Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law argues that racial residential segregation—the fact that some neighborhoods are almost exclusively African American while others are almost exclusively white—is the result of explicit government policy rather than personal choice. In other words, racial residential segregation in the United States is de jure (“by law”) rather than de facto (in this context, “by virtue of personal choices or random circumstances”). The distinction between de jure and de facto segregation is paramount, because de jure segregation is unconstitutional: It infringes the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
Each section below covers a specific way in which racial residential segregation was realized, from the segregation of public housing to labor-market discrimination.
(A note on terminology: Rothstein uses “Black” and “African American” interchangeably, and refers purposefully to “ghettos.” A “ghetto” describes a residential area with a concentrated minority, a shortage of opportunity, and significant barriers to exit. These three conditions apply to contemporary African American neighborhoods.)
One of the most important methods by which government segregated cities was the construction of segregated public housing (“projects”) from World War I through to the 1960s and 1970s. By confining African Americans to subpar public housing in undesirable areas, federal, state, and local authorities promoted (1) the segregation of their cities and (2) the transformation of predominantly Black areas into slums.
Projects were segregated as a matter of policy. For example, they had to abide by the “neighborhood composition rule”—that is, they had to reflect the racial composition of the neighborhood around them.
During WWII, segregated projects were constructed near shipyards to house the influx of war workers. Black workers were housed close to worksites in shoddily constructed units, while white workers lived in sturdier projects further inland. (White workers were also subsidized to rent rooms from private landlords.)
After WWII, city-level public housing authorities used segregated public housing to ghettoize their African American residents. For example, in 1952, the NAACP took the San Francisco public housing authority to court, claiming that though the authority had promised to make all new construction integrated, it was trying to build a new segregated project. Under oath, the authority’s chairman admitted that the agency was purposely trying to confine African Americans to particular locations in the city.
Another key cause of racial residential segregation in the US was the enactment of discriminatory zoning laws. Zoning laws are local ordinances that limit how certain “zones”—or areas—in a municipality can be developed; racial zoning laws restricted African Americans from owning property in certain areas.
After the Supreme Court ruled racial zoning unconstitutional in Buchanan v. Warley, city authorities found workarounds and subterfuges that allowed them to continue segregating by race. Two such strategies were:
Officials passed ordinances limiting certain neighborhoods to single-family homes affordable only to middle-income people. Because African Americans had been historically and systematically discriminated against in the job market, many were lower-income and so could only afford housing in apartment buildings—structures that were banned by these ordinances. The result was that areas zoned for single-family homes stayed or became white while areas that allowed multiple-family dwellings stayed or became African American.
Certain areas in municipalities are zoned specifically for industry to protect residents from nuisances like noise and air pollution. To further segregate their cities in the wake of Buchanan, city officials zoned areas near predominantly Black neighborhoods for industry. This move lowered property values in those areas, thereby reducing the current residents’ wealth and limiting their opportunities to move out.
An example of this method can be seen in South Central Los Angeles, a predominantly Black area. In the 1940s, the city began using “spot” rezoning ordinances to move automobile junkyards and commercial factories into the area, thus ghettoizing the residents.
The shortcoming of economic zoning—at least as far as segregationists were concerned—was that it was race-blind: If a Black family were wealthy enough, they could live in an economically zoned neighborhood. In order to keep African Americans confined to particular neighborhoods, the federal government pursued a two-pronged approach. First, it appraised areas that were majority African American as “risky” (a process known as “redlining”); then it denied loan guarantees and financial support to Black families attempting to live outside those areas.
The agency doing the denying was the Federal Housing Administration (“FHA”). Created to increase home ownership by insuring private bank mortgages and facilitating more advantageous terms, the FHA systematically discriminated against Black families. Their reasoning was that integration led to a “reduction in [property] values.”
Not all efforts to maintain and further residential segregation originated with the federal government; three common strategies—restrictive covenants, blockbusting, and contract sales—developed among private enterprises. Nevertheless, the federal government consistently condoned—or, at the very least, ignored—these injustices.
Restrictive covenants are stipulations in deeds that obligate the owner of the property to undertake certain actions or follow rules. For example, a restrictive covenant might prevent the owner from painting the house a certain color. It might also—as it often did in the first half of the 20th century—forbid the owner from selling or renting to an African American.
However, if a white homeowner wanted to violate the covenant and sell a property to an African American, there was little his or her neighbors—who would be the ones “hurt” by the sale—could do about it. To get around this wrinkle in the law, developers began making it a requirement that people purchasing their properties join a community association—an association whose bylaws often included a whites-only clause.
The FHA, for its part, supported restrictive covenants by awarding low-risk ratings to properties that had them. Even after racial restrictive covenants were ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1948, the FHA continued to withhold loan guarantees unless deeds barred sale to African Americans. The justification? That the presence of African Americans reduced property values and so comprised greater risk. (In fact, the evidence shows that the presence of African Americans actually raised property values, because they often had to pay higher prices than whites for the same properties.)
It wasn’t until President John F. Kennedy issued an order forbidding the FHA to contribute to racial discrimination that FHA appraisers ceased this discriminatory practice. For racial restrictive covenants in general to be outlawed, however, African Americans would have to wait until 1972.
Despite the fact that the presence of Black homeowners raised property values rather than lowered them, unscrupulous real estate agents were happy to take advantage of white fears of neighborhood decline. One way they did so was “blockbusting.”
First, real estate agents would gin up fear among whites in a given neighborhood that African Americans were starting to move in. Because whites believed the stereotype that an influx of Black residents meant declining home values and neighborhood distress, these white homeowners would sell their homes quickly and at a discount, thinking they were still coming out ahead.
Then, the real estate agents would turn around and sell the homes to African Americans at a premium. The African American families would move in, precipitating greater fear among their white neighbors and further discount sales. Before long, the neighborhood would be exclusively African American. (“Blockbusting” and “white flight” go hand in hand.)
Sometimes, agents wouldn’t even have to actually sell a home to an African American. For example, agents were known to pay African American women to walk through white neighborhoods with their babies in carriages, or African American men to drive through neighborhoods with the radio turned up, to frighten whites into selling cheap.
When agents did sell to African Americans, they often employed a particular type of agreement called a “contract sale.” Under the terms of this agreement, the deed to the home would transfer to the buyer after fifteen or twenty years, but only if the buyer made every monthly payment over the term of the contract. If the buyer didn’t, they could be evicted immediately—because the payments didn’t earn the buyer equity in the home.
The repercussions of these burdensome payments—which were inflated by discriminatory real estate agents—were many and varied. It forced buyers to work multiple jobs or take in boarders to earn enough just to make their payments (many were evicted for nonpayment despite these efforts). The additional boarders created overcrowding in homes and local schools—so much so that many schools had to switch to morning shifts and evening shifts. The shifts gave rise to gangs, which gave rise to criminality, which caused whites to move out of integrated neighborhoods even quicker.
Many other federal agencies besides the FHA contributed to racial residential segregation. The IRS, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve all, in one way or another, exacerbated it.
One of the central responsibilities of the IRS is determining the tax-exempt status of various US entities. Although its rules require the agency to withhold tax exemptions from organizations that countermand official public policy or promote prejudice and discrimination, the IRS regularly conferred tax-exempt status on entities that contributed to racial residential segregation. For example, tax-exempt religious entities like churches and synagogues regularly promoted segregationist policies like racial restrictive covenants.
Tax-exempt colleges, too, promoted segregation. The University of Chicago subsidized local property owners so that they could keep Hyde Park and its surrounds segregated. From 1933 to 1947, the University covered $100,000 in legal fees for the defense of restrictive covenants and the eviction of recently arrived African Americans.
As much as federal policy contributed to racial residential segregation, the small-scale efforts by state and municipal governments to keep their communities segregated, when considered in their totality, clearly point to a system of de jure segregation in the United States.
White community groups and public officials weren’t only concerned with excluding African Americans from residential areas—they also made concerted efforts to remove them from urban downtowns and business districts. (These were the areas into which Blacks had been pushed due to discrimination in the suburbs.) To reserve these economically important areas for whites, officials practiced “slum clearance”: the condemnation and demolition of dilapidated structures and the forced relocation of their current residents.
The most common impetus for slum clearance was infrastructure projects, in particular the federal interstate highway system. For example, in 1956, the Florida State Road Department routed a section of I-95 through a Black enclave adjacent to Miami’s downtown. By the time of the highway’s completion in the 1960s, the area’s African-Ameircan population of 40,000 had been reduced to 8,000.
Prior to Brown v. Board of Ed., the famous 1954 Supreme Court case ending the doctrine of “separate but equal” in US public schools, many states used the location of segregated public schools to practice racial residential segregation.
One prominent example concerns Austin, TX. In its 1928 “Master Plan,” the city evaded a Supreme Court ruling that housing segregation on the basis of race was unconstitutional by placing a variety of Black-only services, including public schools, on the city’s Eastside. The effect was significant: In 1930, the African American population of the integrated Wheatsville neighborhood was 16%; by 1950, after the segregated school for African Americans was shuttered, it was 1%.
In general, government can’t be held responsible for the intimidation tactics used by white supremacists to defend segregation. However, when public authorities either turn a blind eye—or, worse, encourage that intimidation—it amounts to an unconstitutional infringement of African Americans’ rights and de jure segregation.
Some of the earliest instances of state-sanctioned abuse of African Americans for the purposes of segregation occurred in Chicago. In the early 1900s, white gangs would throw rocks through the windows of African Americans to coerce them into moving. In the early 20s, whites firebombed African American homes on the border between white and Black areas. Despite two deaths from these firebombings, Chicago law enforcement neither made arrests nor pursued prosecutions.
This sort of vandalism persists into living memory. In 1985, an African American couple who’d moved into Sylvania, a suburb of Louisville, had their house firebombed twice.
One explanation of racial residential segregation is that it isn’t the product of purposeful governmental policy but rather African Americans’ lower incomes—if African Americans had higher earnings, they could live wherever they want. However, this argument fails to account for the public policies whose express intent was to depress African American wages.
African Americans endured discrimination in the labor market as soon as they were able to participate in the labor market. Although famously promised “40 acres and a mule” by the Union at the conclusion of the Civil War, many formerly enslaved people ended up sharecroppers—essentially indentured servants on the land of their former owners.
Later, during the Depression, because FDR needed southern Democrats’ votes to pass the New Deal, he allowed exceptions into the laws that specifically excluded African Americans. In fact, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the agency responsible for implementing and enforcing the Deal’s new wage protections, excluded African Americans with brutal efficiency. For example, within the category of industrial work—which featured both white and Black workers—the NRA denied wage-and-hours standards to canning, citrus packing, and cotton ginning workers. These workers were predominantly African American.
