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Summary
Summary
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.
Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.
As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post-World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. "The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book" (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein's invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.
Author Notes
Richard Rothstein , the author of The Color of Law and father to co-author Leah Rothstein, has written many books and articles on educational policy and racial inequality. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Rothstein's comprehensive and engrossing book reveals just how the U.S. arrived at the "systematic racial segregation we find in metropolitan areas today," focusing in particular on the role of government. While remaining cognizant of recent changes in legislation and implementation, Rothstein is keenly alert to the continuing effects of past practices. He leads the reader through Jim Crow laws, sundown towns, restrictive covenants, blockbusting, law enforcement complicity, and subprime loans. The book touches on the Federal Housing Administration and the creation of public housing projects, explaining how these were transformed into a "warehousing system for the poor." Rothstein also notes the impact of Woodrow Wilson's racist hiring policies, the New Deal-era Fair Labor Standards that excluded "industries in which African Americans predominated, like agriculture," and the exclusion of African-American workers from the construction trades, making clear how directly government contributed to segregation in labor. And Rothstein shows exactly why a simplistic North/South polarization lacks substance, using copious examples from both regions. This compassionate and scholarly diagnosis of past policies and prescription for our current racial maladies shines a bright light on some shadowy spaces. 13 illus. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Recent demonstrations in cities across America against the murder of African Americans by police returned the question of segregation in housing to the fore. While the term de facto segregation is often used to assert that this is the result of private decisions or personal acts of discrimination, Rothstein argues that the real history of segregation is primarily that of explicit or de jure government policy, with personal actions secondary. From wartime public housing to the FHA refusing to insure mortgages for African Americans and many cases in between, government policy at all levels violated the Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments mandating equal protections. Ghettos were deliberately created by official policy. Rothstein provides plenty of evidence to support each example, including interviews, court cases, law codes, and newspapers, along with secondary sources on each aspect of government discrimination. There is an extensive FAQ section for further discussion. This is essential reading for anyone interested in social justice, poverty, American history, and race relations, and its narrative nonfiction style will also draw general readers. This is a timely work that should find a place in the current national discussion.--Pekoll, James Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE ONE DEVICE: The Secret History of the iPhone, by Brian Merchant. (Little, Brown, $28.) This book dispels some of the fog that surrounds the iPhone, making visible the human labor that creates it - including its development and production and the origin of some of the technologies it uses. MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, by Jonathan Taplin. (Little, Brown, $29.) A tech pioneer argues that the radical libertarianism and greed of many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have undermined the communal idealism of the early internet. A FINE MESS: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System, by T. R. Reid. (Penguin Press, $27.) Reid approaches the subject of tax reform with a wry voice and a light touch. A world tour of tax systems reveals other countries' efforts to redesign their systems. THE SEEDS OF LIFE: From Aristotle to da Vinci, From Sharks' Teeth to Frogs' Pants, the Long and Strange Quest to Discover Where Babies Come From, by Edward Dolnick. (Basic Books, $28.) Not until 1875 was the process of human reproduction fully understood. This is a fascinating record of the quest. A GOOD COUNTRY, by Laleh Khadivi. (Bloomsbury, $27.) The son of prosperous Iranian-American immigrants, searching for his identity, becomes alienated and eventually radicalized. This powerful novel is marked by moving prose, vivid characters and a balance between compassion and merciless realism. THE COLOR OF LAW: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein. (Liveright, $27.95.) Most residential segregation in America is de jure - that is, it derives from policy or law, which was supported by virtually every presidential administration since the 19th century. This powerful and disturbing account is also a call to arms. THE HEIRS, by Susan Rieger. (Crown, $26.) When a wealthy New York lawyer dies, his wife and five sons learn he may have had a second, secret life and another family. The sons want the truth; their mother is not so sure. With grace and finesse, this polished novel explores their varying responses. FLY ME, by Daniel Riley. (Little, Brown, $27.) In this debut novel, set in Southern California in the '70s, a Vassar-grad stewardess becomes involved in a drug smuggling operation while her husband quotes Pynchon. Riley writes about the era with captivating authority. HOW TO BE HUMAN, by Paula Cocozza. (Metropolitan/Holt, $26.) A lonely woman becomes involved with a fox in her London garden in this hypnotic first novel. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Choice Review
