The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Rothstein’s book begins in Richmond, California, located across the bay from San Francisco. Richmond has the highest density of African American citizens in the region. During World War II, it was the site of a shipbuilding complex; later, it featured a large oil refinery. Between 1940 and 1945, the labor demands of the war industry drew workers to Richmond. Its population increased from 24,000 to 100,000, with the African American population rising from 270 to 14,000. One of these workers was Frank Stevenson, who was born in 1924 in Lake Providence, Louisiana. Lake Providence was described as “the poorest place in America” (3). Stevenson was the son of a pastor who owned the land his church was built on. Stevenson was educated in a one-room schoolhouse run by the church. In the 1930s the school year was shorter for African Americans than their White counterparts because African American children worked as farm laborers. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal prohibited child labor and established a minimum wage. However, industries like agriculture, which employed significant numbers of African Americans, were excluded from this legislation. Stevenson finished seventh grade and then found a job delivering food to workers in New Orleans’s shipyards. He worked a variety of jobs, including laying rails, loading freight, and carrying cement. When he was 19, he moved to Richmond.

Richmond’s population boomed as people moved to the region for work in wartime industries. The federal government built public housing to meet the demand. It was officially segregated. Houses for White workers were sturdily contracted and intended to be permanent. In contrast, the housing for African American workers was poorly constructed and built to be temporary.

Low-interest loans were issued to White homeowners to remodel and subdivide their houses to lease spare rooms. There were no programs to help African American workers find housing, and they often ended up living in illegal sublets. Integrated activities were prohibited. This was partly due to pressure from the Richmond police and the housing authority. In sports facilities and recreational spaces like movie theaters, special hours were set aside for African Americans. African Americans who did not work in the war effort were arrested by police. Stevenson found work in a Ford Motor assembly plant that built military jeeps and fixed tanks. The factory was unionized, and African American workers were gradually assigned more skilled labor.

In the 1950s consumer demand expanded, and Ford moved its factory to Milpitas, a suburb of San Jose. The town of Milpitas responded by passing emergency laws that banned apartment construction. As a result, African American workers were forced to choose between giving up their jobs or making the long commute between Milpitas and Richmond. Stevenson commuted more than an hour each way with eight other workers for more than 20 years. Richmond became a predominantly African American city, as government-subsidized housing drew White working-class families to the suburbs. In the 1970s Stevenson bought his first home.

Rothstein compares Stevenson’s experience with that of Wallace Stegner, who also moved to the Bay Area during the war. Following the publication of his acclaimed semiautobiographical novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Stegner was hired to teach creative writing at Stanford University in 1945. Palo Alto was experiencing a housing shortage at that time. Stegner joined the Peninsula Housing Association of Palo Alto, a cooperative of working- and middle-class families who couldn’t find housing. Of the 150 families that joined, three were African American. The cooperative sought to build houses on commonly owned land, but it had a hard time getting mortgages or financing for the construction costs without government approval, as the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) would not insure loans for a cooperative with African American members. The association fell apart, and the land was sold to a developer whose agreement with the FHA barred African Americans from buying the homes.

In the mid-20th century public housing was designed for middle- and lower-class White families. The intention of public housing was not to subsidize housing for those who couldn’t afford it but to provide housing because it was scarce. During the Great Depression, President Roosevelt’s New Deal created public housing for civilians through the Public Works Administration (PWA). The intent was to create construction jobs while alleviating the housing shortage. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes directed the program; he was the former president of the Chicago branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). One-third of the units developed went to African American families. However, these units were segregated. Public housing for African Americans could only be built in neighborhoods that were designated as African American. This was a violation of constitutional rights, as the PWA segregated neighborhoods that were previously integrated. African Americans who lived in White neighborhoods were evicted, increasing the density in African American neighborhoods. Federal and local governments further segregated African American families into urban ghettos.

