Chapter 1
The Legacy of Government-Sanctioned Segregation
When the 2014 Ferguson riots erupted following Michael Brown's death, most Americans viewed the city's racial segregation as simply an unfortunate product of private choices-white flight, income disparities, or personal preferences. This comforting narrative allows us to avoid confronting an uncomfortable truth: America's residential segregation wasn't accidental but deliberately engineered through explicit government policies. Richard Rothstein's groundbreaking work has transformed our understanding of housing segregation, earning praise from Ta-Nehisi Coates as "the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation." The book has become required reading in universities nationwide and was named one of the ten best books of the year by both the New York Times and Publishers Weekly, with Barack Obama citing it as essential reading for understanding America's racial divide.
Chapter 2
Uncovering America's Forgotten History of Housing Discrimination
The San Francisco Bay Area, despite its progressive reputation, perfectly illustrates how government deliberately created segregation nationwide. Consider Richmond, California, where the Black population exploded from just 270 to 14,000 during World War II. The federal government responded by building explicitly segregated public housing-placing poorly constructed "temporary" units for African Americans near railroad tracks and industrial areas, while creating sturdier housing for whites inland, closer to established white neighborhoods.
Frank Stevenson's journey exemplifies this experience. Born in 1924 in Louisiana, he migrated to Richmond at nineteen seeking better opportunities. Despite securing work at Ford's military production plant and demonstrating remarkable initiative by learning multiple jobs during breaks, Stevenson faced insurmountable housing barriers. When Ford relocated to Milpitas in 1953, he confronted another obstacle: the newly incorporated town banned apartments and allowed only single-family homes in subdivisions where federal housing policies prohibited sales to Black families. Stevenson organized a carpool of nine workers who made the hour-plus commute daily for twenty years. Only in 1970, after his daughters finished high school, could he finally buy his first home in Richmond's previously whites-only section.
Even acclaimed novelist Wallace Stegner, who joined Stanford University after his 1943 bestseller "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," encountered how deeply entrenched government segregation policies were. Stegner helped lead a cooperative of middle-class families-professors, teachers, city workers, carpenters, nurses-who pooled resources to purchase a 260-acre ranch near Stanford for 400 homes. Their plans collapsed when the Federal Housing Administration refused to insure loans because three of the 150 families were African American. The cooperative disbanded, selling to a private developer whose FHA agreement explicitly barred sales to African Americans, creating the whites-only "Ladera" subdivision that still exists today.
In 1954, when one white homeowner in East Palo Alto sold to a Black family, real estate interests orchestrated systematic "blockbusting." They established offices specifically to frighten white homeowners with warnings of a "Negro invasion" and plummeting property values, purchased homes at discount prices from panicked white sellers, then advertised them with "Colored Buyers!" headlines, selling to desperate African Americans at inflated prices. Within six years, East Palo Alto became 82 percent Black, with overcrowded conditions as homeowners took in renters to afford their inflated mortgages.
What's most striking is that Northern California had few African Americans before World War II-the government wasn't following existing patterns but actively imposing segregation where it hadn't previously existed.
Chapter 3
How Public Housing Created Black Ghettos
Public housing, originally built for working- and lower-middle-class white families, became a powerful tool for concentrating African Americans in urban ghettos. Unlike today's image of crime-ridden high-rises, early public housing was attractive, unsubsidized, and selective-with strict tenant requirements including marriage licenses, sufficient furniture, and good housekeeping habits.
The transformation from desirable middle-class housing to segregated slums began during World War I, when the federal government's first civilian housing projects explicitly excluded African Americans, even in northern industrial centers where they worked in significant numbers. This forced Black workers into overcrowded slums and sometimes imposed segregation where it hadn't previously existed.
Under Roosevelt's New Deal, the Public Works Administration institutionalized segregation nationwide. Despite being led by Harold Ickes, a former NAACP branch president, the PWA established a "neighborhood composition rule" that entrenched racial separation. In Atlanta, the first PWA project (Techwood Homes) demolished an integrated neighborhood called the Flats, displacing 1,600 families-nearly one-third African American-to create 604 units for whites only.
Similar patterns played out across America. In St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Toledo, and New York, the PWA imposed segregation on previously mixed communities. Even when neighborhoods already had both races living side by side, the government built separate projects for whites (often with superior amenities) and Blacks, hardening boundaries that had been more fluid.
