabashed racist like Donald Trump.

Is HUD secretary actually a “Black job” after all?

All of which brings us back to Scott Turner who, unlike most of his fellow Cabinet-designates, actually has relative experience for his presumptive future job. As the Executive Director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council in Trump’s first administration, Turner worked in part with HUD in “distressed communities.” Immediately prior to that appointment, the Republican served for two consecutive terms in the Texas State legislature as an elected representative.

Turner’s qualifications, still, are no reason to expect for Trump’s presidency to positively impact Black America, particularly that slice that relies on HUD, what with Republicans’ Project 2025 agenda that explicitly outlines a way to “reset HUD” as it relates in part to “program eligibility.”

That chapter of Project 2025 was, naturally, authored by Ben Carson, who served as HUD secretary during Trump’s first presidency – a tenure by the acclaimed neurosurgeon with no experience in housing or the public sector that was notably marked by the worsening of affordable housing, according to Realtor.com.

Thus, showing that given missions for HUD secretaries aren’t always beneficial to Black people, belying the foundation on which the agency was originally created and making it a misnomer and then some to only refer to the position as a “Black job.”

This is America.

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