In The Color of Law, historian Richard Rothstein’s central argument is that, from the 1870s to the present day, federal, state, and local governments in the United States have systematically and intentionally segregated American cities. While most Americans assume that their country’s pervasive pattern of racial segregation is the de facto product of individual decisions and market conditions, Rothstein argues that this is incorrect: American residential segregation is de jure, a product of unconstitutional policies. Not only has the government consistently supported pervasive racial discrimination by America’s financial institutions and real estate industry, but in fact the government initially mandated much of this discrimination, and undoing housing segregation requires first understanding and accepting this fact.
Most Americans wrongly believe in what Rothstein calls “the de facto segregation myth.” While virtually all Americans are familiar with the “nationwide system of urban ghettos, surrounded by white suburbs” that characterizes almost every city in the United States, most assume that this has happened because white residents independently chose to leave urban neighborhoods, while African Americans could not afford to leave them. Many people know about racist real estate agents and bank redlining (the discriminatory refusal of home financing to African Americans), but few realize that these were actually products of official policy, not exceptions to it. In fact, Rothstein clarifies, the history of American de jure segregation has been deliberately and effectively erased. Popular high school history textbooks wrongly blame segregation on things like “unwritten custom or tradition,” rather than the government policies that actually caused it. And even the Supreme Court is ignorant about this dimension of American history: Chief Justice John Roberts has written an official Court decision that segregation was “a product not of state action but of private choices,” a claim that Rothstein’s book is dedicated to proving false. Roberts’s error shows how pervasive “the de facto segregation myth” has truly become: Americans, particularly those in power, tend to accept and perpetuate this myth without ever measuring it up to reality.
Rather than accepting this dominant narrative, Rothstein shows in The Color of Law that American residential racial segregation is actually de jure, the product of government policy rather than “private choices.” Each of Chapters Two through Ten focuses on a different way that government has created, advanced, or unconstitutionally failed to stop residential segregation. In Chapter Two, for instance, Rothstein shows how, in places like Atlanta, St. Louis, and Cleveland, the federal Public Works Administration destroyed integrated neighborhoods and built segregated public housing on top of them. Similarly, in Chapter Four, Rothstein examines how Presidents Wilson and Hoover encouraged white people to buy homes in the suburbs by promising this would distance them from African Americans, and then the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) kept these suburbs all-white by mandating redlining in its Underwriting Manual. Each of Rothstein’s chapters highlights a different way in which the U.S. government has mandated segregation, which shows that it cannot simply be blamed on people’s personal housing choices.
In each chapter, Rothstein also explains why the government action he describes constitutes de jure residential segregation. While this is relatively obvious in the cases of segregated public housing, explicitly racist zoning by local governments, and redlining by the FHA, Rothstein also looks at cases in which the government deliberately ignores its constitutional obligation to stop segregation by private individuals. For instance, while the IRS did not cause segregation by giving tax-exempt status to segregationist groups, this decision is unconstitutional because the IRS is legally “obligat[ed] to withhold tax favoritism from discriminatory organizations.” Similarly, throughout the 20th century in U.S. cities such as Chicago, angry white mobs frequently attacked black families who moved into their neighborhoods. While government was not responsible for sending in the mobs, when police forces refused to protect black homeowners or arrest mob members, this counted as “state policy that violated the Fourteenth Amendment” (which declares that state governments must ensure “equal protection of the laws” to all Americans). Through such examples, Rothstein makes it clear that the government’s actions were unconstitutional—which means it is obligated to undo them.
In order to reverse housing segregation, Rothstein argues, Americans must first understand the reality that this segregation is de jure. His book is an attempt to set the record straight and fight against collective amnesia: although in the 1970s most people knew that the government actively pursued segregation in American cities, today this is far from common knowledge. This profound misunderstanding of the past is an injustice in itself, and also has severe consequences in the present: because people do not realize that the government is responsible for segregation, they blame African Americans for living in deteriorated neighborhoods and conclude that the government has no obligation to help them. Due to this kind of thinking, the United States’ white majority does not recognize the wrong that needs to be righted in the first place, making the solutions that Rothstein proposes in Chapter Twelve not yet “politically possible.” Without truly learning about the history of segregation, Rothstein concludes, Americans will never take action to stop it. Such political action is crucial not only to undo existing segregation, but also to stop the segregationist practices that continue in the present day—one example of which is government-sanctioned reverse redlining, in which banks target prospective African American homebuyers with predatory loans that are aimed to bankrupt them, rather than support them. Only citizens armed with knowledge of history, Rothstein insists, can force the government to learn its lesson and start following its constitutional obligation to treat all Americans equally. As Rothstein reveals in his Epilogue, he sees his book as a first step toward an “incomparably difficult” task of righting historical wrongs. But unless Americans “contemplate what we have collectively done” and choose to “accept responsibility” for de jure segregation, the problem will never be solved.
