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

by Richard Rothstein

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.”