After World War II, President Truman proposed new public housing to address the severe housing shortage for returning veterans. When conservatives attempted to defeat the bill by adding an anti-segregation amendment, liberal senators faced a difficult choice: support segregated housing or no housing at all. They chose the former, arguing it would benefit Black Americans despite its flaws. The 1949 Housing Act passed without integration requirements, leading to massive segregated high-rise projects nationwide like Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes and St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe towers.
By the 1960s, civil rights groups shifted focus from fighting discriminatory tenant assignments to opposing the placement of predominantly Black projects in already-segregated neighborhoods. In 1976, the Supreme Court found that Chicago Housing Authority, with federal complicity, had unconstitutionally selected sites to maintain segregation. Despite this ruling, authorities simply stopped building altogether. By the time legal battles concluded, most suitable land in white neighborhoods had been developed, rendering integration efforts futile.
The real estate industry fiercely opposed public housing from the beginning. Though initially unsuccessful when private enterprise couldn't meet housing needs during the Depression and World War II, the lobby later succeeded in restricting public housing to only the poorest families. New regulations established strict upper-income limits, forcing out middle-class families who would have preferred to stay. This policy transformation made integration impossible while warehousing the poor. Projects rapidly deteriorated as maintenance workers became ineligible to live where they worked, maintenance budgets shrank without middle-class rents, and politically empowered residents who could demand adequate funding disappeared.
Chapter 4
Racial Zoning: Creating Segregation Through Local Laws
American progress toward greater freedom and equality isn't always linear-sometimes we move dramatically backward. Residential integration declined steadily from 1880 to the mid-twentieth century and has largely stalled since.
After the Civil War, freed slaves dispersed throughout America seeking work and escaping southern violence. For decades, many lived peacefully across the country. But in 1877, the disputed Hayes-Tilden presidential election was resolved with Republicans agreeing to withdraw federal troops protecting Black citizens in the South. This ended Reconstruction, allowing the former slaveholding aristocracy to renew subjugation through Jim Crow laws, voting restrictions, segregation, and violence.
As Jim Crow intensified in the South, fear and hatred of African Americans spread nationwide. Even in seemingly unlikely places like Montana, where Black citizens had thrived after the Civil War, they were systematically expelled from predominantly white communities with public officials' support. Helena's Black population peaked at 420 (3.4%) in 1910, fell to 131 by 1930, and just 45 by 1970.
The imposition of African American subordination eventually reached the federal government. When Woodrow Wilson became president in 1912, he and his cabinet approved government office segregation in 1913. Curtains separated Black and white clerical workers, separate cafeterias and basement toilets were created for African Americans, and Black supervisors were demoted to ensure no African American oversaw white employees.
In this era of southern terror against African Americans and their expulsion from small towns nationwide, public officials became newly dedicated to separating white urban neighborhoods from Black residents. Baltimore pioneered racial zoning in 1910, prohibiting African Americans from buying homes on majority-white blocks and vice versa. Many southern and border cities followed with similar ordinances. In 1917, the Supreme Court overturned Louisville's racial zoning ordinance in Buchanan v. Warley, citing "freedom of contract" rather than equal protection.
After this ruling, federal officials enthusiastically promoted economic zoning that could accomplish racial segregation without explicit racial language. Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover organized an Advisory Committee on Zoning that distributed thousands of copies of zoning manuals nationwide. Though race wasn't explicitly mentioned, the committee consisted of outspoken segregationists who candidly observed that preventing "the coming of colored people into a district" was a more powerful motivation for zoning than creating single-family districts.
In 1926, the Supreme Court upheld zoning that prohibited apartments in single-family neighborhoods, enabling countless suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning that prevented low-income families-disproportionately African American-from residing in white communities, often with thinly veiled racial motivations.
The practice of using industrial and toxic waste zoning to turn African American neighborhoods into slums extended far beyond St. Louis. Government studies confirmed that nationwide, commercial waste facilities were more likely to be found near African American than white residential areas. Race was such a strong predictor of hazardous waste facility locations that there was only a one-in-10,000 chance of this distribution occurring randomly.