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De Jure vs. De Facto Segregation ThemeTracker
De Jure vs. De Facto Segregation Quotes in The Color of Law
De facto segregation, we tell ourselves, has various causes. When African Americans moved into a neighborhood like Ferguson, a few racially prejudiced white families decided to leave, and then as the number of black families grew, the neighborhood deteriorated, and “white flight” followed. Real estate agents steered whites away from black neighborhoods, and blacks away from white ones. Banks discriminated with “redlining,” refusing to give mortgages to African Americans or extracting unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans. African Americans haven’t generally gotten the educations that would enable them to earn sufficient incomes to live in white suburbs, and, as a result, many remain concentrated in urban neighborhoods. Besides, black families prefer to live with one another.
All this has some truth, but it remains a small part of the truth, submerged by a far more important one: until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. […] Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto. Rather, it is what courts call de jure: segregation by law and public policy.
By failing to recognize that we now live with the severe, enduring effects of de jure segregation, we avoid confronting our constitutional obligation to reverse it. If I am right that we continue to have de jure segregation, then desegregation is not just a desirable policy; it is a constitutional as well as a moral obligation that we are required to fulfill.
Half a century ago, the truth of de jure segregation was well known, but since then we have suppressed our historical memory and soothed ourselves into believing that it all happened by accident or by misguided private prejudice. Popularized by Supreme Court majorities from the 1970s to the present, the de facto segregation myth has now been adopted by conventional opinion, liberal and conservative alike.
Over the past few decades, we have developed euphemisms to help us forget how we, as a nation, have segregated African American citizens. We have become embarrassed about saying ghetto, a word that accurately describes a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exit. We don’t hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in Eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don’t characterize those whites as inner city families.)
Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state housing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto.
The director of the Federal Housing Administration supported Tenerowicz, stating that the presence of African Americans in the area would threaten property values of nearby residents. Foreman was forced to resign. The Federal Works Agency then proposed a different project for African Americans on a plot that the Detroit Housing Commission recommended, in an industrial area deemed unsuitable for whites. It soon became apparent that this site, too, would provoke protests because it was not far enough away from a white neighborhood. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt protested to the president. The FWA again reversed course and assigned African Americans to the Sojourner Truth project. Whites in the neighborhood rioted, leading to one hundred arrests (all but three were African Americans) and thirty-eight hospitalizations (all but five were African Americans).
The waffling of San Francisco’s elected leaders and housing administrators about whether to segregate public projects, like similar waffling in Boston and elsewhere, makes sense only if these officials knew that the segregation they imposed was wrong, if not unconstitutional.
This policy change, mostly complete by the late 1960s, ensured that integrated public housing would cease to be possible. It transformed public housing into a warehousing system for the poor. The condition of public projects rapidly deteriorated, partly because housing authority maintenance workers and their families had to leave the buildings where they worked when their wages made them ineligible to live there, and partly because the loss of middle-class rents resulted in inadequate maintenance budgets. The federal government had required public housing to be made available only to families who needed substantial subsidies, while the same government declined to provide sufficient subsidies to make public housing a decent place to live. The loss of middle-class tenants also removed a constituency that had possessed the political strength to insist on adequate funds for their projects’ upkeep and amenities. As a result, the condition and then the reputation of public housing collapsed. By 1973 the changeover was mostly complete. President Richard Nixon announced that public housing should not be forced on white communities that didn’t want it, and he reported to Congress that many public housing projects were “monstrous, depressing places—rundown, overcrowded, crime-ridden.”
In the wake of the 1917 Buchanan decision, the enthusiasm of federal officials for economic zoning that could also accomplish racial segregation grew rapidly.
The frequent existence of polluting industry and toxic waste plants in African American communities, along with subdivided homes and rooming houses, contributed to giving African Americans the image of slum dwellers in the eyes of whites who lived in neighborhoods where integration might be a possibility. This, in turn, contributed to white flight when African Americans attempted to move to suburbs.
Zoning thus had two faces. One face, developed in part to evade a prohibition on racially explicit zoning, attempted to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods by making it difficult for lower-income families, large numbers of whom were African Americans, to live in expensive white neighborhoods. The other attempted to protect white neighborhoods from deterioration by ensuring that few industrial or environmentally unsafe businesses could locate in them. Prohibited in this fashion, polluting industry had no option but to locate near African American residences. The first contributed to creation of exclusive white suburbs, the second to creation of urban African American slums.