Labor unions, too, discriminated against Black workers. Because African Americans were either shut out of or marginalized within unions during the war and after, they missed out on the high wages negotiated for union workers in industries like shipbuilding and housing construction. Although the NLRB ceased to certify white-only unions in 1964, no effort was made to compensate previously excluded Black workers, leaving them still well behind their white counterparts economically. Because African American wages have always been depressed, their ability to escape present-day ghettos is commensurately limited.
Racial residential segregation is difficult to reverse for three reasons in particular:
The Federal Housing Act, passed in 1968, enshrines in law African Americans’ freedom to live wherever they can afford to. But historical discrimination in labor and housing markets has created intergenerational wealth and income disadvantages for African Americans that prevent them from living in middle- and upper-class—that is, predominantly white—areas.
Making matters worse, the value of homes in predominantly white neighborhoods has appreciated considerably in the last 50 or so years while the values in African American neighborhoods haven’t. This development has a dual effect: It makes homes in white neighborhoods even more unattainable for African Americans and it entrenches the intergenerational wealth gap between Blacks and whites (because the homes white parents pass on to their heirs have appreciated significantly while those that Black families pass on haven’t).
Homes in and around the famous Levittown subdivision provide a stark example of these effects. In 1948, a one-bedroom in whites-only Levittown went for about $75,000 in today’s dollars. Today, that home—even without major remodels or updates—sells for about $350,000. A one-bedroom in nearby Lakeview, NY, a predominantly African American town, also went for $75,000 in 1948. Today, the Lakeview home is only worth $90,000–$120,000.
Although many policies passed in the 20th century had no explicitly discriminatory purpose, the fact that segregation was already entrenched meant that these race-neutral policies exacerbated housing inequality. The most salient example is the mortgage interest deduction, the tax break given to homeowners. Because homeownership for many African Americans was unattainable—due to the de jure policies of the FHA and other agencies, among other bodies—they were largely excluded from this government subsidy.
Federal and local governments have enacted programs to help low-income families secure affordable housing. Unfortunately, these programs tend to redouble segregation rather than remedy it.
For example, the Housing Choice Voucher program (also known as “Section 8”), which provides families with financial support to rent apartments they couldn’t otherwise afford, offers amounts too meager for families to escape low-income areas. Landlords in better-off areas also frequently refuse to accept housing vouchers as payment.
Given the challenges enumerated above, Rothstein is loath to offer remedies to racial residential segregation for fear they will inevitably come up short. Nevertheless, he proposes some initial steps that may, in time, lead to a more integrated, and thus more equitable, society.
Americans must realize that racial residential segregation isn’t the result of personal choices or housing and labor market cycles. Rather, it is the legacy of explicitly discriminatory public policy that flouted the US Constitution and US laws. Acknowledging this fact opens the door for government to enact bold changes to rectify past injustices.
One of those bold reforms could be to subsidize African Americans to purchase homes in predominantly white neighborhoods. For example, the government could purchase homes at market rates in areas segregated by FHA policy and sell them to African Americans at historically pegged prices. Another strategy would be to subsidize low- and middle-class Black families directly to allow them to move to and integrate into predominantly white neighborhoods.
Zoning ordinances prohibiting multi-family homes and requiring large lots are still on the books in many localities, effectively excluding lower- and lower-middle-income buyers—many of whom are African American—from living there. A blunt instrument is simply to ban these zoning laws (which were often racially motivated in the first place).
Another possibility is to withhold the mortgage interest deduction from homeowners in discriminatorily zoned areas or areas that aren’t taking steps to accommodate low- and middle-income families. The affected families would then put pressure on officials to promote integration.
In addition to mitigating the effects of exclusionary zoning laws, states and municipalities can enact inclusionary zoning laws. These laws actively promote the construction of affordable housing and the attraction of low- and middle-income families to mostly white areas.
With the right reforms, the Housing Choice Voucher program could be a powerful tool for integration. One key reform would be to increase voucher amounts. Another would be to increase Section 8’s overall funding to ensure all people who qualify for a voucher get one. The program’s funding is currently limited and applicants are often denied vouchers due to the program’s running out of money. (In 2015, six million qualified people went without vouchers.)
Widely reviewed and discussed when it was published in 2017, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law makes the case that racial residential segregation—the fact that African Americans largely live in discrete areas separate from white Americans—is the result of explicit government policy (“de jure” segregation) rather than personal preferences or random processes (“de facto” segregation). That is, historically, African Americans didn’t choose to live almost exclusively among themselves; rather, they were compelled to do so by an array of discriminatory policies designed and implemented by government at the federal, state, and local levels.
The distinction between de jure and de facto segregation is key. This is because segregation “by law” is unconstitutional and so remediable by legislation and litigation, whereas the Supreme Court has ruled that segregation “by personal choice” isn’t rectifiable under the Constitution.
Rothstein proves his claim that racial residential segregation was government-sponsored by examining the various means public officials used to promote segregation. Each chapter in the following summary focuses on one of these means, from the segregation of public housing to the exclusion of African Americans from federal home loans to the continual disadvantagement of African Americans in the labor market.
To emphasize the individual strategies government employed to segregate US localities, Shortform has had to omit some of the many examples Rothstein includes of racial residential segregation. (Those familiar with the book will also notice that we’ve redistributed the material that appears in the book’s first chapter and combined some shorter chapters.) As always, if you enjoy the summary and are curious to know more, we encourage you to consult the author’s work itself.
Before he delves into the discrete means by which government sponsored racial residential segregation, Rothstein discusses the terminology he’ll be using throughout the book and offers a brief history of de jure segregation.
The use of the term “ghetto” to refer to predominantly Black neighborhoods has become unacceptable, but Rothstein argues the term accurately denotes the situation of racial residential segregation, and therefore uses it in his work. A ghetto describes a residential area with a concentrated minority, a shortage of opportunity, and significant barriers to exit. These three conditions apply to contemporary African American neighborhoods.
It is also habit to despecificate the African American experience by referring generally to “people of color.” Rothstein resists this habit, because the policies he discusses were designed to disadvantage African Americans specifically.
Rothstein uses “African American” and “Black” interchangeably in accordance with contemporary norms. He also occasionally uses the (now unacceptable) term “Negro” in historical contexts when that was the preferred nomenclature.
As noted in the introduction, de jure segregation is unconstitutional: It infringes the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution. It was also outlawed by the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited any law that echoed the characteristics of slavery by disadvantaging African Americans.
Unfortunately, in 1883, the Supreme Court determined that housing discrimination didn’t represent a continuation of the “badges and incidents of slavery.” It wasn’t until 1968—when the Supreme Court overturned the 1883 decision and, separately, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act—that racial discrimination in housing was unambiguously prohibited.
Between 1883 and 1968, African Americans were systematically and repeatedly disadvantaged in the housing market due to government policy—specifically through the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration—with repercussions that extend into today.
For example, the primary source of wealth for American families is their home. Because Black Americans were unable to obtain financing, from either the government or private banks, to purchase homes in the middle of the last century, their descendants haven’t inherited the same wealth that white Americans have.
These descendants are also unable to file suit for remuneration on account of this historical discrimination. Because the Supreme Court ruled housing discrimination legal between 1883 and 1968, descendants of those discriminated against have no legal standing to sue.
Even after 1968, the Supreme Court continued to minimize the government’s role in creating housing segregation. For example, in 1974, in a case concerning the desegregation of urban and suburban Detroit’s public schools, Justice Potter Stewart, who wrote for the majority, claimed that the racial disparities between the city of Detroit and the suburbs were the product of diverse private acts rather than public policy. Ultimately, the Court ruled that the predominantly white suburbs couldn’t be included in a compulsory desegregation program.
(It’s worth noting that Potter’s decision overturned the ruling of a district court judge who found that federal, state, and local policy did indeed bear outsized responsibility for racial residential segregation.)
Potter’s position was echoed more recently by the Court. In 2007, in a case involving Seattle and Louisville public schools’ consideration of race in filling classes, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that racial residential segregation (and thus public school segregation) was the product of private choice (“de facto”), and so the Court couldn’t allow a public remedy.
De jure and de facto segregation can indeed be hard to separate. “Structural racism,” which describes a societal condition in which both private attitudes and public institutions disadvantage people of color, illustrates this point.
Rothstein’s argument is not that de facto or private segregation doesn’t play a role in housing segregation. Rather, his point is that jurists like Stewart and Potter have overlooked the clear role of government policy in racial residential segregation, and so have unjustly excused governments from remedying it.
One of the most significant methods the federal government used to institute racial residential segregation was public housing policy. Throughout much of the 20th century, federal housing was segregated by race, and rules mandated that units for African Americans be built in predominantly African American areas and units for whites be built in predominantly white areas. These rules entrenched the racial makeup of areas that, but for the introduction of segregated public housing, could have remained—or been further—integrated.
In the contemporary imagination, public housing—or “projects,” as they’re colloquially known—is composed of dreary high rises, largely occupied by families of color headed by single mothers. This stereotype isn’t true: Present-day public housing can consist of attractive low-rise structures and count whites and BIPOC alike among its inhabitants. In fact, at least in its early history, public housing was the exclusive province of whites.
The first public housing units were built during World War I to accommodate war-industry workers. In this era, 83 projects housed 170,000 (white) workers. Although African Americans worked in the war industries in large numbers, they were excluded from these units.
Later, during the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt inaugurated a housing program under the aegis of the Public Works Administration (PWA) to ease a nationwide housing shortage. As was the case with other New Deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), whose workers’ camps and villages were strictly segregated, the new housing program’s rules promoted racial segregation. For example, of the PWA’s 47 housing projects, 17 were assigned exclusively to African Americans, 6 were integrated but segregated by building, and the remaining 24 were designated for whites only.
These projects also had to abide by what then-Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes called the “neighborhood composition rule.” According to this rule, a project had to reflect the racial composition of the neighborhood around it: Projects located in white areas had to be exclusively white, projects located in Black areas exclusively Black, and so on.
The problem with the “neighborhood composition rule” was that it exacerbated city planners’ segregation efforts. In Miami, federal officials agreed to build an African American project in an area zoned specifically for Black residents. And in Atlanta, where the first PWA project was built, an integrated neighborhood called the “Flats” was demolished to make way for a whites-only project. The displaced African Americans were forced to rent rooms in other African American neighborhoods or move in with relatives, eventually creating the population density that turns neighborhoods into slums.
Similar processes repeated themselves in St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Toledo, and New York: Integrated neighborhoods comprising white immigrants from Europe and African Americans were upended and segregated by the arrival of white- or Black-only public-housing projects.
When Congress ended the PWA program in 1937, it established the US Housing Authority (USHA) to provide subsidies to states and localities building public housing. The USHA’s subsidy policies echoed those of the PWA: Federally subsidized projects should reflect the racial makeup of the surrounding community.
Austin, Texas, provides a signal example of the effects of this policy. Projects for African Americans were built on the east side of the city, whereas projects for whites were confined to the west side. This outcome was driven by segregationist city planners, who’d aimed to shift the city’s African American inhabitants to the east side.
