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

by Richard Rothstein

until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today’s residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.

Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto. Rather, it is what courts call de jure: segregation by law and public policy.