Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Color of Law, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
De Jure vs. De Facto Segregation
Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste
Racism, Profit, and Political Gain
Separation of Powers, Legal Activism, and Minority Rights
Summary
Analysis
Rothstein notes that the San Francisco Bay Area is generally considered “liberal and inclusive” compared to much of the United States, so if de jure segregation happened there, then chances are it happened in many other places, too. The historically industrial city of Richmond has the largest African American population in the Bay Area, and Rothstein tells its history through the experiences of resident Frank Stevenson.
Rothstein carefully chooses to begin by writing about segregation in the San Francisco Bay Area because he knows that his audience is likely to live in similar “liberal and inclusive” enclaves and assume that they could not possibly be part of the problem. By pointing out that even the Bay Area is segregated, then, Rothstein not only suggests that the whole country is likely to be, but also forces his readers to confront their own complicity in segregation.
Themes
In Part I of the chapter, Rothstein examines Mr. Stevenson’s life story in order to show how Richmond typifies American housing segregation. Born in a Louisiana town deemed “the poorest place in America,” Stevenson’s family did not have to sharecrop, since his father owned some land, but he still grew up farming. In fact, the school year was shorter for black children, so they could work on farms, and the New Deal’s Fair Labor Standards Act established minimum wage and anti-child labor protections for all sectors of the economy except agriculture and other “industries in which African Americans predominated.” Before high school, Stevenson and his brothers left for New Orleans, and then Richmond, to do heavy physical labor.
Frank Stevenson’s life shows the clear connections between past and present racism in the United States: even though he was born after the end of slavery, African American people in the South were clearly still treated as second-class citizens by the government. Explicitly written out of the New Deal and given lower-quality education on purpose, African American people like Frank Stevenson were essentially blocked out of the middle-class lives available to white Americans until the Second Great Migration—the mass migration to Northern and Western industrial centers during World War II, when African American people could get factory jobs for the first time because of a shortage of white labor.
Themes
During World War II, Richmond’s shipyards had to hire women and African American people, and the city’s populated expanded rapidly its black population increased 50-fold. Stevenson’s “seventh-grade education” was average among African American migrants to Richmond, who were “an elite” compared to “African Americans in the southern states they left behind.”
African American people were blocked out of the labor market until economic necessity forced companies and the government to include them, which shows how both racial inclusion and exclusion often follow the demands of capital, profit, and production.
Themes
The government built “officially and explicitly segregated” housing to accommodate Richmond’s population boom. African American people lived in “poorly constructed” temporary housing in industrial areas, while white workers got “sturdily constructed and permanent” houses in suburban areas. This geographical segregation in Richmond remains even now. White workers could rent rooms in other families’ homes and get loans to improve their houses—the government took out huge loans to built a suburb called Rollingwood, where African American people were prohibited from living and every house had an extra bedroom for rent to a “white war worker.” Meanwhile, multiple black families were often forced into one apartment.
Richmond exemplifies the pattern of how governments impose and justify segregation without openly defending racist ideology. Although they were not motivated by a specific desire to deteriorate African American people’s living conditions, Richmond’s housing policies were racist because they dedicated disproportionate resources to white people’s interests, leaving insufficient resources for African American people, and they constituted de jure segregation because they were imposed by the government and racially separate by law. The fact that this segregation persists to the present day shows how discriminatory housing policies from the past continue to shape people’s lives and livelihoods even though segregation might no longer be on the books. This is one of the principal reasons that housing discrimination is harder to combat than civil rights violations like segregation in transportation or the denial of voting rights.
Themes
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After the war, the government came up with a new strategy: by giving white people loans to move from public housing to the suburbs, it would free public apartments for African American people, who “became almost the only tenants of Richmond public housing.” While most African American people lived in public housing, many—like Stevenson—lived without public services in unincorporated North Richmond, and thousands more “remained in cardboard shacks, barns, tents, or even open fields,” often on land they legally owned. (Unlike white people, they could not get loans to build houses.) This de jure segregation was supported by private organizations like the USO (which segregated its clubs), and public institutions like the police (who jailed all black man who could not show evidence of their employment).
Ultimately, while white people were subsidized to buy homes, African American people who were financially capable of buying homes were not even able to construct them because the government would not provide them with public services. So again, in practice, the government explicitly prioritized the interests of white people over those of African American people, even though in theory it was providing more housing for everyone. In other words, discrimination was not written into the law, but rather resulted from how the government chose to apply laws that appeared to be neutral and nondiscriminatory. This is not to say that there were not also formal rules discriminating against African American people: for instance, as Rothstein discusses in the next chapter, their inability to get credit was a result of regulations by the Federal Housing Administration.
Themes
When he arrived in Richmond during World War II, Frank Stevenson quickly found work at a Ford Motor auto manufacturing plant that was temporarily under government control. Although Ford refused to hire nonwhite workers before World War II, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union ensured that black workers hired during the war, including Frank Stevenson, could retain their jobs after it ended.
While Stevenson and his fellow African American Ford employees were able to keep their jobs after the war due to advocacy from the UAW, this does not imply that unions were generally integrationist (they weren’t). Moreover, without the UAW’s interference, nonwhite workers would have been fired again after the war, which shows how industry—which was integrated only when economic and political circumstances demanded it—both played an important role in depressing African American people’s wages over the 20th century and consistently put self-interest over equality.
