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 returns to Richmond, California, where African American World War II veteran Wilbur Gary wanted to buy a house in 1952. A white friend was leaving Rollingwood, and in the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer case, the Supreme Court had already decided that restrictive covenants could not be enforced. So Gary bought his friend’s house and moved in, even though the neighborhood’s community association tried to enforce the invalid covenant and then, when that failed, offered to buy Gary’s house back for more than he had paid. Then the neighbors tried a more extreme tactic: they formed an angry mob on the Gary family’s lawn. The police “refused to step in, so the NAACP […] organize[d] its own guards.” For more than a month, the mob waited outside the house and the police arrested nobody, even after the governor ordered them to protect the family.
While horrifying, the racist mob violence Wilbur Gary suffered is not at all unusual or out-of-place in American history—white supremacist terrorist groups continue to function openly in the 21st century, and lynching was common all across the country well into the 1960s. Indeed, given the political climate, Gary would have legitimately feared meeting the same fate, and the police’s failure to protect him suggests discrimination. (Later in the chapter, Rothstein makes it clear that this was a pattern based on outright racism.) It is important to remember that Rollingwood was a neighborhood built specifically for World War II veterans, but black people like Wilbur Gary and his family were nonetheless blocked out of it simply because of racist FHA restrictions. In other words, by trying to move into Rollingwood, not only was Gary breaking no existing law, but he was actually claiming a benefit that should have been his all along.
Themes
In this chapter’s Part I, Rothstein tells a similar story in Pennsylvania, where Robert Mereday helped build a second Levittown. His son’s girlfriend and her family tried to move there but could not, which Rothstein notes would have been a very common and demoralizing experience. But after learning that African American people would pay more for the same houses, white Levittown residents started selling to them.
The strange circumstances surrounding Levittown’s initial integration recall the ironic, circular relationship between racism and economics that Rothstein illuminated in Chapter Six: even though the FHA and VA used economic excuses to justify their discriminatory policies, integration was actually in white people’s economic interests as well as African American people’s, and so it is unsurprising that some white Levittown residents eventually took advantage of the profits integration could offer them.
Themes
In 1957, a middle-class black veteran named Bill Myers moved to Levittown, Pennsylvania with his family, supported by a private loan from “a New York City philanthropist.” But the mailman saw them and began yelling racist slurs during his rounds, leading an angry mob to form outside their house, and even rent a “clubhouse” next door. This racist mob stayed for weeks, and the police did nothing. Although the state attorney general finally got the mob disbanded, the Myers family left Levittown after four years because they were “constantly under threat” there.
Like Wilbur Gary, Myers was only able to move into a white suburb because of extraordinary circumstances—this is why he was a pioneer, but also why Levittown’s white residents (who were also veterans, like Myers) were so offended. Again, although the angry mob was started by private individuals acting on a de facto discriminatory basis, the government has an obligation to stop even de facto racism and discrimination, and its willful failure to do so turns this case into an example of de jure discrimination. Similarly, Rothstein points out that the mailman is a federal employee on the job, which makes his racist parade around Levittown officially a form of government-sponsored racism.
Themes
Rothstein asks whether, in the cases of Wilbur Gary and Bill Myers’s families, the police’s inaction counts as “government-sponsored, de jure segregation.” He points out that “the government [is not always] accountable for every action of racially biased police,” but in these cases, higher-ranking officials clearly “either encouraged […] or took inadequate steps to restrain” the police’s complicity in violence. Therefore, the police’s actions should be considered as “state policy that violated the Fourteenth Amendment[],” and there is no question “that law enforcement officers conspired to violate the [Gary and Myers families’] civil rights.”
Rothstein continues to recognize that the line between de facto and de jure discrimination is fine and even debatable, but he considers police support for white supremacist mobs a clear example of de jure discrimination because it constitutes the state government’s failure to equally protect all groups under the law. Again, the crucial distinction is the difference between isolated acts of discrimination (say, by an individual police officer) and a clear, pervasive pattern of discrimination by the police department as a whole—in other words, the institution of the police supported the mob, which represents official policy, as opposed to an individual police officer doing so out of private feelings. It is also important to remember that, if discrimination is de facto, this does not make it any less unjust or harmful—it only changes the kind of role the government should take towards resolving it.
Themes
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In Part II, Rothstein declares that “what the Gary and the Myers families experienced was not an aberration” and offers numerous examples of similar “attacks on African American pioneers,” which were almost always “sanctioned by elected officials and law enforcement officers.” These “pioneers” were always middle-class or higher, and usually attempted to avoid creating conflict, which suggests that white people’s objections were definitely about race, and not about class or other personal conflicts.
Rothstein goes to great lengths to emphasize the fact that the only real difference between “African American pioneers” and the residents of the white neighborhoods they integrated was race: they had similar jobs, income levels, and families. The government was clearly not breaking ranks with the white public by supporting angry mobs—but, by succumbing to popular pressure, it not only entrenched segregation for generations to come, but also completely failed in its constitutional duty to protect all citizens’ rights.
