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

by Richard Rothstein

Another Boston project from the 1940s, Mission Hill, had two sections: Mission Hill itself and across the street, the Mission Hill Extension. In 1962, 1,024 families, not one of them African American, lived in Mission Hill. At the Mission Hill Extension, 500 of 580 families were African American. Five years later, after Boston agreed to desegregate the developments, Mission Hill was still 97 percent white while the Mission Hill Extension had increased to 98 percent African American.

Jeffries’s literature proclaimed, “Mayor Jeffries Is Against Mixed Housing.” One leaflet, distributed in white neighborhoods but pretending to be addressed to African Americans, suggested that a vote for Frankensteen would bring black families to white communities. It read: NEGROES CAN LIVE ANYWHERE WITH FRANKENSTEEN MAYOR. NEGROES – DO YOUR DUTY NOV. 6.

The San Francisco Housing Authority, in 1942, constructed a massive development to house 14,000 workers and their families at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard and began to assign apartments on a nondiscriminatory first-come, first-served basis. The navy objected, insisting that integration would cause racial conflict among workers and interfere with ship repair. Local officials bowed to the navy’s demand and moved African American tenants to separate sections.

The San Francisco Housing Authority attempted to recruit white tenants by placing advertisements in light-rail commuter cars, despite the long waiting lists of African Americans for apartments. This combination of vacant white units and waiting lists for black units increasingly characterized public housing nationwide.

The only integrated war project in the Bay Area was one that housed shipyard workers in Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from the city. The project was not integrated purposely; the first buildings were dormitories for single men, and the shipyard’s rapid expansion left no time to separate the races. As workers flooded in, officials could barely keep up, just handing out blankets and pillows and assigning rooms that were available. Perhaps to their surprise, the officials found that integration presented few problems among the workers, so the biracial character of the project was maintained when workers’ families arrived. After a few years, however, private housing in the area became available to whites, and the Marin project, too, became predominantly African American.

The authority’s executive secretary then made this concession: although projects in white neighborhoods would remain all white, the authority would admit more white applicants to its nearly all-black Westside Courts project and to Hunters Point (where black and white tenants remained segregated by building). It was a meaningless concession because whites were unlikely to apply to reside in Westside Courts now that they had rapidly increasing opportunities to move to the suburbs. Only a decision to assign African Americans to the all-white projects would have promoted integration, but such a proposal was not on offer by the authority.

black families to projects outside the Western Addition. With contempt for the spirit of the court order, the authority established three new public housing projects in other areas that by then had few white residents, ensuring that segregation in these neighborhoods would be reinforced. Moreover, the California decision was not widely imitated.

IV

This is exhausting. When does it get better?

On the Senate floor, Douglas proclaimed: “I should like to point out to my Negro friends what a large amount of housing they will get under this act. . . . I am ready to appeal to history and to time that it is in the best interests of the Negro race that we carry through the housing program as planned rather than put in the bill an amendment which will inevitably defeat it.” The Senate and House rejected the proposed integration amendments, and the 1949 Housing Act was adopted, permitting local authorities to continue to design separate public housing projects for blacks and whites or to segregate blacks and whites within projects.

So did a few congressional radicals, led by Vito Marcantonio of New York, who argued on the House floor that “you have no right to use housing against civil rights. . . . Housing is advanced in the interest of the general welfare and in the interest of strength[en]ing democracy. When you separate civil rights from housing you weaken that general welfare.”

The director of the federal Division of Slum Clearance justified the use of redevelopment funds to demolish black neighborhoods and replace them with housing for whites, saying “it does not appear reasonable to assume that . . . we can impose an anti-segregation requirement . . . in light of the Congressional intention as evidenced by its vote on [the amendment].”

In 1955, President Eisenhower’s housing administrator told a congressional committee that the government should not “move too precipitously” to eliminate racial segregation from federal programs. The administration formally abolished a policy (it had never been enforced) that African Americans and whites receive public housing of equal quality. It also ended even nominal adherence to requirements that local housing authorities give priority to the neediest applicants, regardless of race, and that the net supply of housing available to African Americans not be reduced by demolition projects.

In 1960, for example, the Housing Authority of Savannah evicted all white families from its integrated Francis Bartow project, creating an all-black complex. The authority justified its policy by observing that with national (and local) housing shortages abating, whites could easily find homes elsewhere and African Americans needed the public projects more.

The reporters found that the nation’s nearly ten million public housing tenants were almost always segregated by race and that every predominantly white-occupied project had facilities, amenities, services, and maintenance that were superior to what was found in predominantly black-occupied projects.

In 1976 the Supreme Court adopted lower court findings that the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), with the complicity of federal housing agencies, had unconstitutionally selected sites to maintain the city’s segregated landscape.

Unlike the high-rises the agency had built to concentrate public housing in a black ghetto, these proposals were for low-rise, scatter-site housing. But they still would have had African American tenants. Mayor Richard J. Daley rejected the proposal, saying that public housing should not go where it was not “accepted.”

“There will be an enormous practical impact on innocent communities who have to bear the burden of the housing, who will have to house a plaintiff class from Chicago, which they wronged in no way.” Thus the federal government described nondiscriminatory housing policy as punishment visited on the innocent.

The CHA-HUD response was to cease building public housing altogether.

In Miami, for example, African Americans eligible for public housing were assigned to distinct projects while eligible whites were given vouchers for rentals of private apartments to subsidize their dispersal throughout the community. It was not until 1998 that civil rights groups won a requirement that vouchers be offered to African Americans as well—too late to reverse the city’s segregation.

Industry lobbyists insisted that socialism in housing was a threat to private enterprise, a difficult argument to make when, from the 1930s to the end of World War II, private enterprise had been unwilling or unable to build dwellings affordable for working- and middle-class families.

This policy change, mostly complete by the late 1960s, ensured that integrated public housing would cease to be possible. It transformed public housing into a warehousing system for the poor.

Reflecting on public housing in his state, Carey McWilliams, who had been California’s housing commissioner in the early years of World War II, later wrote that “the federal government [had] in effect been planting the seeds of Jim Crow practices throughout the region under the guise of ‘respecting local attitudes.’” We can only wonder what our urban areas would look like today if, instead of creating segregation where it never, or perhaps barely, existed, federal and local governments had pushed in the opposite direction, using public housing as an example of how integrated living could be successful.

But during World War I, when immigration of unskilled Europeans was sharply curtailed, northern manufacturers sent recruiters south. They frequently traveled in disguise, pretending, for example, to be insurance salesmen, to avoid capture by sheriffs. During this time, more than 600,000 African Americans left the South, mostly to seek work in the North and Midwest. Historians call this the First Great Migration.

World War II then spurred the Second Great Migration, from 1940 to 1970, when more than four million African Americans made the journey. Thus most African Americans could not begin to accumulate capital for home purchases until fairly recently, well after European immigrant groups were able to participate in the wage economy.

At construction projects, African Americans were assigned to work separately, but only if enough were needed at particular sites to make up full crews. If not, then African Americans were denied work entirely.

Of the 14,000 African Americans in the industry, 10,000 held one of these job classifications. The NAACP complained, “For these workers the NRA meant increases of from 10 to 40 per cent in the cost of everything they had to buy, without a single penny in increased wages.”

The original bill, proposed by Senator Robert Wagner of New York, had prohibited government certification of unions that did not grant African Americans membership and workplace rights. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) lobbied Wagner to remove the clause, and he did so.

Yet federal agencies both tolerated and supported joint management-union policies that kept African Americans from doing any but the most poorly paid tasks in defense plants.