Given that military units were segregated during World War II, it should come as no surprise that public housing built to accommodate war-industry workers was segregated as well.
In Richmond, California, a town near San Francisco that hosted the biggest shipbuilding operation of the era, not only was housing segregated, but projects built explicitly for African Americans were located near the work site and featured shoddy materials intended to be temporary, whereas housing for white workers was built further inland with stronger materials.
White workers in Richmond were also eligible for the government’s “war guest” program, which leased rooms from private homeowners. The program also issued low-interest loans to homeowners for home remodels or expansions to accommodate lessees. These programs were for white homeowners and workers only.
Segregation in public housing continued after the war as well. For example, in Boston, the Mission Hill projects were as segregated as similar public institutions in the deep south. There were two Mission Hill projects: Mission Hill and Mission Hill Extension. In 1967, despite a city-government promise to desegregate the two entities, Mission Hill was still 97% white whereas Mission Hill Extension was 98% Black.
In Detroit, politicians like Mayor Edward Jeffries based their campaigns around stoking whites’ fears of integrated public housing. Jeffries’s campaign distributed leaflets in white neighborhoods that appeared to (1) come from his opponent and (2) address African Americans. The leaflets read, “Negroes can live anywhere with [his opponent] mayor.” Later, in 1949, Jeffries’s successor vetoed seven integrated projects because they would have been located in predominantly white neighborhoods.
San Francisco’s public housing authority operated similarly to Boston’s, building segregated projects during and after the war that reflected the surrounding community’s racial demographics. In 1949, under pressure from civil rights groups, the authority adopted a compromise policy: It would fill vacancies in future projects without consideration of race, but it would maintain currently segregated projects.
In 1952, when the authority tried to build a new segregated project, the NAACP took the authority to court. The authority’s chairman admitted during testimony that the agency was purposely trying to confine African Americans to particular locations in the city.
The judge ruled against the authority, writing that the segregationist policy violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Forced to provide integrated housing, the authority found a workaround: Rather than integrate already existing projects, it built three new ones for African Americans in seemingly “white” areas, but whose white residents were actually starting to leave. This effectively reinforced segregation in these neighborhoods. A more faithful following of the court ruling would have integrated the all-white projects in the white areas of the city, slowing the segregation of San Francisco overall.
The government’s support for segregation in public housing remained constant in the decade after the war. In 1949, spurred by thousands of returning GIs, Congress passed the Housing Act, which reestablished a federal housing program. To get the necessary votes from southern Democrats to pass the Act, northern Democrats had to strip the law of any integration amendments. The Act as passed permitted local authorities to segregate within or between projects.
The funds from the Housing Act went to establish segregated high-rise projects like Rosen Homes and Schuylkill Falls in Philadelphia, Van Dyke Houses in New York, and Robert Taylor and Cabrini Green Homes in Chicago. Many of these projects still exist (and remain segregated).
In 1952, the Truman administration attempted to reduce the inequities caused by segregated public housing by adopting a new rule: Local housing authorities receiving federal funds had to build Black-only housing projects in proportion to need. All too often vacancies in white-only projects were left unfilled—due to whites’ higher incomes and better treatment in the private real estate market—whereas long waiting lists for Black-only projects were common. The rule would force localities to build new units to satisfy existing need among African Americans.
However, with the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Republican Party’s adoption of a segregationist stance, any incrementalist steps toward a more equitable public housing policy were ended. The Eisenhower administration did away with a policy that mandated that housing for African Americans and whites be of equal quality. Likewise, they stopped enforcing Truman’s policy of addressing housing need, regardless of race.
By the 1960s, which inaugurated a booming private housing market for white families, public housing projects were predominantly occupied by African Americans. Because discrimination by race within the projects was no longer a factor—because whites no longer needed to live in public housing—civil rights groups turned their attention to where new builds were being located. They fought to prevent new housing projects from being situated in already segregated neighborhoods.
A key example of this shift occurred in Chicago. In the early 70s, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the City of Chicago all prevented new projects from being built in predominantly white areas. Civil rights groups sued, and a 1976 Supreme Court ruling, which upheld a lower court ruling, found the agencies’ behavior to be discriminatory and unconstitutional. The crux of the case was a particular policy that allowed individual ward aldermen to veto public housing in their areas. Aldermen in white areas, who didn’t want their areas integrated, vetoed housing units 99.5% of the time.
Similar discriminatory policies were followed in other cities, including Baltimore, Dallas, Miami, and Yonkers, NY.
From the postwar period on, the real estate lobby—a group of professionals hired to represent the real estate industry to members of Congress—helped speed the racial residential segregation of US cities.
First, it pressured Congress to lower the maximum income requirements for public-housing eligibility. As a result, many middle-class families, both white and black, were forced out of projects and into the housing market, and projects became the exclusive redoubt of the poor. These poor, due to discrimination in the labor market (see Chapter 7), were almost exclusively African American.
The repercussions of this shift were multiple. Poor residents of projects didn’t have the resources to maintain the projects themselves, and the government deprived them of the necessary subsidies. These residents also lacked the political strength to insist on better amenities. Thus, in addition to becoming monoracial, the quality of life in public housing declined precipitously.
By the early 1970s, public housing’s reputation as “rundown” and “crime-ridden”—as Richard Nixon testified in 1973—was widespread, a reputation that clung to its primary beneficiaries: Black Americans.
Of course, public housing wasn’t the only means by which government furthered racial residential segregation. Another lever to separate whites from Blacks was racial zoning laws—rules that prohibited Blacks from owning property in white areas (and vice versa). The following sections detail the history of racial zoning in the US and explain how discrimination continued even after racial zoning was declared unconstitutional.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, African Americans gained not only their physical freedom but also a slate of civil and political rights. Formerly enslaved people scattered across the country and, for about a decade, integrated towns and lived relatively unharassed.
These gains were quickly reversed, however, with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes as president in 1877. In order to secure his election, which was disputed, abolitionist Republicans cut a deal with racist southern Democrats: If the Democrats voted for the Republican Hayes, his administration would remove the federal troops occupying the South. (The federal troops were there to keep the peace and enforce the civil rights laws passed by Congress.) The removal of these troops marked the end of “Reconstruction,” the brief period of possibility when Black Americans might have achieved full equality with whites.
Once the federal protection of African Americans—and their new rights—ended, racist localities in the south and elsewhere adopted discriminatory “Jim Crow” laws and enforced those laws by terror. For example, in South Carolina, a white-supremacist group calling itself the “Red Shirts” massacred ten African Americans in the town of Hamburg to scare African Americans from voting. The Red Shirts’ leader, Benjamin Tillman, would serve 24 years in the US senate.
In Montana, where, by 1890, Black settlers were living in every county, African Americans were systematically cleared from white communities. In Glendive, Montana, a 1915 town policy banned African Americans from the town after dark. In Miles City, a significant Black population was forced to flee a violent mob. From 1910 to 2010, the African American population of Helena, the state capital, declined from 420 (3.4% of the city’s population) to 113 (<0.5% of the city’s population).
The premature end of Reconstruction affected federal agencies as well as localities. In the wake of the Civil War, African Americans rose to positions of prominence in the federal civil service, occasionally overseeing white office and manual workers alike.
This state of affairs came to an end with the election of white supremacist Woodrow Wilson in 1912. His administration mandated segregation in government offices—separate work areas, separate cafeterias, separate lavatories—and Black managers were barred from supervising white employees.
In states with smaller populations of African Americans, like Montana, racists could use violence to separate Blacks from whites. In states with Black populations too large simply to run out, racists officials used less frightening, but no less effective, means of marginalizing African Americans. Primary among them were racial zoning laws.
Simply put, racial zoning laws prohibited Blacks from owning homes on white blocks (and vice versa). Baltimore was the first American city to enact segregationist zoning policy, and other major cities soon followed suit, including Atlanta, Dallas, Charleston, New Orleans, and Louisville.
In 1917, in Buchanan v. Warley, the US Supreme Court ruled Louisville’s racial zoning law unconstitutional, thus invalidating scores of racial zoning laws across the country. Yet city officials continued to try to segregate their cities by race, using slight variations to evade the ruling. For example, in Richmond, Virginia, officials used a state law banning interracial marriage to adopt a new zoning law: A person of a particular race couldn’t live on a street where he or she couldn’t marry the street’s majority race. The US Supreme Court declared this law unconstitutional in 1930.
Similar gambits repeated themselves in West Palm Beach, Florida, and Birmingham, Alabama. Both cities had racial zoning laws on the books through the mid-twentieth century. In Kansas City and Norfolk, VA, discriminatory zoning practices persisted until the 1980s.
Elected officials who accepted Buchanan as settled law found other ways to segregate their cities: namely, economic zoning and industrial zoning.
The first way officials achieved racial residential segregation without explicitly mentioning race in their laws was through economic zoning—ordinances designed to limit neighborhoods to single-family homes affordable only to middle-income people. Because African Americans had been historically and systematically discriminated against in the job market (see Chapter 10), many were lower-income, and so could only afford housing in apartment buildings—structures that were banned by these ordinances. The result was that areas zoned for single-family homes stayed or became white while areas that allowed multiple-family dwellings stayed or became African American.
This strategy was blessed by the federal government. In 1921, the Harding administration convened an advisory committee to develop and disseminate a manual explaining economic zoning. Although race wasn’t mentioned in the manual, several members of the advisory committee were ardent segregationists; one would later say that economic zoning was necessary to maintain racial separation.
The federal government’s position was echoed by academic experts. The most prominent scholar of administrative law at the time argued that the best reason for economic zoning wasn’t the creation of single-family neighborhoods but rather the exclusion of African Americans.
Example: St. Louis
A particularly illustrative example of economic zoning occurred in St. Louis. In 1916, a planning engineer named Harland Bartholomew set about classifying all the structures in the city by type to ensure neighborhoods retained their character. For example, if a district mostly consisted of “single-family residential” or “industrial” properties, that district was coded accordingly, and future construction had to be consistent with the category Bartholomew had assigned it.
Although the project was superficially race-neutral, its purpose was, explicitly, to prevent African Americans from being able to move into predominantly white neighborhoods; Bartholomew even said himself that his goal was to keep “colored people” from moving into the “finer residential districts.”
Using these zoning laws, city planners consciously divided the city, allowing more affordable multi-family residences only near industrial areas and preventing those structures from being built in areas containing mostly single-family homes. The upshot was that African Americans were confined to slums—densely packed areas that either contained, or were adjacent to, polluting industry.
Economic Zoning and the Courts
Inevitably, economic zoning laws were tested in the courts. And, for the most part, they were upheld as nondiscriminatory. A 1926 Supreme Court ruling, occasioned by a zoning ordinance in a Cleveland suburb, held that the building of apartment houses in single-family areas was a nuisance. This ruling overturned a district court ruling that acknowledged economic zoning’s not-so-subtle racial purpose.
