The Color of Law

Key Concepts

The segregation we see in housing today is not just a result of private choices; government policies enabled and supported that segregation

“Without our government’s purposeful imposition of racial segregation, the other causes—private prejudice, white flight, real estate steering, bank redlining, income differences, and self-segregation—still would have existed but with far less opportunity for expression. Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto. Rather, it is what courts call de jure: segregation by law and public policy.” (Preface)

“We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies. Although most of these policies are now off the books, they have never been remedied and their effects endure.” (Preface)

“AS A NATION, we have paid an enormous price for avoiding an obligation to remedy the unconstitutional segregation we have allowed to fester. African Americans, of course, suffer from our evasion. But so, too, does the nation as a whole, as do whites in particular. Many of our serious national problems either originate with residential segregation or have become intractable because of it.” (Chapter 12)

Segregation in public housing started in the New Deal but continued into the 1990s

“Segregation in the administration’s housing programs followed a pattern that was established by New Deal construction, employment, and jobs agencies. An early initiative was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), created in 1933 to bring jobs and economic growth to a region whose suffering during the Depression had been unusually severe. In Norris, Tennessee, where the TVA was headquartered, the government developed a model village with 500 comfortable homes, leased to employees and construction workers. The village, though, was open only to whites, while the TVA housed its African American workers in shoddy barracks some distance away. A TVA official explained that the town was being reserved for whites because ‘Negroes do not fit into the program.’” (Chapter 2)

“Other federal court decisions or settlements—in Baltimore, Dallas, San Francisco, Yonkers, and elsewhere—also recognized that HUD or local governments had created or perpetuated segregation. In Miami, for example, African Americans eligible for public housing were assigned to distinct projects while eligible whites were given vouchers for rentals of private apartments to subsidize their dispersal throughout the community. It was not until 1998 that civil rights groups won a requirement that vouchers be offered to African Americans as well—too late to reverse the city’s segregation.” (Chapter 2)

Zoning policies supported segregation by making suburbs financially out of reach for Blacks and by placing industrial activity near Black communities, making them less attractive 

“To prevent lower-income African Americans from living in neighborhoods where middle-class whites resided, local and federal officials began in the 1910s to promote zoning ordinances to reserve middle-class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower-income families of all races could not afford.” (Chapter 3)

“On other occasions, the commission changed an area’s zoning from residential to industrial if African American families had begun to move into it. In 1927, violating its normal policy, the commission authorized a park and playground in an industrial, not residential, area in hopes that this would draw African American families to seek housing nearby.” (Chapter 3)

“Later in the twentieth century, when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) developed the insured amortized mortgage as a way to promote homeownership nationwide, these zoning practices rendered African Americans ineligible for such mortgages because banks and the FHA considered the existence of nearby rooming houses, commercial development, or industry to create risk to the property value of single-family areas.” (Chapter 3)

“Zoning thus had two faces. One face, developed in part to evade a prohibition on racially explicit zoning, attempted to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods by making it difficult for lower-income families, large numbers of whom were African Americans, to live in expensive white neighborhoods. The other attempted to protect white neighborhoods from deterioration by ensuring that few industrial or environmentally unsafe businesses could locate in them. Prohibited in this fashion, polluting industry had no option but to locate near African American residences. The first contributed to creation of exclusive white suburbs, the second to creation of urban African American slums.” (Chapter 3)

Through redlining, government-backed mortgage policies both prevented the building of integrated developments and hindered Blacks’ access to low-cost mortgages

“The [Home Owners' Loan Corporation] created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red. A neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes.” (Chapter 4)

“William Levitt’s refusal to sell a home to Vince Mereday was not a mere reflection of the builder’s prejudicial views. Had he felt differently and chosen to integrate Levittown, the federal government would have refused to subsidize him. In the decades following World War II, suburbs across the country—as in Milpitas and Palo Alto and Levittown—were created in this way, with the FHA administering an explicit racial policy that solidified segregation in every one of our metropolitan areas.” (Chapter 4)

Discriminatory loan covenants kept Blacks out of suburbs, and some courts even enforced these “private” contract terms

“Property owners and builders had created segregated environments by including language both in individual home deeds and in pacts among neighbors that prohibited future resales to African Americans. Proponents of such restrictions were convinced that racial exclusion would enhance their property values and that such deeds were mere private agreements that would not run afoul of constitutional prohibitions on racially discriminatory state action. The FHA adopted both of these theories.” (Chapter 5)

“GOVERNMENT AT all levels became involved in promoting and enforcing the restrictive covenants. Throughout the nation, courts ordered African Americans evicted from homes they had purchased. State supreme courts upheld the practice when it was challenged—in Alabama, California, Colorado, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. In the many hundreds of such cases, judges endorsed the view that restrictive covenants did not violate the Constitution because they were private agreements.” (Chapter 5)