Zoning thus served two purposes: keeping African Americans out of white neighborhoods through economic restrictions, and protecting white neighborhoods from industrial contamination by forcing polluting businesses to locate near Black residences-creating both exclusive white suburbs and urban African American slums.
Chapter 5
"Own Your Own Home": Federal Programs for Whites Only
Exclusionary zoning alone couldn't fully enforce segregation, as it couldn't prevent middle-class African Americans from moving into white neighborhoods. To solve this "problem," the federal government developed additional tools with explicit racial intent to make it nearly impossible for African Americans to follow whites to the suburbs.
The federal government's racial exclusion policy began during the Wilson administration. Fearing communism after the 1917 Russian revolution, officials promoted homeownership to invest white Americans in capitalism. The Labor Department launched an "Own-Your-Own-Home" campaign, distributing buttons to schoolchildren and pamphlets declaring homeownership a "patriotic duty." Their promotional materials exclusively featured white families.
Despite fourteen years of federal homeownership promotion, little progress had been made by Roosevelt's 1933 inauguration. Traditional mortgages remained prohibitively expensive, requiring 50% down payments and full repayment within 5-7 years. Roosevelt's New Deal created the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to rescue defaulting homeowners by restructuring mortgages with longer terms. To assess risk, HOLC hired local real estate agents who created color-coded maps rating neighborhoods-with Black neighborhoods automatically "redlined" as highest risk regardless of their actual middle-class status. In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration was established to insure bank mortgages, but explicitly made racial segregation an official requirement of its program.
Pam Harris's family history reveals how these policies shaped America's racial divisions. Her great-uncle Leroy Mereday, born in South Carolina after the Red Shirt massacre, became a skilled blacksmith who caught the attention of August Belmont II during WWI. His brother Robert played in a USO band during WWII, then got hired at Grumman Aircraft, saved money, and started a successful trucking business that contracted with Levitt's massive housing developments. Despite his middle-class income, neither Robert nor any African Americans could buy Levittown homes. His nephew Vince, a WWII navy veteran who delivered materials to Levittown, was explicitly refused when he applied. Instead, he bought in predominantly Black Lakeview, paying a substantial down payment and higher interest rates compared to the no-down-payment, low-interest VA mortgages available to white Levittowners.
After World War II, the VA joined the FHA in guaranteeing mortgages, adopting identical discriminatory policies. By 1950, they insured half of all new mortgages nationwide. The FHA's greatest impact on segregation came from financing entire white-only suburbs. Mass-production builders like Levitt created massive developments with FHA/VA financing contingent on racial exclusion. Levitt's revolutionary 17,500-home development offered affordable houses with no down payment, but relied entirely on government backing-as Levitt himself testified to Congress, "We are 100 percent dependent on Government."
St. Louis builder Charles Vatterott's experience demonstrates the FHA's stark racial policies. After constructing the FHA-backed St. Ann subdivision for white Catholics, Vatterott attempted to build De Porres, a similar development for middle-class African Americans. Without FHA financing, he was forced to build inferior homes without the parks and playgrounds included in St. Ann. Buyers couldn't get FHA or VA mortgages, many had to rent, and even those on Vatterott's special savings plan couldn't accumulate equity like their white counterparts in St. Ann.
The FHA made no effort to hide its racial motivations. In 1940, it approved a Detroit project only after the builder constructed a half-mile concrete wall separating it from a Black neighborhood. By 1973, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that "housing industry, aided and abetted by Government" created America's system of residential segregation.
Chapter 6
Private Agreements, Government Enforcement
Before the FHA sponsored whites-only suburbanization, many neighborhoods were already racially exclusive through restrictive covenants in deeds and neighbor pacts prohibiting sales to African Americans. Government at all levels actively promoted and enforced these covenants. Courts nationwide ordered African Americans evicted from homes they had purchased, with state supreme courts consistently upholding the practice as constitutional "private agreements." Local governments aggressively promoted such covenants-Baltimore's mayor organized an official "Committee on Segregation," while Culver City instructed air raid wardens to circulate anti-Black housing documents.
From its inception, the FHA gave higher ratings to mortgage applications in neighborhoods without African Americans and rewarded properties with restrictive deed language. The agency's underwriting manuals explicitly recommended racial exclusion, stating that appropriate deed restrictions should include "prohibition of occupancy except by the race for which they are intended" with "appropriate provisions for enforcement." In developments with FHA financing, the agency frequently demanded that developers include racial covenants in property deeds.
