He offers several ways to remediate the problem in his twelfth chapter, “Considering Fixes.” Most of these strategies have to do with shoring up Sect ion 8 housing vouchers and expanding tax-advantaged building programs. Rothstein gives more in Color of Law than a look at government fingerprints all over our segregated landscape. Rothstein has unearthed such a devastating trove of evidence implicating the government in perpetuating Jim Crow practices that no serious reader could chalk up the segregated character of American housing to racist individuals or to some Black yearning to live separately from Whites. It would not be an overstatement to say that driving African Americans away was more or less official policy. Obviously, municipalities didn’t have much of a moral investment in protecting the rights of Blacks to live where they pleased. Additionally, local police were known to simply stand by as mobs of neighbors showed up to harass Black homebuyers.

Highway projects for example had a tendency to run through Black neighborhoods, displacing thousands of homeowners. Many of the methods of discouraging mixed race neighborhoods were more devious means than written policies. Before the project can even start the FHA made startup financing contingent on the developer agreeing in advance to restrict sales only to Whites.Īs the country moved away from Jim Crow and school segregation at the beginning of the Civil Rights era, housing continued sort buyers by race. The federal government’s role in making such projects Whites-only is somewhat concealed. This graphic shows the money flow for the mass post-war housing project such as the Levittown neighborhoods that were constructed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Not surprisingly, Blacks ended up in inferior structures sometimes miles away from plants and yards. This rush to step up production opened the door for government bureaucrats to assign Whites to some neighborhoods and Blacks to others. Workers flooded into temporary living quarters around production centers like the shipyards in Richmond, California. The two world wars brought a need for war manufacturing and an ample workforce. This was only formally ended in 1968 by the US Supreme Court This was done through local laws, bureaucratic policy, and law enforcement. The Color of Law documents how housing discrimination perpetuated spacial confinement or the ghettoization of American cities during a period between the late 1860’s and the 1950s. This means that formerly enslaved people and their descendants suffered informal and formal denial of their rights as freed people. Unfortunately, the badges and incidents of slavery didn’t end for a long time.

The 13th Amendment supposedly ended slavery.

The book color of law