The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

by Richard Rothstein

To ensure that no African Americans migrated to Richmond unless they were essential to the war effort, the city’s police stopped African American men on the street and then arrested and jailed them if they couldn’t prove they were employed. So

Practiced across the country as it had been in East Palo Alto, blockbusting was a scheme in which speculators bought properties in borderline black-white areas; rented or sold them to African American families at above-market prices; persuaded white families residing in these areas that their neighborhoods were turning into African American slums and that values would soon fall precipitously; and then purchased the panicked whites’ homes for less than their worth. Blockbusters’ tactics included hiring African American women to push carriages with their babies through white neighborhoods, hiring African American men to drive cars with radios blasting through white neighborhoods, paying African American men to accompany agents knocking on doors to see if homes were for sale, or making random telephone calls to residents of white neighborhoods and asking to speak to someone with a stereotypically African American name like “Johnnie Mae.” Speculators also took out real estate advertisements in African American newspapers, even if the featured properties were not for sale. The ads’ purpose was to attract potential African American buyers to walk around white areas that were targeted for blockbusting. In a 1962 Saturday Evening Post article, an agent (using the pseudonym “Norris Vitchek”) claimed to have arranged house burglaries in white communities to scare neighbors into believing that their communities were becoming unsafe.

In North Philadelphia in 1942, a priest spearheaded a campaign to prevent African Americans from living in the neighborhood. The same year a priest in a Polish American parish in Buffalo, New York, directed the campaign to deny public housing for African American war workers, stalling a proposed project for two years. Just south of the city, 600 units in the federally managed project for whites went vacant, while African American war workers could not find adequate housing.

In 2010, the Justice Department agreed that “[t]he more segregated a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeowners will face foreclosure because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities.” Settling a lawsuit against the Countrywide mortgage company (later a subsidiary of the Bank of America), Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan remarked that because of Countrywide’s and other lenders’ practices, “[f]rom Jamaica, Queens, New York, to Oakland, California, strong, middle-class African American neighborhoods saw nearly two decades of gains reversed in a matter of not years—but months.” For those dispossessed after foreclosures, there has been greater homelessness, more doubling up with relatives, and more apartment rental in less stable neighborhoods where poor and minority families are more tightly concentrated.

A case that the City of Memphis brought against Wells Fargo Bank was supported by affidavits of bank employees stating that they referred to subprime loans as “ghetto loans.” Bank supervisors instructed their marketing staffs to target solicitation to heavily African American zip codes, because residents there “weren’t savvy enough” to know they were being exploited. A sales group sought out elderly African Americans, believing they were particularly susceptible to pressure to take out high-cost loans.

One slum clearance tool was the construction of the federal interstate highway system. In many cases, state and local governments, with federal acquiescence, designed interstate highway routes to destroy urban African American communities. Highway planners did not hide their racial motivations.

Governor Adlai Stevenson mobilized the National Guard to restore order. Although 118 rioters were arrested, a Cook County grand jury did not indict a single one. The grand jury, however, did indict Harvey Clark, his real estate agent, his NAACP attorney, and the white landlady who rented the apartment to him as well as her attorney on charges of inciting a riot and conspiring to lower property values. Thirty-six years later, when an African American family again attempted to live in Cicero, it was met with firebombs and rifle shots.

In 1968, an official of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission reported that “our experience has been that nearly all attempts by black families to move to Detroit’s suburbs have been met with harassment.”

In the first six months of 1955, 213 violent incidents ensured that most African Americans remained in the North Philadelphia ghetto.

In the Los Angeles area, cross burnings, dynamite bombings, rocks thrown through windows, graffiti, and other acts of vandalism, as well as numerous phone threats, greeted African Americans who found housing in neighborhoods just outside their existing areas of concentration. In 1945, an entire family—father, mother, and two children—was killed when its new home in an all-white neighborhood was blown up. Of the more than one hundred incidents of move-in bombings and vandalism that occurred in Los Angeles between 1950 and 1965, only one led to an arrest and prosecution

Although the 1968 Fair Housing Act made violence to prevent neighborhood integration a federal crime and the Department of Justice prosecuted several cases, frequent attacks on African Americans attempting to leave predominantly black areas continued into the 1980s.

