The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein.

4/5 rating. 217 pages.

Book #18 of 2022. Read April 3, 2022.

This is one of the most disturbing books I have read in a long time. Richard does a phenomenal job of explaining the myriad of ways that our government has kept America segregated. This book was illuminating (in the worst way) in that it showed that the majority of segregation over the past century was explicit and purposeful, not the de facto and accidental segregation I was taught in school.

I ended up highlighting so much of this book because of the continual examples and explanations of segregation through housing and employment, and I tried to highlight only instances after WWII as much as possible. I think this should be a must-read for everyone as Richard says:

“But if we – the public and policy makers – acknowledge that the federal, state, and local governments segregated our metropolitan areas, we may open our minds to considering how those same federal, state, and local governments might adopt equally aggressive policies to desegregate.”

Just a few of the countless damning quotes:

• “There was nothing unwritten about government policy to promote segregation in the North. It was spelled out in the FHA’s Underwriting Manual, in the PWA’s (and subsequent agencies’) racial designation of housing projects, in congressional votes on the 1949 public housing integration amendment, and in written directives of federal and state officials.”
• “Studies by the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Churches of Christ and by Greenpeace, conducted at about the same time as the GAO report [~1980], concluded that race was so strong a statistical predictor of where hazardous waste facilities could be found that there was only a one-in-10,000 chance of the racial distribution of such sites occurring randomly, and that the percentage of minorities living near incinerators was 89 percent higher than the national median.”
• “Still, the [Southern Poverty Law Center] documented 130 cases of move-in violence [against African Americans] in 1989 alone.”

Quotes:

“[U]ntil the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today’s residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.”

“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.”

“African Americans cannot await rectification of past wrongs as a gift, and white Americans collectively do not owe it to African Americans to rectify them. We, all of us, owe this to ourselves. As American citizens, whatever routes we or our particular ancestors took to get to this point, we’re all in this together now.”

“We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies. Although most of these policies are now off the books, they have never been remedied and their effects endure.”

“But banks would not finance construction costs nor issue mortgages to the co-op or to its members without government approval, and the FHA would not insure loans to a cooperative that included African American members.”

“At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages.”

“In 1984, investigative reporters from the Dallas Morning News visited federally funded developments in forty-seven metropolitan areas. The reporters found that the nation’s nearly ten million public housing tenants were almost always segregated by race and that every predominantly white-occupied project had facilities, amenities, services, and maintenance that were superior to what was found in predominantly black-occupied projects.”

“No criterion, other than race, can plausibly explain the veto of over 99 1/2% of the housing units located on the White sites which were originally selected on the basis of the CHA’s expert judgment and at the same time the rejection of only 10% or so of the units on Negro sites.”

“In defending HUD before the Supreme Court, President Gerald Ford’s solicitor general, Robert Bork, expressed the government’s opposition to placing public housing in white areas: ‘There will be an enormous practical impact on innocent communities who have to bear the burden of the housing, who will have to house a plaintiff class from Chicago, which they wronged in no way.’”

“In Miami, for example, African Americans eligible for public housing were assigned to distinct projects while eligible whites were given vouchers for rentals of private apartments to subsidize their dispersal throughout the community. It was not until 1998 that civil rights groups won a requirement that vouchers be offered to African Americans as well – too late to reverse the courts segregation.”

“Although a coroner’s jury indicted Tillman and ninety-three other Red Shirts for the murders, they were never prosecuted and continued to menace African Americans. Federal troops never again came to offer protection. The campaign in Edgefield was of a pattern followed not only in South Carolina but throughout the South. With African Americans disenfranchised and white supremacists in control, South Carolina instituted a system of segregation and exploitation that persisted for the next century. In 1940, the state legislature erected a statue honoring Tillman on the capitol grounds, and in 1946 Clemson, one of the state’s public universities, renamed its main hall in Tillman’s honor. It was in this environment that hundreds of thousands of African Americans fled the former Confederacy in the first half of the twentieth century.”

“Only in 2015, after the murder of nine black church members by a white supremacist youth in Charleston, did the trustees of Clemson adopt a resolution dissociating themselves from Tillman’s ‘campaign of terror against African Americans in South Carolina that included intimidation and violence.’ But the trustees can’t take his name off the hall unless the state legislature authorizes it, and the legislature has not done so.”

“In 1913, [President Woodrow] Wilson and his cabinet approved the implementation of segregation in governmental offices. Curtains were installed to separate black and white clerical workers. Separate cafeterias were created. Separate basement toilets were constructed for African Americans. Black supervisors were denied to ensure that no African American oversaw a white employee.”

