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 explains that “zoning solved only half the problem” for segregationists, because in white suburbs it didn’t stop African American people from moving in. In order to do this, the federal government threw the Constitution out the window, convinced white families to move to the suburbs, and then “with explicit racial intent, made it nearly impossible for African American people to follow.”
In this chapter, Rothstein turns from cities to the suburbs, and also from local governments to the federal government—whose segregationist efforts were led by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which is perhaps the guiltiest actor Rothstein profiles in this entire book. Again, the government’s “explicit[ly] racial” segregationist policy was as blatant then as it is forgotten today.
Themes
In Part I, Rothstein explains that Woodrow Wilson’s government started “an ‘Own-Your-Own-Home’ campaign” in 1917 to get white Americans to care about capitalism and repudiate communism. Homeownership became “a ‘patriotic duty.’” Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, led a group called Better Homes in America, which aimed to convince white people they could “avoid ‘racial strife’” by moving to suburbs, far from African American people. When he was later elected president, Hoover maintained this explicitly racial message. His organization’s publications noted African American people’s “ignorant racial habit[s]” and implored white people to move to “restricted residential districts” where they could get “protection” against African American people moving in. Better Homes in America also organized a conference full of prominent segregationists, including the masterminds of “racial zoning” from the last chapter. At the conference, one committee focused on housing for African American people and pointed out all the problems that Rothstein cites here, but was paid little attention.
Wilson and Hoover used the geopolitical and ideological tension between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union to advance their racial segregationist agendas as well as their ideological ones, which shows how economics and racism are nearly always tied together (especially when it comes to housing discrimination). Namely, to be a “patriotic” American meant being white, legally employed, and middle-class or above. It also meant living in the suburbs, in a house with a mortgage, with a nuclear family made of heterosexual married parents who follow traditional gender roles and have biological children. This “American Dream” was racially exclusionary from the start, by design: it was founded on the government’s desire to build a homogeneous white nation. Unlike Southern plantation society, the systematic oppression of African American people was not explicitly part of the plan—but it was necessary for the plan to be implemented, because African American people inevitably wanted the same privileged suburban life that the government was guaranteeing to white people, and the government’s promise was based on the assumption of racial purity. As in all Rothstein’s examples, antiracist activists at the time knew what was happening—but they lacked the power and resources to stop it. This again speaks to the importance of getting involved in antiracist struggles in the present.
Themes
In Part II, Rothstein explains that the government’s promotion of homeownership was ineffective until 1933, since mortgage terms were too stringent for anyone but the wealthy to afford homes. Conditions only worsened during the Great Depression, but the New Deal created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a government lender that offered struggling homeowners better, longer-term, amortized mortgages (in which homeowners gradually paid for their houses over time, instead of just paying interest). This opened up homeownership to the working and middle classes.
Here, Rothstein introduces one of the most important principles that underlies the rest of his book and helps explain the government’s strategy for blocking African American people from owning homes: home financing is absolutely crucial to enabling homeownership. Houses cost much more than the vast majority of families can save in a short period of time, so if homeownership is to be accessible to the middle class, it has to be possible for them to pay for their homes over time. This is why the establishment of the HOLC by the federal government was so important: homeownership would have been impossible for the vast majority of Americans if it were not for government intervention.
Themes
To evaluate neighborhoods and determine the risk of investing in them, the HOLC worked with real estate agents who helped the agency color-code neighborhoods: the best investments were green, and “the riskiest [were] colored red.” All neighborhoods with African American residents were automatically colored red, no matter the kind or quality of houses in the area. The HOLC’s policy was influential and made it clear that the federal government considered black homeowners to be risky investments, simply because they were black.
The HOLC’s color-coded maps of where to extend and withhold credit are the origin of the term “redlining,” and the HOLC essentially legitimated this practice in the eyes of the federal government for half of the 20th century. While the notion that all African American people are unworthy of credit may seem obviously racist to contemporary readers, in the 1930s it was just as obviously seen as common sense. This does not make it any less racist, devastating, or reprehensible—rather, it shows how people can easily adopt reprehensible beliefs when they are considered socially acceptable.