In 1944, the G.I. Bill was adopted to support returning servicemen. The VA not only denied African Americans the mortgage subsidies to which they were entitled but frequently restricted education and training to lower-level jobs for African Americans who were qualified to acquire greater skills. In some cases, local benefit administrators refused to process applications to four-year colleges for African Americans, directing them to vocational schools instead. Servicemen with dishonorable discharges were ineligible for benefits under the G.I. Bill, and African American soldiers disproportionately received dishonorable discharges—some for protesting segregation in army towns.

Yet when a new central post office was authorized for Oakland, California (on land cleared by displacing more than 300 families, mostly African American), not a single black plumber, operating engineer, sheet metal worker, ironworker, electrician, or steamfitter was hired for its construction. When the Bay Area Rapid Transit subway system (BART) was built in 1967, not a single African American skilled worker was hired to work on it. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance blamed the unions, all certified by the NLRB, for not admitting black members. The BART general manager allowed that although BART was “committed to equal opportunity,” it was unwilling to insist on nondiscrimination because that might provoke a union work stoppage and “[o]ur prime responsibility to the public . . . is to deliver the system . . . as nearly on time as we possibly can.” Although federal regulations provided for termination of a contractor for failing to comply with the nondiscrimination order, no penalty was imposed.

This exploitation persisted throughout the twentieth century and was well understood by economists and social welfare experts. African Americans, of course, understood it as well. In his autobiography Langston Hughes described how, when his family lived in Cleveland in the 1910s, landlords could get as much as three times the rent from African Americans that they could get from whites, because so few homes were available to black families outside a few integrated urban neighborhoods. Landlords, Hughes remembered, subdivided apartments designed for a single family into five or six units, and still African Americans’ incomes had to be disproportionately devoted to rent. Four decades later little had changed. In its 1947 brief to the Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kraemer, the U.S. government cited half a dozen studies, each of which demonstrated that “[c]olored people are forced to pay higher rents and housing costs by the semi-monopoly which segregation fosters.”

A Chicago Department of Public Welfare report in the mid-1920s stated that African Americans were charged about 20 percent more in rent than whites for similar dwellings. It also observed that in neighborhoods undergoing racial change, rents increased by 50 to 225 percent when African Americans occupied apartments that formerly housed whites. The limited supply of housing open to African Americans gave property owners in black neighborhoods the opportunity to make exorbitant profits.

Considering the disadvantages that low-income African Americans have had as a result of segregation—poor access to jobs and to schools where they can excel—it’s surprising that their mobility, compared to that of other Americans, isn’t even lower. Two explanations come to mind. One is that many African Americans heed the warning that they have to be twice as good to succeed and exhibit more than average hard work, responsibility, and ambition to supplement a little luck. The other is that our affirmative action programs have been moderately successful.

Equity that families have in their homes is the main source of wealth for middle-class Americans. African American families today, whose parents and grandparents were denied participation in the equity-accumulating boom of the 1950s and 1960s, have great difficulty catching up now. As with income, there is little mobility by wealth in America. In fact, intergenerational wealth mobility is even less than intergenerational income mobility.

Many of our serious national problems either originate with residential segregation or have become intractable because of it. We have greater political and social conflict because we must add unfamiliarity with fellow citizens of different racial backgrounds to the challenges we confront in resolving legitimate disagreements about public issues.

Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, once responded to a similar question, saying, “Your ancestors weren’t here in 1776, but you eat hot dogs on the Fourth of July, don’t you?” What she was trying to convey is that Americans who preceded us fought for our liberty, sometimes giving their lives for it, yet we benefit without making similar sacrifices. When we become Americans, we accept not only citizenship’s privileges that we did not earn but also its responsibilities to correct wrongs that we did not commit. It was our government that segregated American neighborhoods, whether we or our ancestors bore witness to it, and it is our government that now must craft remedies.

Although our history includes government-organized discrimination and even segregation of other groups, including Hispanics, Chinese, and Japanese, it was of a lesser degree, and is in the more distant past, than the de jure segregation experienced by African Americans.

Yet horrific though our treatment of Mexican immigrants and Puerto Ricans has sometimes been, it is not comparable to our treatment of African Americans. In many communities, restrictive covenants prohibited sales not only to African Americans but also to Hispanics (and frequently to Jews, the Irish, Asians, and others deemed “non-Caucasians”). Yet judges often deemed Mexican Americans to be “Caucasians” and not subject to exclusion by restrictive covenants. As the twentieth century progressed, property and residency restrictions mostly faded away for all except African Americans. Only African Americans have been systematically and unconstitutionally segregated for such a long period, and with such thorough repression, that their condition requires an aggressive constitutional remedy.