Even as late as 1977, the Supreme Court affirmed zoning ordinances that furthered de facto segregation. In that year, the Court upheld a zoning ordinance in a suburb of Chicago that outlawed multifamily residences everywhere but a single outlying commercial district. Despite the fact that the local resistance to multifamily residences had an explicitly racial motivation—letters published in local newspapers argued that the zoning ordinance would keep African Americans out of the neighborhood—the Court ruled the ordinance constitutional.
The second way officials segregated their cities in the wake of Buchanan was industrial zoning—the zoning of particular areas for noisome industrial plants and factories. City planners would zone areas near African American neighborhoods for industry, thereby reducing property values (because of the noise and pollution) and ghettoizing the African Americans that lived in those areas (due to their inability to sell their homes and move elsewhere).
The location of industry in or near African American neighborhoods had a second effect: turning those neighborhoods into slums. One example of this outcome can be found in Los Angeles. Although there was some industry in South Central LA in the 1940s—when the area became predominantly African American—it was still largely residential. But that same decade, the city began using “spot” rezoning ordinances to move automobile junkyards and commercial factories into the area. The result was the deterioration of the neighborhood.
The shortcoming of economic zoning—at least as far as segregationists were concerned—was that it was race-blind: Although many African American families were too poor to own single-family homes, not all were, and so if a Black family could afford to buy a single-family home, they could live in an economically zoned area.
Two policy objectives pursued by the federal government in the middle of the 20th century furthered the cause of segregation. Through agencies like the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the government (1) encouraged and financed the movement of white families out of urban centers and into suburban tracts and (2) withheld that support from African Americans, thereby consigning them to those urban centers.
The origins of the government’s discriminatory interventions in the private housing market can be found in the early twentieth century. Elected officials, wary of the communist takeover in Russia, theorized that the wider ownership of property would act as a bulwark against communism (because the more people who owned property, the more people who would be committed to the capitalist system that allowed for private property).
The type of property officials favored was homes. In 1917, the Department of Labor inaugurated the “Own-Your-Own-Home” campaign, which, through mass marketing, pressured renters to purchase homes as a “patriotic duty.”
This initiative was supplemented by the Better Homes in American organization. Nominally private, but headed by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover and guided by the Department of Labor, this organization praised homeownership as a mechanism for avoiding racial tension. That is, white families could avoid conflict with Black families by moving from integrated urban neighborhoods to single-family homes in suburbs.
A seminal moment in the federal government’s promotion of homeownership was the President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership. Convened by Hoover in the middle of the depression, the conference featured numerous racial dog whistles. For example, one member of the committee on financing homeownership recommended deed restrictions to prohibit “incompatible ownership occupancy”—a euphemism for African American buyers. Other committee members were architects of segregated neighborhoods in Atlanta and St. Louis.
However, Hoover’s efforts to promote homeownership were ultimately no match for the Depression, and when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, homeownership remained out of reach for most working- and middle-class families; even families who already owned their homes were having trouble making their mortgage payments.
Roosevelt responded to these challenges by creating two agencies, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). As a rule, both agencies systematically discriminated against Black Americans.
Designed to keep current homeowners in their homes, the HOLC bought mortgages in danger of default and reissued them to the holder with more generous terms. For example, in the ’30s, most mortgages required 50% down payments, and borrowers could only pay off interest, not principle, until the mortgage came due after 5–7 years. The HOLC, however, offered borrowers 15-year terms and amortized payment plans (amortized payments include part of the principle as well as interest). This meant owners could gain equity in their homes even as they paid off their loans.
Although the HOLC’s mission was altruistic, it still expected its beneficiaries to make the payments to which they were obligated. So, to assess the risk of particular borrowers, the agency hired local real estate agents to appraise properties and neighborhoods. These real estate agents, bound by a segregationist code of ethics that assumed African American residents equaled lower property values and so higher risk of default, produced color-coded maps of metropolitan areas for the government to use as a guide for evaluating homes. The agents used red for neighborhoods with any African American residents—no matter how well off—and green for all-white neighborhoods, a practice that would come to be known as “redlining.” Residents in green neighborhoods had an easier time securing loans and thus were able to cement the monoracial—that is, white—makeup of those neighborhoods.
One representative example of redlining took place in St. Louis. In 1940, an appraiser colored Ladue, a suburb of the city, green, because no foreigners or African Americans lived there. Lincoln Terrace, a suburb with comparable housing stock and equally middle-class residents, was colored red—because it was predominantly African American.
Although the HOLC did occasionally assist homeowners in redlined tracts, the redlined maps set a standard in the government—that certain neighborhoods were undesirable or problematic simply because they contained African Americans.
This standard was especially destructive when it came to the Federal Housing Administration (or “FHA”), whose mission was to increase homeownership by insuring new bank mortgages and facilitating more favorable terms (20% down; 20-year, amortized payment periods).
Like the HOLC, the FHA performed appraisals on the properties whose mortgages a bank wanted to insure. In 1935, the FHA issued its first manual to its appraisers; the manual explicitly referred to integration as leading to “instability” and a “reduction in values.” It also said that properties in neighborhoods that excluded “inharmonious” racial and ethnic groups should receive high ratings, thus increasing the likelihood homes in that neighborhood would be insured. The manual favored suburbs over urban areas, and it singled out integrated schools as a sign of lending risk. Subsequent editions of the manual, right up until 1952—i.e., throughout and after World War II—maintained similar guidelines.
The effects of this racialized policy were significant. For one, it prevented Black families from moving to the suburbs, where many white families were relocating. For example, in 1941, a real estate agent in New Jersey tried to sell twelve homes in a development called Fanwood to African American families. All the families had good credit, and local banks were willing to finance their purchase if the FHA would insure the mortgages. But the FHA declined, writing that no loans would be given to “colored developments.” Today, Fanwood’s African American population is about 5% while the county in which it’s located is 25% Black.
In accounts of racial residential segregation, the discrimination against individual homeowners—by agencies like the HOLC and FHA—gets most of the attention. But another, arguably more pernicious, strategy of segregation was federal agencies’ subsidization of white-only developments.
The process went like this: A developer would submit plans for a subdivision to the FHA. Included in these plans would be descriptions of the construction materials, zoning restrictions, and other specifications; but, most importantly, they would include commitments not to sell to African Americans. Once the FHA approved the plans, developers could secure financing from private banks with relative ease, because these banks knew that the mortgages they would eventually issue would be insured.
Levittown, the massive subdivision built for WWII veterans on Long Island, New York, provides a clear example of this policy (though similar examples can be found elsewhere, including in Oak Forest in Houston, Texas, and Prairie Village, in Kansas City). Although African American workers helped build Levittown, they were ineligible to own homes there. One African American veteran, whose family’s business trucked building materials into Levittown, tried to purchase a home there and was refused. He ended up having to take out an uninsured mortgage in a predominantly Black area nearby.
(The FHA was so instrumental in the building of Levitt’s subdivisions that in 1960, a New Jersey court deemed his project in that state public housing—and so constitutionally obligated to accept buyers of any race.)
Simply put, much of the racial residential segregation in the US today is the result of a collaboration between public and private entities in the middle of the 20th century. A 1973 report from the US Commission on Civil Rights concluded as much, finding that “government and private industry came together to create a system of residential segregation.”
Years before the FHA adopted explicitly discriminatory policies that furthered racial residential segregation, private homeowners and developers regularly included racist “restrictive covenants” with deeds to particular properties. These covenants were ignored, then propped up, by the federal government, and so constitute a further incidence of de jure segregation.
Restrictive covenants comprised the obligations a purchaser of a property was agreeing to when he or she assumed ownership. They included stipulations concerning the color(s) the home could be painted or what kinds of foliage an owner could plant. They also frequently included a clause that forbade the owner from selling or renting to an African American. In the 20s, it was not uncommon to find among the list of prohibitions—of constructing a slaughterhouse or smithy on the premises, of producing noxious odors through manufacturing—a line limiting the property to “people of the Caucasian race” (with the notable exception, of course, of domestic workers). Often all the homes in a particular area would feature racist restrictive covenants, thus limiting that area to whites only.
The problem with restrictive covenants, at least to property owners that wanted to keep their neighborhoods segregated, was that they were difficult to enforce if a particular property owner wanted to sell to an African American. For example, if a white homeowner wanted to violate the covenant and sell property to an African American, there was little his or her segregationist neighbors—who would be the ones “hurt” by the sale—could do about it. So, to get around this wrinkle in the law, developers began making it a requirement for purchasing their properties that the purchaser join a community association—an association whose bylaws often included a whites-only clause.
One example of this strategy can be found in the Country Club District in Kansas City. In the 20s, a developer named JC Nichols built 6,000 homes and 160 apartment buildings for a total of 35,000 residents. In order to own property in the district, residents had to join the district’s association, whose rules forbade sales or rentals to African Americans. Similar arrangements could be found across the country: in locales as diverse as Boston, New York City, Chicago, Detroit, and Seattle.
As one might expect given the policies of the HOLC and FHA, the federal government condoned—and even helped enforce—racial restrictive covenants.
A key precedent was a 1926 Supreme Court case that found racial restrictive covenants constitutional, on the grounds that they were private contracts between consenting citizens. This gave subsequent administrations legal standing to promote segregation by covenant. For example, during Hoover’s President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, officials urged developers to adopt “appropriate restrictions” to maintain property values. The model restrictions they referred to included provisions prohibiting sale or occupancy to African Americans.
It was during the New Deal, however, that the promotion of restrictive covenants reached its zenith. Not only did FHA appraisers award high ratings to neighborhoods with low or null African American residency, but they also awarded high ratings to properties with restrictive covenants. In fact, the FHA’s 1936 underwriting manual explicitly stated that deeds for insured properties should include (1) racial restrictive covenants and (2) provisions for neighborhood enforcement of the covenants (for example, community association bylaws).
The FHA also encouraged builders to use restrictive covenants. For example, when the government commissioned developer David Bohannon to build Rollingwood, an all-white subdivision near Richmond, CA, the government required Bohannon to include racial restrictive covenants with the deeds to the properties.
In 1948, in Shelley v. Kraemer, the US Supreme Court overturned its 1926 ruling and decided that racial restrictive covenants were indeed unconstitutional. The 6-0 majority reasoned that, because covenants had to be enforced by courts and courts were barred from participating in segregation, racial restrictive covenants were unenforceable. (The court was down to six justices because three recused themselves—because those three possessed deeds with racial restrictive covenants.)
However, for the next 14 years, the FHA simply ignored the ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer, justifying its continued support of restrictive covenants by appealing to a “fact” of integrated neighborhoods: that the presence of African Americans reduced property values and so constituted a greater risk of loan default. It wasn’t until President John F. Kennedy issued an order forbidding the FHA to contribute to racial discrimination that the practice ended.