In 1948, the Supreme Court's Shelley v. Kraemer ruling repudiated its earlier endorsement of restrictive covenants, declaring that court enforcement of racial covenants violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The federal government responded with massive resistance to undermine the ruling. FHA Commissioner Richards declared the decision would "in no way affect" agency programs, and officials continued supporting racial exclusion. The FHA refused to insure racially inclusive developments, claiming interracial communities were "bad risks." Even after Solicitor General Perlman announced in December 1949 that the FHA would stop insuring mortgages with restrictive covenants, he delayed implementation by 2.5 months, allowing property owners to hurry and record new restrictions. Only in 1962 did President Kennedy's executive order finally prohibit using federal funds for housing discrimination.
Chapter 7
The Myth of White Flight and Property Values
The FHA justified its racial policies by claiming African American presence in white neighborhoods would cause property values to decline and increase mortgage defaults. However, the agency never provided evidence supporting this claim. Their housing economist Homer Hoyt's 1939 report merely observed that racial separation occurred worldwide, citing as evidence that American missionaries and European colonial officials lived separately from Chinese in China.
Statistical evidence actually contradicted the FHA's assumptions about property values. Because government policy excluded African Americans from most suburbs, their demand for single-family homes on urban outskirts meant they often paid above-market prices, causing property values to increase rather than decline. A 1942 federal appeals court decision noted that restrictive covenants could actually depress property values by excluding African Americans willing to pay higher prices. Despite this evidence, the FHA continued its discriminatory policies for at least another decade.
The FHA's theories about property values could become self-fulfilling through blockbusting. Speculators employed manipulative tactics: hiring African Americans to walk through white neighborhoods with babies or blasting music, placing ads in Black newspapers for unavailable properties, making calls asking for stereotypically Black names, and even arranging burglaries to create fear. They then sold homes at inflated prices to African Americans through contract sales where buyers accumulated no equity and could lose everything with a single late payment.
The FHA's redlining necessitated the contract sale system for Black homebuyers unable to obtain conventional mortgages, creating conditions for neighborhood deterioration. In Chicago's Lawndale neighborhood, approximately 85 percent of properties purchased by African Americans were sold on contract. These buyers couldn't leave declining neighborhoods without losing everything they'd invested, while whites could freely move away. This entire system-blockbusting, property devaluation, neighborhood deterioration, and white flight-had its foundation in federal government policy that ensured African Americans had few alternatives for fair market value housing.
Chapter 8
IRS Support and Compliant Regulators
As public housing concentrated African Americans in urban projects while federal loan insurance helped white families move to suburban homes, other government policies reinforced metropolitan segregation. The IRS granted tax-exempt status to organizations promoting residential segregation, while regulatory agencies were complicit in discriminatory practices of banks and insurers they supervised.
The IRS consistently failed its obligation to withhold tax exemptions from discriminatory organizations, despite regulations specifically authorizing charitable deductions for groups that "eliminate prejudice" and "defend human and civil rights." Until 1970, sixteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, the IRS granted tax exemptions to whites-only academies established to evade desegregation. Churches, synagogues and clergy frequently led efforts to maintain neighborhood segregation through restrictive covenants and homeowner associations, yet retained their tax-exempt status.
Insurance companies, heavily regulated by state governments, participated in housing segregation. In 1938, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company president Frederick Ecker needed a state insurance code amendment to build the 12,000-unit Parkchester apartments in New York City, which excluded African Americans. Metropolitan Life later built Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan, where the city condemned eighteen square blocks and granted a 25-year tax abatement despite the company's "whites only" policy.
Banks and savings institutions pursued discriminatory lending policies that constituted de jure segregation because they operated under extensive government oversight. Federal regulators-including the Federal Reserve, Comptroller of Currency, FDIC, and Office of Thrift Supervision-regularly reviewed lending practices but allowed discrimination against African Americans. In 1961, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights challenged regulators, but they defended banks' discriminatory practices. The Federal Reserve chairman William McChesney Martin falsely claimed "competition" would ensure loans for qualified black families, while FDIC chairman Erle Cocke explicitly supported denying loans to African Americans to protect white property values.