Rothstein has given one of the most thorough examinations of race and federal housing policy to date. In this work, he examines the racial geography of cities set in motion through de jure segregation, the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments that promote patterns of socioeconomic discrimination, even currently in public policy. He traces these patterns beginning in the 1920s with racial zoning, all the way to current-day patterns of economic and political disenfranchisement. Most valuable, however, is that this book offers up effective policy recommendations that would begin to address decades of housing policy wrongs. Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels. --Leslie T Grover, Southern University and A&M College
Kirkus Review
How government policies have perpetuated the caste system of slavery.Rothstein (Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right, 2008, etc.), a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, mounts a hard-hitting argument condemning federal, state, and local governments for devising laws that enforce segregation. Underserved, blighted African-American communities, he argues persuasively, are not the result only of personal prejudice or market forces but of unconstitutional "racially explicit government policies to segregate our metropolitan areas." The author cites cases and decisions regarding public housing, racial zoning, mortgage lending, the enforcement of housing covenants, fearmongering to incite white flight, planning for highways and roads, IRS tax-exemption status for institutions that promote segregation, state-sanctioned violence, and the effects of segregation on schools and income disparity. Although he sometimes refers to particular individuals, his main focus is on law and public policy affecting neighborhoods. In 1949, for example, when a proposed integration amendment to a public housing law threatened to be defeated by Southern Democrats, liberals caved, voting for a program that stipulated segregation rather than giving up the possibility of much-needed public housing. State supreme courts consistently upheld restrictive real estate covenants that forbade sales of homes to African-Americans, claiming that such "private agreements" did not violate the Constitution. Even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants did, indeed, violate the 14th Amendment, the Federal Housing Administration continued to deny mortgage insurance to homes in integrated neighborhoods. After World War II, the GI Bill denied African-Americans mortgage subsidies and opportunities for education and training that were available to whites. Rothstein considers the insidious effects of housing segregation on economic mobility, infrastructure, and politics. "Racial polarization," he asserts, bolsters leaders who appeal to white voters' "sense of racial entitlement" and who foster intolerance. An informed, important expos of the nation's institutionalized racism that would have been even more reader-friendly with the inclusion of more individual case histories. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Conventional narratives about segregation in 21st-century America hold that persistent racial disparities are a product of de facto segregation-the summation of individual preferences-rather than de jure segregation enforced (unconstitutionally) by law. Legal scholar Rothstein (NAACP Legal Defense Fund; Univ. of Calif., Berkeley) disabuses us of this "too-comfortable notion" that the state has not incentivised, and in some cases explicitly required, discrimination against African Americans. Rather than being an accident of privately held prejudice, Rothstein's work argues that segregation across the long 20th century was a product of federal, state, and local housing and land-use policies that directly and intentionally led to the suppression of black family wealth and well-being. To support his argument, he draws on extensive historical research that documents government efforts to create and enforce segregation. Each chapter focuses on a particular tactic such as public housing, racial covenants, or state-sanctioned violence. The final section calls on citizens to accept collective responsibility and remedy state wrongs through public policy. VERDICT This indictment of government-sponsored segregation is a timely work that will find broad readership among those asking "How did we arrive here?" and "What next?"-Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. vii |
| 1 If San Francisco, then Everywhere? | p. 3 |
| 2 Public Housing, Black Ghettos | p. 17 |
| 3 Racial Zoning | p. 39 |
| 4 "Own Your Own Home" | p. 59 |
| 5 Private Agreements, Government Enforcement | p. 77 |
| 6 White Flight | p. 93 |
| 7 IRS Support and Compliant Regulators | p. 101 |
| 8 Local Tactics | p. 115 |
| 9 State-Sanctioned Violence | p. 139 |
| 10 Suppressed Incomes | p. 153 |
| 11 Looking Forward, Looking Back | p. 177 |
| 12 Considering Fixes | p. 195 |
| Epilogue | p. 215 |
| Appendix: Frequently Asked Questions | p. 219 |
| Author's Note and Acknowledgments | p. 241 |
| Notes | p. 253 |
| Bibliography | p. 293 |
| Photograph Credits | p. 321 |
| Index | p. 325 |