Courts, too, tended to undercut the spirit of the ruling. In a state supreme court case in Missouri, the court found that, though an African American purchaser of a restricted home couldn’t be evicted, the seller could be sued by their neighbors for damages. In Oklahoma state supreme court, the court ruled that both the seller and the buyer could be held liable.
These circumventions of Shelley ceased in 1953, when the US Supreme Court expressly barred both evictions and the recoupment of damages in cases involving restrictive covenants. Still, the Court didn’t take the step of banning racial restrictive covenants outright. That ruling would have to wait until 1972.
In addition to its direct contributions to racial residential segregation—by curtailing African Americans’ ability to purchase homes outside redlined districts and supporting whites’ efforts to resist integration—the FHA also indirectly contributed to residential segregation by enabling discriminatory private real estate practices.
One such practice was “blockbusting.” To “blockbust” a neighborhood, real estate agents would gin up fear among white residents of a white neighborhood that African Americans were about to move in. Because it was the position of both the FHA and the real estate industry that the presence of African Americans in a neighborhood meant declining property values, whites could be persuaded to sell their homes to these real estate agents at discounted prices. The agents would then turn around and sell these properties to African Americans at a premium. The arrival of more African Americans would persuade more white residents to sell—so-called “white flight”—and the cycle would continue until the neighborhood was fully African American.
Sometimes, agents wouldn’t even have to actually sell a home to an African American to catalyze white flight. For example, agents were known to pay African American women to walk through white neighborhoods with their babies in carriages, or African American men to drive through neighborhoods with the radio turned up, to nudge whites toward selling.
The irony of blockbusting is that statistical evidence shows African Americans actually raised property values. Because the FHA refused to insure their mortgages, African American families tended to have to pay higher prices than whites to move into comparable housing, thereby raising the average value of a home in whatever neighborhood they’d chosen.
In truth, the FHA’s position that African Americans reduced property values was a self-fulfilling prophecy: Although average values initially rose with the arrival of African American families, blockbusting would drive average prices back down due to whites’ selling at discounts.
Another private-real-estate practice that disproportionately harmed African Americans was the “contract sale.” Under the terms of a contract sale, the deed to the home would transfer to the buyer after fifteen or twenty years, but only if the buyer made every monthly payment over the term of the contract. If the buyer didn’t, they could be evicted immediately—because the payments didn’t earn the buyer equity in the home. Contract buying was common in many cities, but arguably none more so than Chicago. In the 1960s, approximately 85% of property purchased by African Americans was on contract.
The repercussions of these burdensome payments—which were inflated by discriminatory real estate agents—were many and varied. They forced buyers to work multiple jobs or take in boarders to earn enough just to make their payments (forget about maintenance). The additional boarders created overcrowding in homes and local schools—so much so that many schools had to switch to morning shifts and evening shifts. The shifts gave rise to gangs, which gave rise to criminality, which caused whites to move out of integrated neighborhoods even quicker. Eventually, the neighborhood would deteriorate to the point of becoming a slum.
If the FHA had insured African American mortgages, they could have received home loans from reputable financial institutions on reasonable terms. Instead, African American home buyers were forced to deal with predatory real estate firms who took advantage of Blacks’ limited options.
Government’s contribution to racial residential segregation didn’t end with federal and local housing programs or the FHA. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), as well as an array of regulator agencies, also exacerbated segregation by neglecting their constitutional obligations not to promote prejudice or discrimination.
The IRS contributed to racial residential segregation by failing to follow its own rules against promoting discrimination. One important area in which it did this was in the determination of tax-exempt status for US entities. IRS rules obligate the agency to withhold tax exemptions from organizations that countermand official public policy or promote prejudice and discrimination. Yet, throughout the middle of the 20th century, the IRS regularly conferred tax-exempt status on entities that contributed to racial residential segregation.
For instance, tax-exempt religious entities like churches and synagogues regularly promoted segregationist policies. In the 1940s, priests in North Philadelphia, Buffalo, New York, and Los Angeles spearheaded efforts to keep African Americans from moving into their predominantly white parishes. In LA, the pastor of the Wilshire Presbyterian Church even personally sued a Black war veteran to keep him from moving into the neighborhood. Yet his church’s tax-exemption was never in danger.
Religious organizations weren’t the only tax-exempt parties pushing segregation—colleges and universities were guilty of the practice as well. For example, on the South Side of Chicago, the University of Chicago subsidized local property owners so that they could keep the area segregated. From 1933 to 1947, the University covered $100,000 in legal fees for the defense of restrictive covenants and the eviction of recently arrived African Americans.
As with the IRS, a number of regulatory agencies also contributed to segregation, especially in the banking sector. Throughout the middle of the previous century, government regulators frequently allowed the firms over which they had oversight to discriminate against African Americans and further racial residential segregation.
One example of this tacit support of segregation concerns private banks. An array of entities and agencies—the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and others—regulate and support private financial institutions. These public entities could have withheld support or otherwise reprimanded institutions that were discriminating against African American consumers. But they didn’t.
For example, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, which chartered and insured savings and loan associations from the inception of the New Deal, did not oppose financial institutions denying mortgages to African Americans (that is, until 1961, when the US Commission on Civil Rights elicited a promise from the agency to stop its discriminatory behavior). Other important agencies like the Treasury Department and FDIC also took a hands-off approach, arguing that banks were making economic rather than racial decisions, and so they were powerless to intervene.
The upshot was de jure racial segregation at one remove: Public entities constitutionally bound to promote civil rights among private institutions systematically failed to do so.
US regulators’ enablement of racial residential segregation didn’t end with the civil rights battles of the 50s and 60s. In fact, by failing to police the predatory and discriminatory lending practices of mortgage providers in the early 2000s—practices that would eventually lead to the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession—regulatory agencies tacitly consigned many Black borrowers to default and entrenchment in ghettos.
The story begins with so-called “subprime” mortgages—loans designed for low-income borrowers that featured exploitative features like misleadingly low initial interest rates, high late-payment penalties, and unethical financial incentives for brokers. Although subprime mortgages were designed for borrowers who met certain financial criteria, they ended up being sold to African Americans at much higher rates than white purchasers.
For example, among borrowers who refinanced in 2000, low-income African Americans were twice as likely to have subprime loans as white Americans, and higher-income African Americans were three times as likely to have subprime mortgages as whites. By 2006, whether they qualified for more conventional loans or not, African American mortgagors in general were three times as likely to have subprime mortgages.
The agency responsible for regulating predatory lending was the Federal Reserve. Although a 2005 survey conducted by the Federal Reserve itself confirmed that predatory lenders were targeting African Americans, the agency did nothing to stop the practice. It was only in 2010, after the economy had collapsed and oversight of mortgage lenders had transferred to a different agency, that the Federal Reserve’s neglect came to light.
In the aftermath of the crisis, which resulted in a tsunami of mortgage defaults and foreclosures, some severely affected cities sued banks that had sold subprime mortgages. In one such suit, brought by the city of Memphis against Wells Fargo, affidavits from bank officials showed that subprime mortgages were colloquially referred to as “ghetto loans.”
The effect of the financial crisis on Black families has been significant. Those who lost a house have had to move in with friends or relatives, creating greater crowding in already-overcrowded neighborhoods. Having a default and foreclosure on a credit report makes purchasing a new home even more difficult. And banks are selling foreclosed properties at inflated prices and with punitive terms, echoing the exploitation of not only subprime loans but also the “contract buying” of houses in the 1950s.
In short, the upshot of the crisis has been (1) the greater concentration of African Americans in low-income neighborhoods and (2) a reduction in means to escape those neighborhoods.
As much as federal policy contributed to racial residential segregation, the small-scale efforts by state and municipal governments to keep their communities segregated, when considered in their totality, also clearly point to a system of de jure segregation in the United States.
One of the strategies localities used was zoning laws (as discussed in Chapter 3): reserving neighborhoods for single-family residences or industry, thereby funneling African Americans into overcrowded multi-family structures and loud or toxic areas. Others include:
One approach pursued by local officials to keep white communities segregated was to condemn privately owned land in white areas that was slated for African American families.
An illustrative example occurred in Creve Coeur, a white suburb of St. Louis, in 1959. An African American family, fully permitted, had already begun building their home when the community discovered their new neighbors would be Black. The community formed a committee and raised contributions to buy the property from the Black owners. When the Black owners refused to sell, the city condemned the property and reserved it for recreational use (for example, parkland). The African American family sued to retain their property, but a Missouri appeals court found that the motives for condemnation, if for public purposes, couldn’t be examined by the courts.
White community groups and public officials weren’t only concerned with excluding African Americans from certain residential areas—they also made concerted efforts to remove them from urban downtowns and business districts as well. To reserve these economically important areas for whites, officials practiced “slum clearance”: the condemnation and demolition of dilapidated structures and the forced relocation of their current residents.
In theory, slum clearance could have been socially beneficial. If the substandard structures had been replaced with quality, affordable, and—most importantly—integrated housing, it would have helped mitigate some of the problems facing these Black neighborhoods. However, officials pursued slum clearance quite differently: African Americans were displaced from their neighborhoods and left to the whims of the private real estate market (which, as we saw in Chapter 5, systematically disadvantaged African Americans).
A primary strategy of slum clearance was the initiation of infrastructure projects, especially the federal interstate highway system. In fact, from its very inception, the interstate system was seen as a means to destroy “unsightly” and “unsanitary” areas. Concrete companies, road-builders organizations, and research institutes touted highway construction as a way to eliminate blighted neighborhoods.
One such elimination took place in Hamtramck, Michigan. A predominantly white and Polish neighborhood, Hamtramck officials used federal urban renewal funds to raze the area’s African American homes for, first, an annex to a local Chrysler automobile plant, then the Chrysler Expressway (I-75). Despite a court’s finding twelve years later that the removal had been discriminatory, most of the African Americans who had been displaced ended up in Detroit ghettos.
Prior to Brown v. Board of Ed., the famous 1954 Supreme Court case ending the doctrine of “separate but equal” in US public schools, officials used the location of segregated public schools as another means to segregate their localities. The strategy was straightforward: Place schools designated for African Americans in African American areas. This meant African Americans living in districts with whites-only schools would have to relocate, essentially creating segregated areas.
One prominent example of this policy concerns Austin, TX. In the city’s 1928 “Master Plan,” it evaded the ruling in Buchanan (which ruled housing segregation on the basis of race unconstitutional) by placing a variety of Black-only services, including public schools, on the city’s Eastside. The effect was significant: For example, in 1930, the Black population of the city’s Wheatsville neighborhood was 16%; by 1950, after the segregated school for African Americans there was shuttered, it was 1%. Wheatsville essentially became a whites-only neighborhood.