Racially discriminatory government activities continued into the twenty-first century through regulatory tolerance of "reverse redlining"-the excessive marketing of exploitative subprime loans to African American communities. These loans had onerous conditions including high closing costs, prepayment penalties, and deceptive "teaser" rates. By 2006, African Americans had subprime mortgages at three times the rate of white borrowers, with higher-income African Americans at four times the rate of higher-income whites. When the housing bubble burst, foreclosures devastated Black neighborhoods, reversing decades of economic gains.
Chapter 9
Local Tactics: The Creativity of Discrimination
In the face of racial discrimination in housing, local governments employed numerous creative tactics to prevent African Americans from moving into white neighborhoods. From zoning changes and denial of utilities to routing highways and selecting school sites, these actions maintained segregation at the local level, complementing federal efforts.
When Ford relocated its plant to Milpitas, black workers like Frank Stevenson faced severe housing discrimination. While white workers easily found homes in FHA- and VA-insured whites-only subdivisions, African Americans were systematically excluded. The American Friends Service Committee tried to help by finding a developer willing to build an integrated subdivision, but faced extraordinary obstacles. Multiple attempts to develop integrated housing were thwarted by zoning changes, permit denials, and financing refusals.
Exclusionary tactics were common throughout post-WWII America. In 1954, when a University of Pennsylvania professor and his wife attempted to develop an integrated housing tract in Swarthmore near Philadelphia, local officials systematically obstructed their plans. The borough council imposed expensive requirements not demanded of other developments, including certified engineer drawings and costly new sewer systems. When the couple scaled back their plans to meet objections, neighboring property owners claimed the access road was private, despite previous public improvements.
Condemning African American residences for "public purposes" became another common segregation tactic. In 1959, when an African American couple attempted to build in white St. Louis suburb Creve Coeur, the town condemned their property for recreational use after discovering their race. Courts ruled they couldn't question condemnation motives if the purpose was public. Similarly, in 1969, when a Methodist church group proposed integrated housing in Black Jack, Missouri, residents quickly incorporated their community and passed restrictive zoning to block the development.
Beyond keeping African Americans out of white areas, officials also worked to shift black populations away from downtown business districts through "slum clearance"-a widely understood euphemism for removing black neighborhoods. The federal interstate highway system became a powerful tool for this segregation. Highway industry groups consistently promoted roads as ways to "eat out slums" and "reclaim blighted areas." In Miami, I-95 accomplished what unconstitutional zoning had failed to do, reducing a 40,000-person African American community to 8,000. Similar highway-based displacement occurred in Camden, Los Angeles (destroying the middle-class Sugar Hill neighborhood), and other cities nationwide.
In southern and border states, officials developed another segregation tactic: placing the only schools serving African American children in designated black neighborhoods without providing transportation. This forced black families wanting education for their children to move to these areas. Austin's 1928 master plan created an "incentive to draw the negro population" to the Eastside by relocating segregated schools and public services there. The strategy worked effectively-the integrated Wheatsville neighborhood, 16% African American in 1930, saw its black school closed in 1932 and by 1950 was only 1% African American.
Chapter 10
Violence With Government Approval
When African Americans attempted to move into white neighborhoods, they frequently faced not just discrimination but violent resistance-often with the tacit approval or active participation of local authorities who refused to provide protection.
In 1952, Wilbur Gary, an African American navy veteran and contractor, purchased a home in Rollingwood, California, despite restrictive covenants that had been ruled unenforceable by the Supreme Court four years earlier. A mob of 300 whites gathered outside the Gary home, shouting epithets, throwing bricks through windows, and burning a cross on their lawn. For days, police and sheriff deputies refused to intervene, forcing the NAACP and Communist Party-affiliated civil rights groups to organize protection for the family.
Similarly, in 1957, Bill and Daisy Myers became the first African American family in Levittown, Pennsylvania. After a mail carrier announced their arrival, up to 600 white protesters assembled, pelting their home with rocks. Neighbors rented the adjacent house, flying Confederate flags and blaring music all night. For two months, police stood by-some even joking with the mob-as crosses were burned and the Myers' supporters were harassed. The district attorney offered to buy out the Myers rather than protect them.