“In addition to promoting segregation, zoning decisions contribute to degrading St. Louis’s African American neighborhoods into slums. Not only were these neighborhoods zoned to permit industry, even polluting industry, but the plan commission permitted taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution to open in African American neighborhoods but prohibited these as zoning violations in neighborhoods where whites lived.”

“Other influential zoning experts made no effort to conceal their expectation that zoning was an effective means of racial exclusion. Columbia Law School professor Ernst Freund, the nation’s leading authority on administrative law in the 1920s, observed that preventing ‘the coming of colored people into a district’ was actually a ‘more powerful’ reason for the spread of zoning during the previous decade than creation of single-family districts, the stated justification for zoning. Because the Buchanan decision had made it ‘impossible to find an appropriate legal formula’ for segregation, Freund said that zoning masquerading as an economic measure was the most reasonable means of accomplishing the same end.”

“Terrified by the 1917 Russian revolution, government officials came to believe that communism could be defeated in the United States by getting as many white Americans as possible to become homeowners – the idea being that those who owned property would be invested in the capitalist system.”

“In 1958, a white San Francisco schoolteacher, Gerald Cohn, purchased a house with an FHA-guaranteed mortgage in the Elmwood district of Berkeley. By the closing date, Mr. Cohn wasn’t ready to move in and, while keeping up his mortgage payments, rented the house to a fellow teacher, Alfred Simmons, an African American. The Berkeley chief of police asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to inquire how Mr. Simmons had managed to get into this all-white neighborhood.”

“In thousands of communities between Fanwood and Berkeley, FHA policy was the same, with very few exceptions: no guarantees for mortgages to African Americans, or to whites who might lease to African Americans, regardless of the applicants’ creditworthiness.”

“William Levitt’s refusal to sell a home to Vince Mereday [an African American,] was not a mere reflection of the builder’s prejudicial views. Had he felt differently and chosen to integrate Levittown, the federal government would have refused to subsidize him. In the decades following World War II, suburbs across the country – as in Milpitas and Palo Alto and Levittown – were created in this way, with the FHA administering an explicit racial policy that solidified segregation in every one of our metropolitan areas.”

“For Levittown and scores of such developments across the nation, the plans reviewed by the FHA included the approved construction materials, the design specifications, the proposed sale price, the neighborhood’s zoning restrictions (for example, a prohibition of industry or commercial development), and a commitment not to sell to African Americans. The FHA even withheld approval if the presence of African Americans in nearby neighborhoods threatened integration. In short, the FHA financed Levittown on condition that, like the Richmond suburb of Rollingwood during the war, it be all white, with no foreseeable change in its racial composition.”

“In 1973, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that the ‘housing industry, aided and abetted by Government, must bear the primary responsibility for the legacy of segregated housing…. Government and private industry came together to create a system of residential segregation.’”

“In 1976, the IRS denied the tax exemption of Bob Jones University because the school would not allow interracial dating by its students. The university mounted a court challenge to the IRS action, and when the case reached the Supreme Court the Reagan administration refused to defend the agency. So the Supreme Court appointed an outside lawyer, William T. Coleman, Jr., to make the argument that the government itself should have presented. Coleman’s brief asserted: ‘Indeed, if [the charitable organization provision of the IRS code] were construed to permit tax exemptions for racially discriminatory schools, the provision would be unconstitutional under the Fifth Amendment. The Government has an affirmative constitutional duty to steer clear of providing significant aid to such schools.’”

“In Los Angeles, the Reverend W. Clarence Wright, pastor of the fashionable Wilshire Presbyterian Church, led efforts to keep the Wilshire District all white. He personally sued to evict an African American war veteran who had moved into the restricted area in 1947. Wright lost the case, one of the few times before Shelley in which a state court held covenants to be unconstitutional. In a widely publicized ruling, the judge said that there was ‘no more reprehensible un-American activity than to attempt to deprive persons of their own homes on a “master race” theory.’”

“In 2000, 41 percent of all borrowers with subprime loans would have qualified for conventional financing with lower rates, a figure that increased to 61 percent in 2006. By then, African American mortgage recipients had subprime loans at three times the rate of white borrowers. Higher-income African Americans had subprime mortgages at four times the rate of higher-income whites. Even though its own survey in 2005 revealed a similar racial discrepancy, the Federal Reserve did not take action. By failing to curb discrimination that its own data disclosed, the Federal Reserve violated African Americans’ legal and constitutional rights.”

“Settling a lawsuit against the Countrywide mortgage company (later a subsidiary of the Bank of America), Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan remarked that because of Countrywide’s and other lenders’ practices, ‘[f]rom Jamaica, Queens, New York, to Oakland, California, strong, middle-class African American neighborhoods saw nearly two decades of gains reversed in a matter of not years – but months.’”