(City officials furnished African Americans moving to the Eastside with other attractions, including a library and a new park. But shortly after the neighborhood became majority African American, services like street paving and sewer maintenance declined.)
Similar tactics were used in cities as far-flung as Indianapolis, Houston, and Atlanta. In Raleigh, NC, city planners in the ’20s moved all segregated schools for African Americans to the southeastern part of the city, forcing the middle-class Black residents of northeastern neighborhoods to relocate. In Houston, the school board used a map with “Race Restriction Areas” as a guide for school placements.
In addition to the various city-planning methods just discussed, officials also leveraged law enforcement—or, rather, the selective enforcement of the law—to entrench racial residential segregation. When Black families attempting to integrate white neighborhoods were subjected to vicious harassment, elected officials and law enforcement officers often tolerated—and sometimes actively encouraged—that harassment.
It’s important to note that, in general, government can’t be held responsible for the intimidation tactics—verbal abuse, property damage, and, ultimately, physical violence—used by white supremacists to defend segregation. However, when public authorities either turn a blind eye or, worse, encourage that intimidation, it amounts to an unconstitutional infringement of African Americans’ rights and de jure segregation.
Some of the earliest instances of state-sanctioned abuse of African Americans for the purposes of segregation occurred in Chicago. In the early 1900s, white gangs would throw rocks through the windows of African Americans’ homes to coerce them into moving. In the early 20s, whites firebombed African American homes on the border between white and Black areas. Despite two deaths resulting from these firebombings, Chicago law enforcement neither made arrests nor pursued prosecutions.
The violence in Chicago continued into the postwar era. Between 1944 and mid-1946, there were 46 attacks on African American homes that lay on the border between white and Black neighborhoods. Again, despite firebombings that resulted in deaths, no arrests were made.
On one famous occasion in 1951, the police even led the intimidation. When Harvey Clark, an African American veteran, and his family attempted to rent a home in Cicero, an all-white Chicago suburb, the police threatened him with arrest as well as physical harm. When, with the help of the NAACP, he obtained a court injunction ordering the police to protect rather than harass him, the police ignored it, allowing a mob of 4,000 to destroy his home and set his belongings ablaze without an arrest.
It took the national guard to restore order in Cicero. But even though 118 rioters were eventually arrested, none were indicted. In fact, the only parties charged were Harvey Clark, the real estate agent who found him the apartment, his landlady, and his NAACP attorney—for inciting a riot and conspiring to reduce property values.
Another instance of state-sanctioned violence involving a Black veteran occurred in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1954. A white friend of a Black navy veteran purchased a house in a white neighborhood and signed the deed over to the veteran. The house was subsequently vandalized—mobs threw rocks and fired bullets through the windows—and, eventually, dynamited. Despite the fact that the dynamiter confessed to the crime, he wasn’t charged. In fact, the only person charged throughout the terror campaign was the white friend who’d purchased the house initially. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for “sedition.”
In Detroit, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, firebombings, cross burnings, and other acts of violence were commonplace when African Americans attempted to integrate white areas. In LA, there were over 100 acts of arson and vandalism perpetrated against African Americans between 1950 and 1965. Only one led to an arrest and prosecution (and this only because the case was taken out of the hands of local authorities).
One might assume that this sort of state-sanctioned thuggery was confined to the pre-Civil Rights era. Not so. In 1985, an African American couple who’d moved into Sylvania, an exclusively white suburb of Louisville, had their house firebombed twice. They sued a police officer for being a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and, under oath, the officer testified that 20 of the 40 Klan members known to him were also police officers. In the same testimony, the officer noted that his superiors not only knew that officers were Klan members but also condoned it (as long as officers’ membership was kept secret).
Furthermore, between 1985 and 1986, well after the disestablishment of “separate but equal,” the Southern Poverty Law Center found that only 25% of acts of violence against African American integrators were prosecuted.
Commentators inclined to argue against the fact of de jure segregation often point to other explanations for that segregation. One such explanation they put forward is the well-documented disparity between African Americans’ and whites’ incomes. According to this argument, racial residential segregation isn’t the product of purposeful governmental policy but rather African Americans’ lower incomes—if African Americans had higher earnings, they could live wherever they want, including areas where whites predominate.
However, this argument fails to account for the public policies whose express intent was to depress African American wages. In other words, Black Americans’ lower average incomes and wealth were too the product of purposeful government (in)action—and so part of the structure of de jure segregation.
In the following sections, we’ll trace the long history of labor market discrimination against African Americans before turning to the specific actions taken by entities like labor unions and the Fair Employment Practices Committee.
The story of African Americans’ unfair treatment in the American labor market begins in the aftermath of the Civil War. Although famously promised “40 acres and a mule” by the Union at the conclusion of the war, many former enslaved people ended up sharecroppers—essentially indentured servants on the land of their former owners. Sharecroppers worked portions of the plantation in exchange for a cut of the crop, but absurdly punitive rental and living costs meant that African Americans often ended up in debt to the plantation owner.
Law enforcement contributed to the peonage of newly freed enslaved people by arresting them for petty offenses and then, when they couldn’t afford fines or court fees, selling them to business owners. For example, between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of WWII, more than 100,000 African American prisoners were working in US mines and factories.
With the coming of the New Deal came an array of programs intended to mitigate the effects of the Great Depression, among them Social Security, employment programs, minimum wage protections, and greater recognition of labor unions. Because FDR needed southern Democrats’ votes to pass New Deal legislation, he allowed exclusions into the laws that specifically prevented African Americans from reaping their benefits. For example, the labor union and wage protections included in the laws didn’t apply to workers in agriculture and domestic service, two industries whose workers were predominantly African American. The result was stagnant wages for a majority of African Americans.
In fact, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the agency responsible for implementing and enforcing the new wage protections, excluded African Americans with brutal efficiency. For example, within the category of industrial work—which featured both white and Black workers—the NRA denied wage-and-hours standards to canning, citrus packing, and cotton ginning workers. These workers were predominantly African American.
And, due to pressure from the American Federal of Labor (AFL), the Wagner Act—which established collective bargaining rights for private-sector employees—was amended to allow unions legal recognition even if they excluded African Americans from membership. Some newly recognized unions used their power to have African American workers fired and replaced with whites.
Unions continued to be a vehicle for labor-market discrimination during World War II. With the co-option of heavy industry for the war effort came management–union partnerships that, more often than not, were explicitly discriminatory.
For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, powerful unions like the Marine Laborers Union (30,000 members) and the Steamfitters Union (17,000 members) negotiated agreements with companies so that only union-referred workers could be hired. These unions then refused to refer African Americans.
Other unions, when forced by labor demand to admit African Americans, simply ensured that their African American members didn’t enjoy the same benefits as their white members. The Boilermakers union, for example, established auxiliary chapters for African Americans. Members of the auxiliaries paid full dues but couldn’t file grievances or vote in union elections. They were also prohibited from foreman positions if they would be supervising whites.
Bending to pressure from civil rights icon A. Philip Randolph, president of the Pullman car porters’ union, FDR signed an executive order in 1941 prohibiting discrimination by organizations involved in war production. The order established the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), an agency designed to police discrimination in the war industries and empowered to recommend the cancellation of contracts in the case of discrimination.
Unfortunately, the FEPC failed repeatedly to stop or remedy discrimination among firms engaged in the war effort. One problem it faced was poor management. The FEPC’s first chairman was removed after he praised discrimination in defense plants (although he remained a member of the committee). Another issue was simple ineffectiveness. The Roosevelt administration’s first priority was winning the war, and it tended to look the other way when essential firms balked at the FEPC’s mandate.
For example, when Lockheed and Boeing were forced to hire African Americans for high-earning positions due to demand for their products, the firms offered Black workers lower compensation and fewer benefits than their white counterparts without repercussions from the FEPC. Likewise, Standard Steel in Kansas City refused the FEPC’s recommendations, emphasizing that it had never hired an African American in its 25 years of existence and wasn’t about to start.
After the war, although some unions voluntarily desegregated, others continued to exclude African Americans and nevertheless maintain their NLRB certification. Even after John F. Kennedy banned unions from excluding African Americans in 1962, some continued to discriminate: The most powerful US Postal Service union, for example, in certain areas denied African Americans membership into the 1970s.
Because African Americans were shut out of unions during the war and after, they missed out on the high wages negotiated for union workers in industries like shipbuilding and housing construction. Although the NLRB ceased to certify white-only unions in 1964, no effort was made to compensate previously excluded Black workers. In short, even after African American workers were allowed to join unions, they were already well behind their white counterparts economically.
(Discrimination in unions—and failure on the part of the NLRB to catch it—persists to this day. In 2015, the New York City sheet metal workers union was ordered to pay its African American members $13 million because, from 1991 to 2006, Black union members had received fewer job assignments than their white peers.)
Another post-war federal program whose discriminatory practices contributed to racial economic disparities was the GI Bill. Intended to provide returning WWII veterans with financial support for housing, education, and job training, the GI Bill’s benefits were frequently denied to African Americans. One reason for this was that dishonorably discharged soldiers were ineligible for benefits, and Black soldiers were unfairly and disproportionately dishonorably discharged, sometimes for protesting against segregation.
Depressed incomes among African Americans, due to the labor market distortions described above, led to racial residential segregation (because African Americans didn’t have the funds to relocate into white or integrated areas). But racial residential segregation also led to depressed incomes.
One way segregation resulted in depressed incomes was through price gouging. Because African Americans were confined to particular neighborhoods, landlords in those neighborhoods were able to exploit their tenants. A common strategy was to subdivide single-family apartments into five or even six units, and then charge each tenant an excessively high rent. With nowhere else to go, tenants were forced to devote large proportions of their income to rent.
In Chicago, examples abound of exploitation by landlords. In 1946, a landlord divided a two-story building with a 540-square-foot footprint into six cubicles per floor. Each cubicle was rented to a single family at inflated prices, resulting in a total rent for the property that rivaled a luxury apartment on Chicago’s tony “Gold Coast.” At another property, after a fire killed ten Black tenants, an inquest revealed that a white tenant paying $15 a month had been evicted so that the landlord could charge a Black family $60 a month.
Another way segregation led to depressed incomes was through increased transportation costs. When a firm relocated from an integrated area to an area segregated for white residents only, Black workers were forced to commute, incurring fuel and/or public transportation costs and risking termination on account of absenteeism (due to transportation delays).
For example, in 1955, Ford moved its Edgewater, NJ, plant to Mahwah, NJ. Mahwah zoning ordinances prevented African American workers from moving into the town, so they were forced to commute from places like Newark and New York City. By 1970, Black workers’ annual transportation costs ran between $1,000–$1,500—10% of their gross earnings.