What the Garys and Myers experienced was not an aberration but part of systematic, nationwide police tolerance and promotion of violence to maintain residential segregation throughout the twentieth century. Chicago's history exemplifies this pattern. From 1917-1921, fifty-eight firebombings targeted Black homes in white areas with no arrests despite two deaths. In 1919, nearly thirty bombings occurred in six months before a major race riot. Post-WWII Chicago saw 357 reported "incidents" against African Americans attempting to integrate white neighborhoods.
In 1951, when Harvey Clark, a Black bus driver and veteran, rented in all-white Cicero, police threatened him and ignored a court order to protect him. When a 4,000-person mob destroyed his apartment and burned his belongings, officers "acted like ushers." A grand jury indicted Clark and his supporters-not the rioters-for "inciting a riot."
These incidents intimidated countless other African Americans from attempting to live in neighborhoods of their choosing, with fear of integration passing down through generations.
Chapter 11
Economic Barriers: Deliberately Suppressed Incomes
The persistent racial segregation is often explained by claiming Black families simply can't afford to live in white middle-class communities. While this economic disparity exists, it resulted from deliberate governmental policies that purposely suppressed African American incomes throughout the twentieth century.
Until well after emancipation, most African Americans were denied access to free labor markets and couldn't save from wages. Following the Civil War and intensifying after Reconstruction, sharecropping systems essentially perpetuated slavery, with workers typically owing plantation owners more than their wages. Local authorities enforced this peonage by preventing sharecroppers from seeking work elsewhere.
Many African Americans were arrested for petty or fabricated offenses and, unable to pay fines, were sold to plantations, mines, and factories. Douglas Blackmon estimates over 100,000 were enslaved this way from Reconstruction until World War II, with U.S. Steel alone using tens of thousands of imprisoned African Americans. This practice wasn't explicitly outlawed until 1951.
In the 1930s, Roosevelt's New Deal legislation required support from southern Democrats committed to white supremacy. Consequently, Social Security, minimum wage protection, and union recognition excluded occupations dominated by African Americans: agriculture and domestic service.
The National Recovery Administration established industry-specific minimum wages but routinely withheld benefits from African Americans. Industries and factories employing predominantly Black workers were either excluded from coverage or classified as "southern" to justify lower wages. The cotton textile industry's minimum wage increase bypassed job classifications held by African Americans, leading the NAACP to note that for these workers, the NRA meant "increases of from 10 to 40 per cent in the cost of everything they had to buy, without a single penny in increased wages."
In 1935, President Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, granting unions bargaining rights if supported by a majority of workers. Senator Wagner's original bill prohibited certification of unions that denied African Americans membership, but the American Federation of Labor lobbied to remove this clause. For at least thirty years afterward, the government protected the bargaining rights of unions that excluded African Americans or segregated them into lower-paid jobs.
The government's blocking of African Americans' wage-earning opportunities was most devastating during World War II, when Black workers migrated to centers of war production. Federal agencies tolerated and supported policies that restricted African Americans to the lowest-paid tasks in defense plants. In the San Francisco Bay Area, unions like the Marine Laborers and Steamfitters grew enormously during the war. With NLRB-certified agreements requiring union referrals for hiring, these unions simply refused to refer African Americans.
African Americans could save less from their wages because discriminatory property tax assessments left them with less disposable income than whites with similar earnings. City and county governments extracted excessive taxes from Black homeowners by systematically overassessing properties in Black neighborhoods while underassessing those in white areas. A 1973 HUD study of ten large U.S. cities found systematic overassessment in low-income Black neighborhoods with corresponding underassessment in white middle-class areas.
The creation of racial ghettos was self-perpetuating: living in economically disadvantaged communities depressed disposable income, making escape more difficult. Restricting African Americans' housing supply led to higher rents and home prices in Black neighborhoods than for similar accommodations in white ones. By 1947, the U.S. government cited multiple studies demonstrating that "colored people are forced to pay higher housing costs by the semi-monopoly which segregation fosters."
Chapter 12
Moving Forward: Addressing Our Segregated Legacy
From 1957 to 1968, Congress adopted civil rights laws prohibiting second-class citizenship for African Americans in public accommodations, transportation, voting, and employment. These laws were largely effective, but ending housing segregation proved far more complicated because it requires undoing past actions that seem irreversible.