Themes
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In 1934, Roosevelt also started the Federal Housing Administration, which insured bank mortgages but “included a whites-only requirement.” It had real estate agents appraise properties according to the Underwriting Manual, which explicitly stated that “inharmonious racial or nationality groups” should lower the appraised value of homes. The FHA focused loans on new white suburbs (preferably those separated from black neighborhoods by “boulevards or highways”), and it emphasized “preventing school desegregation.” Although its language changed slightly, the Underwriting Manual’s principles and the FHA’s refusal to give African American people loans did not change at least through the 1950s. Rothstein gives examples of a real estate agent being unable to sell to “creditworthy” middle-class black families and a white teacher being “blacklisted” by the FHA for temporarily renting his house to an African American colleague. There were “very few exceptions” to these rules.
The FHA’s “whites-only requirement,” perhaps the single most influential piece of racist legislation Rothstein addresses in this book, essentially defined African American people as poor investments. This created a self-fulfilling prophecy: nobody would invest in African American people, which increased the wealth gap between white people and African American people, which lenders then used as evidence that black people could not be trusted with credit. By turning racism into an economic decision rather than evidence of personal hatred, the FHA and the real estate industry managed to sanitize, institutionalize, and shamelessly promote racial discrimination policies so extreme that they likely seem absurd to contemporary readers. Not only African American people, but also anyone who dealt with or defended African American people, was completely shut out of the market for decades. There is little doubt that this two-tiered system of laws clearly counts as de jure discrimination—making the segregation it created de jure, as well.
Themes
In Part III, Rothstein recalls an interview with Pam Harris, whose “great-uncle, Leroy Mereday, was born in Hamburg [South Carolina] fourteen years after the Red Shirt massacre.” Mereday ended up on Long Island, and most of his family followed him. During World War II, his brother Robert played the saxophone for defense plant workers in a USO band, which led him to a job in one of those defense plants. After the war, Robert started a trucking company.
Like Frank Stevenson, Leroy and Robert Mereday participated in the Second Great Migration during World War II, which was the result of necessity: wartime manufacturing plants needed workers. This Great Migration both led to an explosion in Northern cities’ African American populations and gave these migrants the opportunity to work middle-class jobs, on par with white people, for the first time. But this does not mean that their treatment was equal in every—or even any—other respect.
Themes
With his “solid middle-class income” and his nephews as employees, Robert Mereday hoped to buy a house in a suburb, like the famous Levittown that his company helped build. But he knew that he could not because he was black. His nephew Vince tried, but failed, and had to buy in a nearby black suburb called Lakeview instead. Although he was a veteran, Vince could not get favorable Veterans Administration (VA) loans and was forced into a perilous, uninsured mortgage instead. Rothstein emphasizes that Levittown, like all the other cities he looks at in this book, was segregated on purpose.
There is no way to analyze this situation without concluding, first, that Robert Mereday was blocked from homeownership because of racial discrimination, and second, that this discrimination decreased his quality of life and access to opportunities moving forward. Mereday’s trajectory was identical to that of numerous white war workers and veterans, but he was barred from joining them in leading a middle class lifestyle simply because he was black. The fact that his company helped build Levittown only added insult to injury.
Themes
In Part IV of this chapter, Rothstein notes that VA loans were also made in collaboration with the FHA’s Underwriting Manual, which meant they were unattainable for black Americans. The FHA and the VA systems not only allowed individual white families to get houses, but also encouraged “mass-production builders [who] created entire suburbs” that, to get loans, had to exclude black people. The “visionary” Levittowns, full of comfortable homes for war veterans, are a characteristic example of this. Levitt got his loans preapproved and his buyers got mortgages “almost automatically”—so long as they were white. But ironically, because Levittowns were so dependent on the federal government, New Jersey decided that its Levittown counted as “publicly assisted housing” and could not racially discriminate. However, all of the other Levittowns were all-white, as were numerous other housing developments built with FHA and VA support.