“A case that the City of Memphis brought against Wells Fargo Bank was supported by affidavits of bank employees stating that they referred to subprime loans as ‘ghetto loans.’ Bank supervisors instructed their marketing staffs to target solicitation to heavily African American zip codes, because residents there ‘weren’t savvy enough’ to know they were being exploited. A sales group sought out elderly African Americans, believing they were particularly susceptible to pressure to take out high-cost loans.”

“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.”

“In 1951, Harvey Clark, an American Chicago bus driver and air force veteran, rented an apartment in all-white Cicero, a Chicago suburb. At first, the police forcefully attempted to prevent him, his wife Johnetta, and two small children from occupying the apartment. They threatened him with arrest and worse if the family did not depart. ‘Get out of Cicero,’ the police chief told the real estate agent who rented the apartment, adding, ‘Don’t come back…or you’ll get a bullet through you.’ When Harvey Clark got a court injunction ordering the police to cease interfering with his occupancy and ‘to afford him full protection from any attempt to so restrain him,’ the police ignored it, making no effort, for example, to impede a group of teenagers who were pelting the apartment’s windows with stones. When the Clarks refused to leave, a mob of about 4,000 ripped in, raiding the apartment, destroying the fixtures, and throwing the family’s belongings out the window onto the lawn where they were set ablaze. The officers present arrested no one.”

“Governor Adlai Stevenson mobilized the National Guard to restore order. Although 118 rioters were arrested, a Cook County grand jury did not indict a single one. The grand jury, however, did indict Harvey Clark, his real estate agent, his NAACP attorney, and the white landlady who rented the apartment to him as well as her attorney on charges of inciting a riot and conspiring to lower property values.”

“Of the more than one hundred incidents of move-in bombings and vandalism that occurred in Los Angeles between 1950 and 1965, only one led to an arrest and prosecution – and that was because the California attorney general took over the case after local police and prosecutors claimed they were unable to find anyone to charge.”

“Such violence in Kentucky did not end in the 1950s. In 1985, Robert and Martha Marshall bought a home in Sylvania, another suburb of Louisville that had remained exclusively white. Their house was firebombed on the night they moved in.”

“A Chicago Department of Public Welfare report in the mid-1920s stated that African Americans were charged about 20 percent more in rent than whites for similar dwellings. It also observed that in neighborhoods undergoing racial change, rents increased by 50 to 225 percent when African Americans occupied apartments that formerly housed whites.”

“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.”

“By the time the federal government decided finally to allow African Americans into the suburbs, the window of opportunity for an integrated nation had mostly closed. In 1948, for example, Levittown homes sold for about $8,000, or about $75,000 in today’s dollars. Now, properties in Levittown without major remodeling (i.e., one-bath houses) sell for $350,000 and up. White working-class families who bought those homes in 1948 have gained, over three generations, more than $200,000 in wealth.”

“In fact, however, the United States has less mobility than many other industrialized societies. Of American children born to parents whose incomes were in the bottom income quintile, almost half (43 percent) remain trapped in the bottom quintile as adults. Only 30 percent of children born to parents in the lowest-earning quintile make it to the middle quintile or higher. African Americans have even less mobility. For those born to parents in the bottom income quintile, over half (53 percent) remain there as adults, and only a quarter (26 percent) make it to the middle quintile or higher.”

“Median white family income is now about $60,000, while median black family income is about $37,000 – about 60 percent as much. You might expect that the ratio of black to white household wealth would be similar. But median white household wealth (assets minus liabilities) is about $134,000, while median black household wealth is about $11,000 – less than 10 percent as much.”

“He finds that young African Americans (from thirteen to twenty-eight years old) are now ten times as likely to live in poor neighborhoods as young whites – 66 percent of African Americans, compared to 6 percent of whites.” 

“In 1975, when Maryland proposed a rail line to connect suburban Anne Arundel County and downtown Baltimore, white suburbanites pressed their political leaders to oppose the plan, which they did. A review by Johns Hopkins University researchers concluded that the residents believed that the rail line ‘would enable poor, inner-city blacks to travel to the suburbs, steal residents’ T.V.s and then return to their ghettos.’ Maryland’s state transportation secretary stated that his office ‘would not force a transit line on an area that clearly does not want it,’ failing to explain how he balanced the desires of a white suburban area ‘that clearly does not want it’ with the desires of urban African Americans who needed it.”

#thecoloroflaw #segregation #housing #hud #richardrothstein #americanhistory #racism #government #mustread #bookrecommendations #bookreviews

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