Themes
Rothstein traces the history of such conflict in Chicago, which offers instructive examples. Angry white mobs successfully evicted African American people in 1897 and 1907, and countless arsons in 1917-1921 and 1944-1950 went unpunished. Police ignored a 1951 “mob of about 4,000” white people who destroyed a black family’s apartment—the only people charged with a crime were the real estate agent, attorney, and landlady who helped the family get the apartment. (This happened again, in the same neighborhood, in the 1980s.) In 1953, when the city government offered African American people public housing in a white neighborhood, white people rioted, police did nothing, and the city rolled back its decision and fired the official who made it. And in 1964, the police evicted black students who legally moved into an apartment they rented from “a white civil rights activist.”
Chicago’s police systematically supported anti-integration terrorism for decades, with cooperation rather than intervention from the state government. Although the Fourteenth Amendment had been on the books for several decades, the city government punished anyone who tried to follow it, whether an official or a private citizen. This history no doubt helps explain why Chicago remains so segregated today. While it was never written into official policy, then, support for segregation was clearly an unwritten rule in the city government, and its actions establish that the city’s segregation is de jure.
Themes
After World War II, in the suburbs of Detroit, white people harassed black families in most of their attempts at integration. There were “213 violent incidents” in Philadelphia “in the first six months of 1955” alone. In Los Angeles, firebombing was common and prosecuted only once, among the “more than one hundred incidents [...] between 1950 and 1965.”
By taking up these other examples, Rothstein makes it clear that Chicago is not an outlier, and that violence against integrating African American people—as well as systematic police indifference to this violence—was common across the United States, not just in the South.
Themes
Although federally outlawed by the Fair Housing Act in 1968, arson and mob attacks remained common through the 1980s, and were only frequently prosecuted after 1985. While law enforcement focused on “infiltrat[ing] and disrupt[ing]” political activists and criminal organizations during the 20th century, Rothstein points out, they did nothing about the “nationwide terror campaign against African Americans who integrated previously white communities.” This makes the government, which failed to punish police inaction or prioritize the protection of African American people, partially responsible for the violence.
Rothstein emphasizes that the government’s focus on stopping leftist groups and civil rights activists, rather than racist mobs, constitutes a political decision that reflects the biases of law enforcement itself. He also points out that the incidents of arson and mob violence he cites are clearly acts of terrorism, and not merely riots or hate crimes, because they occurred systematically, targeted civilians, and sought to advance a political purpose—segregation—by striking up fear and apprehension in the minds of potential “pioneers” of integration.
Themes
In Part III of this chapter, Rothstein tells the story of another African American veteran and middle-class professional, Andrew Wade, who managed to move his family into “an all-white suburb” in Louisville, Kentucky with the help of a white activist friend, Carl Braden, in 1954. Like the integration pioneers before them, the Wades faced an angry mob who shattered their windows with rocks and gunshots, and the police did nothing. Eventually, the mob blew up the Wade house, and the police arrested Andrew Wade and Carl Braden themselves. The police had a confession from the person who blew up the home, but did not arrest them, and ultimately “Carl Braden was sentenced to fifteen years in prison” (although he won an appeal and got his sentence overturned).
Andrew Wade and his family’s story show how white terrorism layered different tactics to dissuade pioneers from integrating. When mob violence failed to dislodge the Wades, the white community—with the support of the state—turned to arson and then to prosecution. This story also illustrates how the police were not the only agents who enforced the laws on a racially discriminatory basis: so did the prosecutors that represented the government’s interests in court. This makes it even clearer that the state government as a whole was conspiring to sustain segregation, de jure.
Themes
In 1985, after another black family’s house was blown up in Louisville, a police officer admitted in court that “half of the forty [Ku Klux] Klan members known to him were also in the police department,” and his superiors supported their membership. Despite all of this history, in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Louisville was segregated “not of state action but of private choices”—and used this decision to reject “a racial integration plan” in the city’s schools. There is no question that what happened there was “state-sponsored violence,” which is one among many tools used by “all levels of government” to prevent integration. It worked primarily through fear, the impact of which is hard to measure, or overstate.
While it may not be surprising to students of American history that many police officers are also members of a white supremacist terrorist group, the Louisville police’s explicit support for the racists among their ranks clearly shows why Andrew Wade and his family never received the police protection that they were legally due. The police’s approval of white supremacist officers is ostensibly based on the idea that officers’ private biases are separate from their responsibilities to the public as agents of the law, but the examples of police support for racist terror that Rothstein has presented throughout this chapter indicate that people’s private biases essentially always influence the decisions they make in public life. The historical amnesia represented by the Supreme Court’s decision only adds insult to injury and helps sanitize and erase the history of racial terror in the United States.
Themes