Aside from labour discrimination, one of the most insidious ways African Americans were deprived of wealth in this era was through discriminatory property assessments. A municipality determines a property owner’s property tax by multiplying the assessed value of the property by a municipally established tax rate. Historical tax assessment evidence suggests that properties owned by African Americans were frequently assessed at higher values relative to their market values than properties owned by whites. The effect of this disparity was that African Americans shouldered a higher tax burden than whites in a given municipality.
For example, a study of property assessments in Boston in 1962 found that properties in Roxbury, a predominantly African American neighborhood, were assessed at 68% of market values whereas properties in West Roxbury, a predominantly white neighborhood, were assessed at 41%. A 1979 study of assessments in Chicago found that assessments in Bridgeport, an all-white and fiercely segregationist neighborhood, were 50% lower than the legally prescribed ratio; in nearby North Lawndale, a predominantly African American neighborhood, assessments were 200% higher than the legal ratio.
The disproportionate tax burden borne by African Americans had an array of ramifications, including property distress due to a lack of funds for maintenance and eviction due to tax liability.
With the enactment of the Fair Housing Act in April 1968—a vote spurred by the tragedy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination—the private segregationist practices described above finally became explicitly illegal. (Of course, the public practices had been unconstitutional since the conclusion of the Civil War.)
However, unlike other Civil-Rights-Era statutes that protected African Americans’ right to vote or patronize any restaurant of their choosing—statutes whose benefits were felt immediately—the Fair Housing Act was powerless to rectify the decades of housing discrimination that preceded its passage. That is to say, despite African Americans’ being able to live wherever they want, racial residential segregation has persisted due to the US’s history of de jure segregation.
Racial residential segregation is difficult to remedy for a number of reasons, but three in particular: the unaffordability of quality housing, the unintended consequences of race-blind public polity, and flawed social programs.
The Federal Housing Act enshrines in law the ability for African Americans to live wherever they can afford to. But historical discrimination in labor and housing markets has created intergenerational wealth and income disadvantages among African Americans, meaning they can’t afford to live where they please.
For example, the median family income of whites is currently around $60,000. For African Americans, it’s $37,000. And when it comes to wealth, the distribution is even more unequal: Whereas the median household wealth of white families is around $134,000, the median household wealth of Black families $11,000. In 1989, the most recent year for which inheritance data is available, only 6% of African Americans inherited wealth, and among those that did, the average was $42,000. Among whites, 24% inherited wealth, with an average inheritance of $145,000.
African Americans are also less economically mobile than white Americans. While the average American born into the bottom income quintile has a 30% of making it to the middle quintile, Black Americans only have a 26% chance. In terms of wealth mobility, white children have a 42% chance of rising above the bottom quintile; Black children have a less than 25% chance of rising.
Epitomizing the cyclical nature of racial residential segregation, one of the reasons African Americans are less upwardly mobile than whites is their de facto confinement to poor neighborhoods. Poorer neighborhoods lack the services and opportunities—sufficiently staffed and equipped public schools, greengrocers, unpolluted air, safe streets—that put children on an upward trajectory.
For example, one 2013 study found that African Americans between the ages of 13 and 28 are now ten times more likely to live in poor neighborhoods than their white counterparts. The same study found that 67% of Black families who, a generation ago, lived in the poorest 25% of US neighborhoods continue to live in such neighborhoods. Whites who lived in such neighborhoods have fared much better: Only 40% of those families still live in the poorest neighborhoods.
Making matters worse, the value of homes in predominantly white neighborhoods has appreciated considerably in the last 50 or so years. This development has a dual effect: It makes homes in those neighborhoods even more unattainable for African Americans and it entrenches the intergenerational wealth gap between Blacks and whites (because white parents pass on their appreciated homes to their heirs).
Homes in and around the famous Levittown subdivision provide a stark example of these effects. In 1948, a one-bedroom in Levittown—which excluded African Americans—went for about $75,000 in today’s dollars. Today, that home—even without major remodels or updates—sells for about $350,000.
Compare this with nearby Lakeview, NY, a predominantly African American town. In 1948, a comparable one-bedroom house cost approximately $75,000 in today’s dollars, but today, that same one-bedroom house is only worth $90,000–$120,000. In short, Black families denied homes in Levittown missed out on 80% of the wealth generation enjoyed by Levittown’s white families.
Although many policies passed in the 20th century had no explicitly discriminatory purpose, the fact that segregation was already entrenched meant that these race-neutral policies exacerbated housing inequality.
The most salient example is the mortgage interest deduction, the tax break given to homeowners. Because homeownership for many African Americans was unattainable—due to the de jure policies of the FHA and other agencies, among other bodies—African Americans were largely excluded from this government subsidy.
Another race-neutral policy that has had a discriminatory effect on African Americans is the government’s support of private transportation, the US highway system in particular. One material impact of new highways was the displacement of African American and integrated communities to make way for their construction. But highways also favored suburban whites, who had the means to access cars, and disadvantaged African Americans, who relied on public transportation. While (predominantly white) suburbanites were able to commute to their jobs in the city centers, (predominantly Black) urbanites couldn’t reach jobs in the suburbs.
Baltimore’s transportation policies illustrate this disparity. From 1975 to 2015, suburbanites resisted the construction of rail lines that would link downtown Baltimore to the suburbs. A Johns Hopkins study of a failed initiative in 1975 found that the suburbanites believed the train would allow “inner-city” African Americans to travel to their towns and rob their homes.
Likewise, in 2015, Maryland’s governor nixed a rail-link plan that would connect (heavily African American) downtown Baltimore with a (largely white) suburb and diverted those funds to highway maintenance. The NAACP filed a civil rights complaint with the US Department of Transportation, alleging the decision discriminated against African Americans. In 2017, the Trump administration closed the complaint without explanation.
Federal and local governments have enacted programs to help low-income families secure affordable housing. Unfortunately, these programs tend to redouble segregation rather than remedy it.
One example of such a program is the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. This program incentivizes developers to build affordable units for low-income families by offering tax breaks on projects that include those units.
Although the program has the potential to integrate neighborhoods in theory—if developers built these affordable units in high-income (and thus traditionally white) areas—in practice it has failed to remedy racial residential segregation. This is for two reasons:
A 2005 study of tax-credit projects nationwide found that approximately 75% of the low-income units were placed in neighborhoods with poverty rates of at least 20%.
A second key example of counterproductive public policy is the Housing Choice Voucher program, commonly known as “Section 8.” This program subsidizes low-income families’ rental payments. The theory is that housing vouchers will supplement low-income families’ rent budgets enough to allow them to live in high-income areas.
Unfortunately, landlords in better-off areas often refuse housing vouchers, and voucher amounts are typically too meager to enable families to move to high-income areas. For example, in 2010, over half of the families with dependent children who used housing vouchers rented in areas with a poverty rate of over 20%.
Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis and the site of intense protests against police brutality in 2014, exemplifies the failures of public policy to desegregate neighborhoods and improve the financial situation of African Americans.
Ferguson’s story begins with “urban renewal” projects—redevelopment projects and highway expansions—in St. Louis. The upshot of these projects was the razing of low-income urban neighborhoods and the displacement of their residents. When federal tax credits and housing vouchers weren’t sufficient to allow these displaced residents to move to middle-class—and predominantly white—towns in St. Louis’s metropolitan area, the displaced were forced to relocate to “inner-ring” suburbs like Ferguson. As the low-income, predominantly minority, population in these inner-ring suburbs grew, the white residents moved out, and all the problems of racial residential segregation arose once more.
If outlawing discrimination in the private sector and enacting public policies to help low-income families find housing have failed to remedy racial residential segregation, what solution is there? Because undoing racial residential segregation—and the intergenerational damage it has done to African American wellbeing—is a massive challenge, Rothstein is loath to offer remedies for fear they will inevitably come up short. Nevertheless, he proposes some initial steps that may, in time, lead to a more integrated, and thus more equitable, society. Those steps are:
First and foremost, Americans must realize that racial residential segregation isn’t the result of personal choices or the random outcomes of the housing and labor markets. Rather, it is the legacy of explicitly discriminatory public policy that flouted the US Constitution and US laws. Once elected officials, policymakers, and the public at large acknowledge that federal, state, and local governments were responsible for racial residential segregation, it opens the door for those same governments to enact bold changes to rectify past injustices.
There have been efforts in this direction. In 1970, HUD secretary George Romney created a program called “Open Communities.” The program’s goal was to further the integration of white neighborhoods by withholding federal funds from suburbs that hadn’t repealed their discriminatory zoning laws. Unfortunately, resistance to the program among Republican voters was fierce, and President Nixon eventually forced Romney to repudiate the program.
In 2015, the Obama administration latched onto a minor provision of the 1968 Fair Housing Act to require localities to assess their degree of segregation and, if high, propose policies to address it. Implicit in the new rule was the possibility that federal funds might be withheld from communities that didn’t address segregation. (Shortform note: This rule lacked support when the Trump administration assumed the reins of government, and HUD secretary for the Trump administration, Ben Carson, terminated the rule in 2018.)
In addition to public acknowledgment of the government’s role in segregating the US, the US’s education system must also incorporate the facts of residential segregation into its curricula. Before the US can move forward with the far-reaching policies necessary to rectify racial residential segregation, its citizens must have a shared understanding of how the country was segregated.
For example, one of the most widely used American history textbooks in US high schools only contains one sentence on racial residential segregation in the northern states, and that sentence is passively constructed to obscure the causes of the segregation. (The same textbook, in its units on New Deal programs like the HOLC and FHA, fails to mention that those programs redlined urban centers and systematically excluded African Americans from receiving benefits.)
Similar obfuscations—and, in some cases, outright falsehoods—feature in other widely used textbooks, with the result that young Americans grow up believing segregation was a natural or mysterious process rather than a conscious and purposeful goal of official policy.
Next, people must understand that segregation hurts everyone. Social science literature has shown that whites who live, work, and learn in exclusively white spaces experience both psychological and economic hardship. It’s a mere misconception that whites remain unaffected by racial residential segregation—that only African Americans confined to racial ghettos are harmed.
For example, studies have shown that when people are grouped with others from similar backgrounds, they are less creative and more prone to error and groupthink. And political scientists have shown that racial polarization leads to political preferences among whites that actually harm their own interests. For example, leaders whose policies harm white working-class voters will nevertheless attract those voters with racial appeals.
Although politically infeasible, a simple way to further the integration of white American neighborhoods is subsidizing the purchase of homes in those neighborhoods by African Americans.
One way to subsidize Black families is for the government to purchase homes at market rates in predominantly white areas segregated by FHA policy and sell them to African Americans at historically pegged prices. An example would be to purchase the next 15% of homes in Levittown—because the New York metropolitan area is 15% Black—and sell those homes to African American purchasers at, say, $75,000 (the price their grandparents would have paid for the home).
Another strategy would be for the federal government to fund middle-class Black families to allow them to move to predominantly white neighborhoods. Middle-class Black areas like Prince George’s County, Maryland, and Calumet Heights, Illinois, border distressed areas that present risks for the children in those families, and so those families, given the financial means, may be inclined to move to high-income areas.