Despite being a half-century old, the Fair Housing Act hasn't erased the effects of government promotion of segregation. American students remain highly segregated in schools, especially in northern states like New York and Illinois. Without pervasive housing segregation, school desegregation would have been more successful.
From the end of World War II until 1973, real wages of working Americans nearly doubled, with African Americans experiencing the biggest growth in the 1960s when the racial income gap narrowed somewhat. After 1973, wages stagnated for all working-class Americans while housing prices soared-43% from 1973-1980 alone. By the time the government finally allowed African Americans into suburbs, the opportunity for integration had largely closed. Homes in places like Levittown that sold for $8,000 in 1948 (about $75,000 today) now sell for $350,000+, giving white families who bought then over $200,000 in wealth appreciation that Black families were denied.
While median Black family income is about 60% of white family income ($37,000 vs. $60,000), median Black household wealth is less than 10% of white wealth ($11,000 vs. $134,000). This enormous disparity is substantially attributable to government racial housing policy. Home equity is the main source of wealth for middle-class Americans, but African American families whose parents and grandparents were denied participation in the equity-accumulating boom of the 1950s and 1960s struggle to catch up.
Low-income African Americans are less upwardly mobile than low-income whites partly because they're more likely to be trapped in poor neighborhoods for multiple generations. Patrick Sharkey's research shows young African Americans are ten times more likely to live in poor neighborhoods than young whites-66% versus 6%. Overall, 48% of African American families have lived in poor neighborhoods for at least two generations, compared to just 7% of white families.
Because Americans vary greatly in economic and social circumstances, government programs affect different groups differently even when they appear race-neutral. Once de jure segregation was established, race-neutral policies often had disparate impacts on African Americans. Transportation policies illustrate this-we've invested heavily in highways for suburban commuters but little in public transit that would connect urban African Americans to jobs.
Government housing actions inevitably either worsen or reduce segregation. Two major federal housing programs-Low-Income Housing Tax Credits and Housing Choice Vouchers (Section 8)-have unintentionally deepened racial segregation. Tax credit projects face community vetoes in middle-class areas, pushing them into already-segregated neighborhoods. Similarly, Section 8 vouchers are often too small for middle-class rentals, and many landlords refuse them.
Chapter 13
Confronting Our History, Imagining Solutions
Residential segregation has inflicted profound costs on our nation, affecting not just African Americans but all Americans. It fuels racial polarization, corrupts politics, and creates cynicism in a society claiming justice while perpetuating inequalities. This segregation harms both white and Black children, leaving them ill-prepared for diverse adult environments. For low-income African Americans, additional social and economic barriers further impede achievement.
Addressing a century of de jure segregation requires complex solutions, though perfect justice for descendants of those wronged is no longer possible. Progress depends on widespread understanding of our true history. Current textbooks mislead students by portraying segregation as the result of personal choices rather than government policy.
While the Obama administration attempted to enforce the Fair Housing Act's integration provisions in 2015, political resistance remains strong. Without dispelling the myth that segregation occurred naturally, effective remedies face steep obstacles.
Several potential remedies exist, though politically challenging. The government could purchase homes in historically segregated areas at market rates and resell them to African Americans at historically adjusted prices. Alternative approaches include banning exclusionary zoning or reforming tax codes to incentivize low-income housing development.
Some progress has emerged through civil rights litigation. In Baltimore, an ACLU lawsuit created a program providing enhanced housing vouchers and counseling for families moving to high-opportunity suburbs. Participants relocated from areas with 33% poverty rates to neighborhoods with 8%, and from 80% to 21% African American populations.
The Stevenson family exemplifies segregation's multigenerational impact. Despite raising three daughters in segregated Richmond, California, their descendants remain largely confined to fourth-income-quintile occupations, raising questions about opportunities lost to unconstitutional segregation.
Chief Justice Roberts' assertion that residential segregation without state action lacks constitutional implications ignores historical reality. Government at all levels actively promoted racial discrimination through public housing policies, zoning laws, FHA practices, and school boundaries. Had officials instead championed integration and equal rights, America would be far less segregated today.
While undoing de jure segregation's effects presents enormous challenges, progress must begin with acknowledging our government's central role in creating and maintaining these divisions.