The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red. A neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes.
The full cycle went like this: when a neighborhood first integrated, property values increased because of African Americans’ need to pay higher prices for homes than whites. But then property values fell once speculators had panicked enough white homeowners into selling at deep discounts.
Falling sale prices in neighborhoods where blockbusters created white panic was deemed as proof by the FHA that property values would decline if African Americans moved in. But if the agency had not adopted a discriminatory and unconstitutional racial policy, African Americans would have been able, like whites, to locate throughout metropolitan areas rather than attempting to establish presence in only a few blockbusted communities, and speculators would not have been able to prey on white fears that their neighborhoods would soon turn from all white to all black.
The consequences of racially targeted subprime lending continue to accumulate. As the housing bubble collapsed, African American homeownership rates fell much more than white rates. Families no longer qualify for conventional mortgages if they previously defaulted when they were unable to make exorbitant loan payments; for these families, the contract buying system of the 1960s is now making its return. Some of the same firms that exploited African Americans in the subprime crisis are now reselling foreclosed properties to low- and moderate-income households at high interest rates, with high down payments, with no equity accumulated until the contract period has ended, and with eviction possible after a single missed payment.
The Milpitas story illustrates the extraordinary creativity that government officials at all levels displayed when they were motivated to prevent the movement of African Americans into white neighborhoods. It wasn’t only the large-scale federal programs of public housing and mortgage finance that created de jure segregation. Hundreds, if not thousands of smaller acts of government contributed. They included petty actions like denial of access to public utilities; determining, once African Americans wanted to build, that their property was, after all, needed for parkland; or discovering that a road leading to African American homes was “private.” They included routing interstate highways to create racial boundaries or to shift the residential placement of African American families. And they included choosing school sites to force families to move to segregated neighborhoods if they wanted education for their children.
Taken in isolation, we can easily dismiss such devices as aberrations. But when we consider them as a whole, we can see that they were part of a national system by which state and local government supplemented federal efforts to maintain the status of African Americans as a lower caste, with housing segregation preserving the badges and incidents of slavery.
“N_____ have moved into Levittown!”
State-sponsored violence was a means, along with many others, by which all levels of government maintained segregation in Louisville and elsewhere. The Wades and Marshalls were only two middle-class families confronted with hostile state power when they tried to cross the residential color line. How many other middle-class African Americans in Louisville were intimidated from attempting to live in neighborhoods of their own choosing after hearing of the Wade and Marshall experiences? Did the next generation imbibe a fear of integration from their parents? How long do the memories of such events last? How long do they continue to intimidate?
It is certainly true that one cause of segregation today is the inability of many African Americans to afford to live in middle-class communities. But segregation itself has had a high cost for African Americans, exacerbating their inability to save to purchase suburban homes. Income differences are only a superficial way to understand why we remain segregated. Racial policy in which government was inextricably involved created income disparities that ensure residential segregation, continuing to this day.
As it has turned out, schools are more segregated today than they were forty years ago, but this is mostly because the neighborhoods in which schools are located are so segregated. In 1970, the typical African American student attended a school in which 32 percent of the students were white. By 2010, this exposure had fallen to 29 percent. It is because of neighborhood segregation that African American students are more segregated in schools in states like New York and Illinois than they are anywhere else. Throughout the country, not just in the South, busing of school-children was almost the only tool available to create integrated schools—because few children lived near enough to opposite-race peers for any other approach to be feasible. Were housing segregation not pervasive, school desegregation would have been more successful.
Yet unlike the progress we anticipated from other civil rights laws, we shouldn’t have expected much to happen from a Fair Housing Act that allowed African Americans now to resettle in a white suburb. Moving from an urban apartment to a suburban home is incomparably more difficult than registering to vote, applying for a job, changing seats on a bus, sitting down in a restaurant, or even attending a neighborhood school.
“In the North, too, African Americans faced segregation and discrimination. Even where there were no explicit laws, de facto segregation, or segregation by unwritten custom or tradition, was a fact of life. African Americans in the North were denied housing in many neighborhoods.”
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With very rare exceptions, textbook after textbook adopts the same mythology. If middle and high school students are being taught a false history, is it any wonder that they come to believe that African Americans are segregated only because they don’t want to marry or because they prefer to live only among themselves? Is it any wonder that they grow up inclined to think that programs to ameliorate ghetto conditions are simply undeserved handouts?