Local governments used highway construction and slum clearance to make commuting from the suburbs and working in downtown more attractive, destroying Black neighborhoods in the process

“It wasn’t only the large-scale federal programs of public housing and mortgage finance that created de jure segregation. Hundreds, if not thousands of smaller acts of government contributed. They included petty actions like denial of access to public utilities; determining, once African Americans wanted to build, that their property was, after all, needed for parkland; or discovering that a road leading to African American homes was “private.” They included routing interstate highways to create racial boundaries or to shift the residential placement of African American families. And they included choosing school sites to force families to move to segregated neighborhoods if they wanted education for their children.” (Chapter 8)

“WHILE MANY de jure segregation policies aimed to keep African Americans far from white residential areas, public officials also shifted African American populations away from downtown business districts so that white commuters, shoppers, and business elites would not be exposed to black people.” (Chapter 8)

“Where low-income African Americans were living in squalor, plans to demolish substandard structures and provide new, decent homes in integrated neighborhoods would have been appropriate. But mostly policy makers contemplated no such relocation. Instead, slum clearance reinforced the spatial segregation of African Americans as well as their impoverishment. This, in turn, led to further segregation because the more impoverished African Americans became, the less welcome they were in middle-class communities.” (Chapter 8)

Government inhibited the wealth building of Blacks through, among other things, segregated New Deal programs, excluding Blacks from the GI Bill benefits, allowing segregation in unions, and higher taxation for Black communities 

“But we cannot understand the income and wealth gap that persists between African Americans and whites without examining governmental policies that purposely kept black incomes low throughout most of the twentieth century.”  (Chapter 10)

IN 1935, President Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, granting unions at construction sites and factories the right to bargain with management if the unions were supported by a majority of workers. Labor organizations that gained this official certification could negotiate contracts that covered all of a firm’s employees. The original bill, proposed by Senator Robert Wagner of New York, had prohibited government certification of unions that did not grant African Americans membership and workplace rights. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) lobbied Wagner to remove the clause, and he did so. The enactment of the Wagner Act was accomplished with the knowledge that it sanctioned an unconstitutional policy of legally empowering unions that refused to admit African Americans. For at least the next thirty years, the government protected the bargaining rights of unions that denied African Americans the privileges of membership or that segregated them into janitorial and other lower-paid jobs.” (Chapter 10)

“These governments did so by overassessing properties in black neighborhoods and underassessing them in white ones. Although assessors may have had a bias that led them to assess houses of lower-income families of any race at a higher percentage of their market values than houses of affluent families of any race, this alone cannot explain the differences. A 1979 study of Chicago assessments, for example, included a statistical analysis demonstrating that the chances of these differences being attributable to social-class bias alone were less than one in a hundred.” (Chapter 10)

Quotables

“Throughout the country, whites came to assume black perversity and inferiority. Consider a state as seemingly improbable as Montana where African Americans thrived in the post–Civil War years. In the early 1900s they were systematically expelled from predominantly white communities in the state. Public officials supported and promoted this new racial order. The removal of African Americans was gradual. By 1890, black settlers were living in every Montana county. By 1930, though, eleven of the state’s fifty-six counties had been entirely cleared of African Americans, and in the other counties few remained. The African American population of Helena, the state capital, peaked at 420 (3.4 percent) in 1910. It was down to 131 by 1930, and only 45 remained by 1970. By 2010 the 113 African Americans in Helena comprised less than half of one percent of the city’s population.” (Chapter 3)

“The Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer, banning court enforcement of restrictive covenants, had been unanimous, 6–0. Three of the nine justices excused themselves from participating because their objectivity might have been challenged—there were racial restrictions covering the homes in which they lived.” (Chapter 5) 

“The consequences of being exposed to neighborhood poverty are greater than the consequences of being poor itself. Children who grow up in poor neighborhoods have few adult role models who have been educationally and occupationally successful. Their ability to do well in school is compromised from stress that can result from exposure to violence. They have few, if any, summer job opportunities. Libraries and bookstores are less accessible. There are fewer primary care physicians. Fresh food is harder to get. Airborne pollutants are more present, leading to greater school absence from respiratory illness. The concentration of many disadvantaged children in the same classroom deprives each child of the special attention needed to be successful. All these challenges are added to those from which poor children suffer in any neighborhood—instability and stress resulting from parental unemployment, fewer literacy experiences when parents are poorly educated, more overcrowded living arrangements that offer few quiet corners to study, and less adequate health care, all of which contribute to worse average school performance and, as a result, less occupational success as adults.” (Chapter 11)

“Along with the mortgage interest deduction, another policy that on its face is race-neutral but has a discriminatory effect is our national transportation system. We have invested heavily in highways to connect commuters to their downtown offices but comparatively little in buses, subways, and light rail to put suburban jobs within reach of urban African Americans and to reduce their isolation from the broader community.” (Chapter 11)