By 1937, the PWA program ended. The US Housing Authority (USHA) was created to provide subsidies to municipalities to build public housing. The housing shortage remained a problem as building had slowed during the Great Depression and during World War II, as there was a shortage of construction materials. The first USHA-funded projects were in Austin, Texas. City planners developed policies of rigid segregation that moved African Americans into Rosewood Courts, a ghetto on the Eastside. In 1940 the Lanham Act financed public housing for workers in wartime industries. It further segregated cities as most public housing was only for Whites. When African Americans did have access to public housing, it was segregated. In New York 20 housing projects were built in the decade after World War II. The projects were not subsidized, and veterans were given priority. There were 21 other factors that could disqualify people from living in public housing, ranging from drug addiction to poorly behaved children. By 1949, a new public housing initiative was launched by President Harry Truman. Segregation was upheld in these projects, which were predominately high-rise towers. With the election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the federal government began to roll back policies against racial discrimination.

In the 1950s public housing began to change. The real estate industry opposed public housing as socialism. Income limits were imposed, and the conditions of public housing deteriorated. Public housing became a system that housed the poor.

After the Civil War, formerly enslaved peoples left the South and moved throughout the United States. In 1877, following the disputed presidential election of the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, federal troops withdrew from the South. Reconstruction, a period of relative freedom for African Americans, ended, and Jim Crow laws were established to segregate the South. The “fear (turning to hatred)” (41) of African Americans spread throughout the United States. In Montana, for example, African Americans thrived following the Civil War, building middle-class communities. However, in the first decades of the 20th century, they were gradually removed from White communities. Some communities established informal policies banning African Americans from living there or being within the town limits after dark. Interracial marriage was also banned.

Segregation was enforced at local levels, too, often with zoning regulations intended to segregate communities. This began in Baltimore in 1910 and quickly spread. In 1917 racial zoning ordinances in Louisville, Kentucky, were overturned by the Supreme Court in Buchanan v. Warley. The court ruled that racial zoning ordinances infringed on freedom of contract, the property owner’s right to sell to whomever they want. Yet many cities ignored this ruling and continued to issue zoning ordinances that segregated cities. Richmond, Virginia, worked around the Buchanan ruling by banning interracial marriage in 1924 and then prohibiting people from living on a street where they were ineligible to marry a resident of the street. The city argued that racial zoning ordinances were not about property rights but were intended to prevent interracial marriage. In 1930 the Supreme Court struck down this ordinance. Other arguments against the Buchanan ruling included threats to peace caused by integration and the need to maintain order.

In cities that abided by the Supreme Court ruling, governments developed solutions to “keep lower-income African Americans from living near middle-class Whites and how to keep middle-class African Americans from buying into white middle-class neighborhoods” (48). Rothstein uses Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, as an example. Economic zoning played an important role in enforcing segregation in Ferguson. Zoning decisions turned St. Louis’s African American communities into slums. Industry, heavy polluters, houses of prostitution, nightclubs, liquor stores, and other places that were banned in White neighborhoods were approved for African American neighborhoods.

The federal government promoted municipal zoning ordinances. Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce for President Warren G. Harding, developed an advisory committee on zoning. The committee believed that if zoning ordinances did not specifically reference race, they would not violate the Supreme Court ruling. This was a correct assumption. Consequently, zoning ultimately contributed to the creation of all White suburbs and African American ghettos in cities.

Zoning ordinances were ineffective at preventing middle-class African Americans from buying homes in predominantly White neighborhoods. Integration was typically initiated by African Americans who were of a higher socioeconomic status than their White neighbors. To block this form of integration, governments promoted single-family suburban homes, “then, once suburbanization was under way, the government, with explicit racial intent, made it nearly impossible for African Americans to follow” (60).

In addition to promoting racial zoning ordinances, Herbert Hoover, while serving as secretary of commerce, also ran the Better Homes in America Association, an organization that promoted single-family homes. A report issued by the organization suggested that “apartments were the worst kind of housing, frequently overcrowded because of the ‘ignorant racial habit’ of African Americans and European immigrants” (61). The promotion of single-family homes became more prominent when Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933. The New Deal included programs to help homeowners make mortgage payments alongside another program for first-time homeowners. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) bought mortgages that were going to be foreclosed and issued new mortgages with low interest rates. The HOLC rated African American communities as being a higher risk for defaulting on payments. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was founded in 1934 to support first-time homeowners by insuring bank mortgages. The appraisal policy was Whites-only. Banks were discouraged from issuing loans in urban neighborhoods, promoting suburbanization. After World War II, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) guaranteed mortgages for returning servicemen. By 1950, half of all new mortgages were underwritten by the FHA and VA.