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.

scores of racially explicit laws, regulations, and government practices combined to create a nationwide system of urban ghettos, surrounded by white suburbs. Private discrimination also played a role, but it would have been considerably less effective had it not been embraced and reinforced by government.

The core argument of this book is that African Americans were unconstitutionally denied the means and the right to integration in middle-class neighborhoods, and because this denial was state-sponsored, the nation is obligated to remedy it.

We’ve developed other euphemisms, too, so that polite company doesn’t have to confront our history of racial exclusion. When we consider problems that arise when African Americans are absent in significant numbers from schools that whites attend, we say we seek diversity, not racial integration. When we wish to pretend that the nation did not single out African Americans in a system of segregation specifically aimed at them, we diffuse them as just another people of color.

We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies. Although most of these policies are now off the books, they have never been remedied and their effects endure.

Public housing’s original purpose was to give shelter not to those too poor to afford it but to those who could afford decent housing but couldn’t find it because none was available.

The PWA designated many integrated neighborhoods as either white or black and then used public housing to make the designation come true—by installing whites-only projects in mixed neighborhoods it deemed “white” and blacks-only projects in those it deemed “colored.”

In 1984, investigative reporters from the Dallas Morning News visited federally funded developments in forty-seven metropolitan areas. 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 defending HUD before the Supreme Court, President Gerald Ford’s solicitor general, Robert Bork, expressed the government’s opposition to placing public housing in white areas: “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.

Guided by Bartholomew’s survey, it designated land for future industrial development if it was in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial African American populations.

On other occasions, the commission changed an area’s zoning from residential to industrial if African American families had begun to move into it.

Not only were these neighborhoods zoned to permit industry, even polluting industry, but the plan commission permitted taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution to open in African American neighborhoods but prohibited these as zoning violations in neighborhoods where whites lived.

Because the Buchanan decision had made it “impossible to find an appropriate legal formula” for segregation, Freund said that zoning masquerading as an economic measure was the most reasonable means of accomplishing the same end.

The pattern was confirmed in a 1983 analysis by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), concluding that, across the nation, commercial waste treatment facilities or uncontrolled waste dumps were more likely to be found near African American than white residential areas.

The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red. A neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes.

Government’s commitment to separating residential areas by race began nationwide following the violent suppression of Reconstruction after 1877. Although the Supreme Court in 1917 forbade the first wave of policies—racial segregation by zoning ordinance—the federal government began to recommend ways that cities could evade that ruling, not only in the southern and border states but across the country. In the 1920s a Harding administration committee promoted zoning ordinances that distinguished single-family from multifamily districts. Although government publications did not say it in as many words, committee members made little effort to hide that an important purpose was to prevent racial integration. Simultaneously, and through the 1920s and the Hoover administration, the government conducted a propaganda campaign directed at white middle-class families to persuade them to move out of apartments and into single-family dwellings. During the 1930s the Roosevelt administration created maps of every metropolitan area, divided into zones of foreclosure risk based in part on the race of their occupants. The administration then insured white homeowners’ mortgages if they lived in all-white neighborhoods into which there was little danger of African Americans moving. After World War II the federal government went further and spurred the suburbanization of every metropolitan area by guaranteeing bank loans to mass-production builders who would create the all-white subdivisions t...

FROM THE FHA’s beginning, its appraisers not only gave high ratings to mortgage applications if there were no African Americans living in or nearby the neighborhood but also lowered their risk estimates for individual properties with restrictive deed language.

Only in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order prohibiting the use of federal funds to support racial discrimination in housing, did the FHA cease financing subdivision developments whose builders openly refused to sell to black buyers.

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.

Although banks and savings and loan associations typically refused to issue mortgages to ordinary homeowners in African American or in integrated neighborhoods, the same institutions issued mortgages to blockbusters in those neighborhoods, all with the approval of federal bank regulators who failed their constitutional responsibilities.

Blockbusting could work only because the FHA made certain that African Americans had few alternative neighborhoods where they could purchase homes at fair market values.

Banks and thrifts were able to refuse service to African Americans only because, until recently, federal and state regulators chose to allow it.

Among homeowners who had refinanced in 2000 as the subprime bubble was expanding, lower-income African Americans were more than twice as likely as lower-income whites to have subprime loans, and higher-income African Americans were about three times as likely as higher-income whites to have subprime loans.

When it became apparent that no existing Milpitas-area development would sell or rent to black workers, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker group committed to racial integration, offered to assist Ben Gross—the chair of the Ford plant’s union housing committee—by finding a developer who would agree to build an interracial subdivision. The AFSC had an existing campaign to press (unsuccessfully) Richmond to desegregate its public housing and find adequate, integrated residences for its African American population being displaced by the demolition of federal war projects. The group also operated a settlement house in North Richmond with after-school tutoring, dances and other youth recreational opportunities, a well-baby clinic for mothers, a day care program for children of working parents, a small playground for toddlers, and a meeting room for community organizations.

Despite this excess inventory, the AFSC was unsuccessful in persuading any existing developer to sell to African Americans.

After a few months, an AFSC official flew to New York to meet with a Quaker vice-president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company who, despite his skepticism about the feasibility of integrated suburban development, agreed to issue a loan for initial construction. Only as a result of this Quaker connection was the AFSC able to obtain a financial commitment.

“Justice delayed is justice denied” was the frequent experience of African Americans having to fight legal battles to obtain housing in white neighborhoods.

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.

“Urban renewal” programs, to clear slums not only for highways but for hospitals, universities, middle-class housing, and offices, operated similarly. That “urban renewal means Negro removal” was a frequent twentieth century slogan of civil rights groups protesting such displacement.

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. Nobody was convicted of these attacks, either. Cicero’s council president boasted after the clash that “[t]he area is well-secured.”

Events in Detroit and its suburbs were similar. During the immediate postwar period, the city saw more than 200 acts of intimidation and violence to deter African Americans from moving to predominantly white neighborhoods. Such an epidemic was possible because police could be counted on to stand by, making no effort to stop, much less to prevent, the assaults.

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 a 1973 study of ten large U.S. cities, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found a systematic pattern of overassessment in low-income African American neighborhoods, with corresponding underassessment in white middle-class neighborhoods.

Restricting African Americans’ housing supply led to higher rents and home prices in black neighborhoods than for similar accommodations in predominantly white ones. If African Americans had access to housing throughout metropolitan areas, supply and demand balances would have kept their rents and home prices at reasonable levels. Without access, landlords and sellers were free to take advantage of the greater demand, relative to supply, for African American housing.