These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Even after the Supreme Court struck down restrictive housing covenants in 1948, the Federal Housing Administration followed a policy of segregation, routinely denying loans to both blacks and Jews. In cities like Chicago and St. Louis and Los Angeles and Detroit, racially restrictive covenants in housing created segregated ghettos where few had existed before the war. Whites got loans, had their housing offers accepted, and moved to the suburbs; blacks were crowded into bounded neighborhoods within the city. Thirteen million new homes were built in the United States during the 1950s; eleven million of them were built in the suburbs. Eighty-three percent of all population growth in the 1950s took place in the suburbs. For every two blacks who moved to the cities, three whites moved out. The postwar racial order created a segregated landscape: black cities, white suburbs.