Themes
Car sales spiked in the 1950s, leading Ford to build a larger plant in Milpitas, which is an hour’s drive southwest from Richmond. Suburbs began arising to house this plant’s workers, and the government ensured that loans would be available for the construction and working-class families’ mortgages—so long as no African American people would be allowed to buy homes in the area. Black Ford workers had to either quit their jobs, move to “a segregated neighborhood north of San Jose,” or stay in faraway Richmond. Stevenson chose this last option, so he had to commute “more than an hour each way” to Milpitas with a group of colleagues. He did this “daily for the next twenty years until he retired.” Over the next decades, as the government continued funding suburban construction and mortgages for white people, Richmond “became a predominantly black city.” Frank Stevenson managed to buy a house there in 1970.
The construction of the new plant in Milpitas illuminates one way that residential segregation concretely disadvantages African American people: not only did they lose hours every day commuting and a large portion of their salaries on transportation, but they were also restricted to using Richmond’s (inferior) government services and sending their children to its (inferior) schools—all this while Ford, the company employing them, was thriving. Again, while in public discourse it is often considered racist or impolite to suggest that schools in predominantly African American neighborhoods are inferior to those in white suburbs, Rothstein sees it as an obvious, empirically proven fact (one he has spent most of his career studying). Rothstein thinks that many white people gladly conflate recognizing that schools in black neighborhoods are generally inferior—which is a way of pointing out racist discrimination—with actually committing discrimination and racism, because this allows them to shut down talk about the ugly reality of American racism, and (most importantly) avoid considering their own participation in it.
Themes
In Part II of this chapter, Rothstein notes that, just a few years after Frank Stevenson moved to Richmond, the renowned writer Wallace Stegner moved near Milpitas, to teach at Stanford University. Unable to find housing, he “joined and then helped to lead” a housing cooperative called the Peninsula Housing Association of Palo Alto, which bought a plot of land and tried to build several hundred houses for its members. But the Association’s plan was unsuccessful: it could not get loans from a bank, because banks would not loan anyone (except the rich) money without insurance from the federal government, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) would not insure any construction for African American families. The Peninsula Housing Association included a few black members, so it could not get a loan.
The Peninsula Housing Association’s experience illustrates the severity of the FHA’s discrimination: because no African American could ever get a loan insured, African American people were completely blocked from moving to the suburbs, even as part of this mostly white association. Again, the FHA is part of the federal government, which makes it clear that this is de jure discrimination, not de facto. By applying its policy to any group with even a single African American member, the FHA also discouraged white people from finding workarounds to its policies or trying to promote integration in any way.
Themes
Ultimately, the Peninsula Housing Association narrowly voted to put a quota on African American membership. But the government still would not insure its loans, and “the cooperative was [soon] forced to disband.” A private company bought the Association’s land and built a whites-only suburb on it.
This example makes it clear that through FHA restrictions, the government mandated racism in localities across the country, regardless of the attitudes of local government, building companies, or the people moving into any given neighborhood. Although most local governments, companies, and white homeowners likely also wanted to keep African American people out, the government’s blanket restriction shows how official de jure policy made the things we usually think of as “racism” on an individual level—like prejudice, hatred, and stereotype—irrelevant to the actual implementation of discriminatory policies.
Themes
In Part III of the chapter, Rothstein summarizes that African American people were shut out of places like Palo Alto because property developers could not get loans unless they promised the FHA that they would not sell to African American people, and because real estate agents, fearing for their jobs, would not even let black families see houses.
Again, although many developers and real estate agents were racist at an individual level, this did not practically affect how they did their jobs, because all of them were legally required to discriminate against African American people, regardless of their personal beliefs.
Themes
Accordingly, no African American people managed to move to Palo Alto until 1954, when a white man “sold his house to a black family” in East Palo Alto. Soon, an opportunistic real estate agent started “blockbusting”: first, he and his colleagues planted fears about a “Negro invasion”; then, they started buying white people’s houses for “discounted prices”; and finally, they put out newspaper ads targeting “Colored Buyers!” who ultimately “purchased the homes at inflated prices.” State regulators decided this practice did not count as “unethical.” They also did not object when the FHA, private insurance companies, and prominent banks stopped insuring mortgages to white families seeking to live anywhere that African American people also lived.
The rapid and profound transformations in East Palo Alto show how racism is profitable for (some) white people but costly for African American people: blockbusters took advantage of white people’s prejudices to make huge profits, but black people had to overpay for quality housing, because they consistently had lesser access to it. The state regulators’ indifference to blockbusting shows that de jure segregation is often the result of government inaction when it has an obligation to act and prevent unconstitutional discrimination.
Themes
As a result, “within six years […] East Palo Alto was 82 percent black” and saw its property values plummet, forcing homeowners to seek “additional rental income.” Through these factors, enforced through federal policy, East Palo Alto became an overcrowded, poorly serviced “slum.” To cope with the population growth, the government de-integrated the city’s existing high school and opened a second one for only black students. Rothstein concludes that the history of the liberal Bay Area clearly shows how “federal, state, and local governments purposely created segregation in every metropolitan area of the nation.” This was not a response to “preexisting racial patterns,” but instead an intentional redrawing of boundaries to “impos[e] segregation where it hadn’t previously taken root.”
The speed of East Palo Alto’s dramatic demographic change illustrates one reason that integrated neighborhoods are a rarity in the United States: once black people move into a neighborhood, white people no longer want to live there and leave as soon as possible. Many do this because they are racist and do not want to live around black people, and many others do so because they fear that their property values will fall. Ironically, as Rothstein later shows, property values only fall in such cases because of blockbusters who scare racist white people into selling their houses for cheap; when middle-class African American people subsequently buy those houses, the value of property in the neighborhood skyrockets, so white people who do not succumb to blockbusting stand to profit greatly from integration. East Palo Alto’s trajectory also shows how government actively creates slums by divesting resources and services from black neighborhoods.
Themes