Rothstein clearly thinks that Levittown and other suburbs like it represented an important, largely democratizing transformation in American residential patterns—these suburbs were and remain the cornerstone of the American middle class (although this does not mean that they are the only way a middle class can emerge). To a significant extent, then, by blocking African American people out of homeownership, the FHA and VA also blocked them from joining the middle class. New Jersey’s determination that Levittown was “publicly assisted housing” is a clear reminder to the reader: white families did not rise into the middle class in 20th-century America because of simple “hard work” or smart financial sense. Many did have these qualities—so did many African American people—but the primary reason for white people’s success was that they were dependent on and supported by the government. This fact reveals the absurdity in common individualistic narratives about self-sufficiency and success, which attribute poverty (which is associated with reliance on the government) to a lack of personal responsibility, and contrast this with the supposed moral virtue of the wealthy. In fact, it is the opposite: the middle-class and wealthy get support from the government, and poverty is in large part the product of groups’ inability to access that same support.
Themes
In his chapter’s brief Part V, Rothstein tells the story of Charles Vatterott, who built two suburbs in St. Louis. The first was all-white and got funding from the FHA, but the second, which in theory was nearly identical, housed middle-class African American people. But Vatterott “could not get FHA financing” and his residents could not get mortgages, so he built “shoddier” and “skimpier” houses, offered his residents savings plans that did not let them “accumulate equity during the process,” and did not build “the community facilities” that he did for the white neighborhood.
The story of Charles Vatterott’s two suburbs shows how, for the FHA, race was the only difference between getting quality housing or not. This is just like the comparison between Robert Mereday and the white veterans and war workers who, after living nearly exactly the same life, were allowed to buy homes and join the middle class only because they were white. Although Vatterott’s intentions were initially antiracist, even he ended up discriminating against African American people—by providing them worse quality housing—because the government mandated it by law (de jure).
Themes
In Part VI, Rothstein makes it clear that the FHA was open about “the racial bases of its decisions.” One builder got denied a loan for a white suburb next to a black neighborhood, then built “a half-mile concrete wall” between them and got his loan approved. When homeowners defaulted and the FHA foreclosed on their homes, it ensured that only “real estate brokers who refused to sell to African Americans” were involved. In a few unique cases, the FHA did fund housing developments specifically for African American people when locals urged them.
Rothstein’s examples continue to show how blatant and egregious the federal government’s policy of de jure racist discrimination was throughout the 20th century: if building a wall to keep African American people out got developers FHA funding, they were perfectly willing to carry out the government’s racist agenda, simply because this was necessary for them to earn their profits. In this way, by mandating that the entire system perpetuate racist discrimination, the federal government essentially made the individual attitudes of everyone involved in the system irrelevant to the outcomes that the system produced.
Themes
In conclusion, Rothstein summarizes the overall trajectory of housing discrimination, as he has analyzed it so far: after “the violent suppression of Reconstruction,” explicit racial segregation was the norm until the Supreme Court outlawed it in 1917, and then governments at all scales started finding workarounds through zoning, pro-homeownership propaganda, loan discrimination, and the active sponsorship of suburb construction for white people.
With every chapter, Rothstein’s portrait of the causes behind present-day racial segregation in American cities becomes clearer and clearer: although the Supreme Court knew and pointed out that it was unconstitutional, the government consistently did everything possible to push white people toward homeownership in the suburbs and ensure that African American people remained second-class citizens living in segregated urban neighborhoods. Rothstein pushes readers who might be used to thinking of certain Southern state and local governments (but not the federal government) as racist and segregationist to reconsider their views and assumptions about the arc of American history.
Themes
