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.