Of course, no African American family should be forced to integrate an area against their will. Even with a financial incentive, some middle-class Black families may resist moving to white areas for fear of encountering harassment, or just social exclusion. Some ways predominantly white areas can attract African American families, subsidies or no, is by creating community welcoming committees and advertising new listings with agents who work with African American homebuyers.
A relatively blunt instrument to undo racial residential segregation is to ban zoning ordinances that prohibit multi-family homes and require large lots (ordinances that were often racially motivated in the first place).
Another possibility is to withhold the mortgage interest deduction from homeowners in punitively zoned areas or areas that aren’t taking steps to accommodate low- and middle-income families. For example, in 1993, a UNC law professor proposed the “Fair Share Act,” which would require state and local governments to integrate municipalities both racially and economically. If public officials balked at the requirements, homeowners’ mortgage interest and property tax deductions would be reduced by 10%, and the penalty would increase with each year the Act’s requirements weren’t met.
In addition to mitigating the effects of exclusionary zoning laws, states and municipalities can enact inclusionary zoning laws. These laws actively promote the construction of affordable housing and the attraction of low- and middle-income families (many of whom, as noted in Chapter 10, are African American).
Examples of inclusionary zoning statutes can be found both at the state and county levels. In New Jersey, state law stipulates that suburbs that don’t contain their “fair share” of affordable housing—based on the percentage of low-income residents in a given metropolitan area—must allow developers to build multi-unit housing.
In Montgomery County, Maryland, the local government legislated inclusion at two levels: Developers are required to reserve 12%–15% of units for families of moderate means, and then the public housing authority purchases a third of those units for the lowest-income renters.
As discussed in Chapter 11, all too often, the Section 8 program reinforces segregation due to insufficient voucher amounts and discriminatory landlords. But, with the right reforms, the program could be a powerful tool for integration.
One key reform would be to increase voucher amounts. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has already settled civil rights lawsuits by providing more generous subsidies for low-income families, and these families have been able to settle in low-poverty and predominantly white areas. One way to achieve this reform more widely is to calculate voucher amounts based on the cost of living in particular areas: that is, rather than calculate the voucher amount based on a metropolis as a whole—which will skew the amount downward—HUD could provide larger amounts for housing in higher-cost neighborhoods and lower amounts for housing in lower-cost neighborhoods.
Another option would be to increase Section 8’s overall funding. Whereas the property tax and mortgage interest deductions are given to anyone who owns a home, Section 8’s funding is limited and applicants are often denied vouchers due to the program’s running out of money. (In 2015, six million qualified people went without vouchers.)
There are also more targeted reforms that could help promote integration. For instance, Section 8 vouchers are commonly distributed by city housing authorities and limited to housing within the city limits. Vouchers with a greater geographical reach could help integrate suburbs and exurbs.
In the ten years Rothstein researched de jure racial residential segregation, he unsurprisingly encountered a number of questions about his findings. In the book’s final chapter, he addresses some of these questions.
This question ignores the many voices, belonging to both whites and African Americans, decrying segregation when it was most entrenched. For example, in 1914, after Woodrow Wilson began segregating federal offices, Christian leaders condemned the move. Later, officials in FDR’s administration like Harold Ickes and Frances Perkins desegregated their departments’ cafeterias, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the president, was the first white person to join the Washington, D.C., chapter of the NAACP. During WWII, while the Boilermakers union excluded African Americans, the United Auto Workers accepted them.
The fact that there were dissenting voices at the time belies the claim that segregation was just “the way of the world” during the early and mid-twentieth century. And so, when we judge public officials who promoted segregation now, we’re not doing so according to “present-day” attitudes but rather principles that existed while segregation was being pursued. However, in the end, the general attitudes of the public in the early-to-mid twentieth century is immaterial: Segregation violated African Americans’ constitutional rights.
The short answer is that it depends on your state: Some states make it difficult and/or expensive to strike clauses from deeds.
That said, the best option might not be to strike the clause from the deed but to amend the deed to recognize both the educational value and moral repugnancy of the clause. For example, you might include language that acknowledges the clause is unenforceable but, nevertheless, disavows it as a remnant of a shameful period in American history.
You should do so for the same reason you celebrate Independence Day—that is, as American citizens, we accept the benefits of sacrifices we did not make (for example, in the Revolutionary War) and the responsibility to correct wrongs we did not commit.
The idea isn’t to force integration but rather to incentivize it. And the way one does this is by not only providing financial support but also making predominantly white communities more welcoming to African American residents.
A major reason African American families decline to move to white areas is increased discrimination: Police in these areas are prone to stop African Americans more frequently than whites, and schools are more likely to punish Black children than white ones for minor infractions. School and police reform is essential to the larger project of nationwide integration.
However, to achieve a truly integrated society, African Americans must also take some risks. That is, some Black families will have to be pioneers, integrating white neighborhoods with the support of public policy.
Integration does indeed confer benefits on African Americans and whites alike, but it would be a mistake to conceive of it as a “win-win” without cost.
For example, residents of predominantly white, middle-class areas should be prepared for a rise in petty crime as low-income African American families are funded to move in. These residents should also be prepared for the possibility that their property will decline in value (due to the enduring legacy of redlining, blockbusting, and white flight).
Financial sacrifices will also be necessary. Taxes will likely go up to fund more generous housing vouchers and developer incentives. Schools will need to hire more special-education teachers to bring new arrivals from under-resourced schools up to speed.
Simply put, historical racial residential segregation is too complex and significant an injustice to be remedied without a greater sacrifice on the part of the privileged.
It’s true that these politicians, who enacted some of the most progressive policies in US history, also entrenched racial residential segregation. The reason was twofold: Political expediency and, at the very least, a tolerance for bigotry.
For example, in the mid-twentieth century, southerners committed to white supremacy were still a major faction in the Democratic party. To appease this faction, Roosevelt and Truman had to include racial exclusions in their policies.
Roosevelt and Truman also tolerated racism among their staff. For instance, Roosevelt twice ran for president with John Nance Garner, a segregationist from Texas, as his vice president.
Some of this bigotry was a product of the homogeneousness of the mid-century political elite. At the time, leaders were almost exclusively male, white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. These “WASPs” often had little concern for members of other races and ethnicities.
The idea that African Americans don’t strive for success—or simply choose antisocial or criminal behaviors like drug dealing rather than legal employment—isn’t born out by the facts. It also elides the obstacles arrayed against African Americans due to discrimination.
First, despite some pejorative stereotypes, African Americans succeed academically. In 2014, 21% of African American men and 24% of African American women between the ages of 25–29 were college graduates, and 90% had finished high school.
Second, many ambitious Black men are permanently disadvantaged both economically and socially by having criminal records—records that, in many cases, they didn’t deserve in the first place. For example, although young Black men are statistically less likely to use or sell drugs than their white counterparts, they’re more likely to be arrested, sentenced, and jailed for those activities (Shortform note: For more information on the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans, read Shortform’s summary of The New Jim Crow). In Ferguson, Missouri, police stopped Black motorists far more frequently than white ones, yet found illegal drugs on white drivers more often than Black ones.
Despite the American notion that anyone can rejoin our community after having “paid their debt to society,” released prisoners typically exist as a permanent underclass. For example, many formerly incarcerated people are not only discriminated against in the private labor market, but they’re also deprived of the right to vote, live in public housing, and access food stamps. Because African Americans make up a disproportionate number of the formerly incarcerated, they feel these effects disproportionately as well.
Third, the difficulties of African American children and teens are often due to health factors beyond their control. For example, due to the second-order repercussions of segregation—overcrowding, dilapidated housing stock, poor maintenance, and nonexistent services—many Black children have suffered irreparable brain damage from lead poisoning. Studies have found lead levels can predict risky behaviors among teenagers and violent or criminal behavior among young adults.
Historically, it was working- and middle-class two-parent Black families that were discriminated against due to de jure segregation. But even now, the greater incidence of single motherhood among African American women can be attributed to the relative lack of marriageable partners. The mechanism for this lack is twofold:
Whereas single white mothers often have the advantage of their historical privilege, which places them in a position to afford child care and other kinds of assistance, Black women don’t have the same options. It would be cruel to slow-walk integration because of African American women’s parenting skills, when society offers them no support.
They are, but The Color of Law is concerned with exposing the de jure racial residential segregation of African Americans. The latter-day segregation of Hispanic, Asian, and other communities, for the most part, isn’t the product of an explicit governmental policy but rather narrow economic opportunity and meager social support. That is, the neighborhoods that tend to become identified with one or another underrepresented race or ethnicity have inexpensive housing that can accommodate recent unskilled immigrants.
That said, Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans have endured de jure segregation (for example, in Texas), and Jews, the Irish, and others were targets of restrictive covenants. However, these injustices were never as widespread, total, or long-lasting as the discrimination against African Americans. For example, Mexicans were often considered “caucasian” for the purposes of restrictive covenants.
This question fails to acknowledge that the US’s de jure segregation of African Americans in the twentieth century was also a form of social engineering—one that met (and meets) with precious few objections. While there may be risks to policies that further integration, the righting of a profound and unconstitutional wrong takes precedence.
Indeed, gentrification can cause great hardship for the low-income families displaced. The solution is to reform zoning ordinances in both urban and suburban areas to ensure an adequate amount of low-income housing. That way, as areas gentrify and property values rise, low-income families can remain to enjoy the economic and social benefits of integration or find an affordable place to live in another area.
Although Rothstein prefers the term “remedies” to reparations—simply because, to his ear, “reparations” connotes a one-time cash transfer rather than a suite of national policies—he has no objection to his proposals being called reparations. As long as the objective is the undoing of racial residential segregation and making African Americans whole, he isn’t concerned with the terminology.
Whatever its ideological makeup, the Supreme Court often tracks the general consensus. If it’s accepted among a large portion of the populace that de jure segregation is a fact that needs to be remedied—and this acceptance is indicated by the election of officials who support remedies—then the Supreme Court would, potentially, let broad legislative action stand.
Section 2 of the 13th Amendment empowers Congress to abolish the “badges and incidents of slavery.” Few ramifications of slavery have been as harmful as racial residential segregation.
Reflect on racial residential segregation and its possible remedies.
Rothstein describes numerous strategies public officials and private citizens used to force African Americans to live separately from white Americans. Which of these strategies was the most surprising or disturbing to you? Why?
Is racial residential segregation present in your hometown? If so, how has The Color of Law changed your understanding of that segregation? If not, how do you think your hometown avoided the methods of segregation Rothstein describes?
Of the remedies to racial residential segregation Rothstein proposes, which do you think is most likely to succeed? Why?
Are there any potential solutions Rothstein missed? Use the space below to describe a possible solution of your own.