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

by Richard Rothstein

The New Orleans NAACP chapter protested the creation of a segregated housing development. The agency ignored the protest, and the development eventually consisted of one thousand homes for African Americans only, surrounding a park and golf course and adjoining a similar FHA-insured development for whites only. In 1955 an FHA spokesman toured fifty cities where he addressed African American audiences, boasting of New Orleans’s achievements and telling his listeners that such segregated projects were “the type of thing [the] FHA wanted.” A pattern emerges from these examples. 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...