PDF Summary:The Color Of Law, by Richard Rothstein
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Widely acclaimed upon its publication in 2017, The Color of Law demonstrates 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 and random chance. From the conclusion of the Civil War through to the present day, federal, state, and local governments have enacted laws to confine African Americans to particular areas and prevent them from moving into others. These policies have had a profound and lasting impact on African Americans, affecting their educational and job opportunities, economic well-being, and physical health.
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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.
Contract Sales
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.
The Failures of the IRS and Other Government Agencies
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.
The Role of Localities
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.
Slum Clearance
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.
School Placement
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%.
State-Sanctioned Violence
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.
Labor Market Discrimination and Residential Segregation
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.
Enduring Challenges
Racial residential segregation is difficult to reverse for three reasons in particular:
1) Housing Unaffordability
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.
2) Unintended Consequences of Race-Blind Policy
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.
3) Flawed Social Programs
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.
Potential Remedies
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.
Acknowledging De Jure Segregation
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.
Financing Integration Directly
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.
Banning Exclusionary Zoning and Implementing Inclusionary Zoning
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.
Reforming Section 8
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.)
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PDF Summary Shortform Introduction
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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.
PDF Summary Introduction
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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.
The Denial of De Jure Segregation
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...
PDF Summary Chapter 1: Public Housing as a Segregating Agent
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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...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 2: How Racial Zoning Laws Segregated Cities
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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).
Effects on the Federal Government
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.
Buchanan v. Warley and the Persistence of Racial Zoning Laws
In states with smaller populations...
PDF Summary Chapter 3: How the Federal Government Worsened Residential Segregation
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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.
How the New Deal Excluded Black Americans
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.
The Home Owners Loan Corporation
Designed to...
PDF Summary Chapter 4: The Public—Private Push to Segregate
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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.
The Government Steps in—to Protect Restrictive Covenants
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...
PDF Summary Chapter 5: How the IRS and Regulatory Agencies Furthered Segregation
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How Regulators Enabled Segregation
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...
PDF Summary Chapter 6: The Cooperation of Localities
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The Harms of Slum Clearance
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...
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PDF Summary Chapter 7: Unequal Incomes and Racial Residential Segregation
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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...
PDF Summary Chapter 8: The Lasting Effects of Historical Segregation
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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.
The Vicious Cycle of Racial Residential Segregation
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...
PDF Summary Chapter 9: What Is to Be Done?
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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.)
Educating US Youth About Racial Residential Segregation
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...
PDF Summary Postscript: Frequently Asked Questions
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Question #3: When my family immigrated to America, I wasn’t even born, and segregation was already in force. Why should I sacrifice to repair the damage it did?
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.
Question #4: I’m an African American, and I’m perfectly happy living among other African Americans. Why are you trying to force African Americans to live in integrated communities?
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...