the color of law thesis

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

Book • By Richard Rothstein • 2017

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In The Color of Law  (published by Liveright in May 2017), Richard Rothstein argues with exacting precision and fascinating insight how segregation in America—the incessant kind that continues to dog our major cities and has contributed to so much recent social strife—is the byproduct of explicit government policies at the local, state, and federal levels.

Rothstein was a panelist on an EPI webinar, July 9, 2020, discussing his book and Reconstruction 2020: Valuing Black Lives and Economic Opportunities for All. Click here to see watch the webinar.

The Color of Law was designated one of ten finalists on the National Book Awards’ long list for the best nonfiction book of 2017.

Highlighted media

• Richard Rothstein discusses The Color of Law on Fresh Air
• Richard Rothstein in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates

To scholars and social critics, the racial segregation of our neighborhoods has long been viewed as a manifestation of unscrupulous real estate agents, unethical mortgage lenders, and exclusionary covenants working outside the law. This is what is commonly known as “ de facto  segregation,” practices that were the outcome of private activity, not law or explicit public policy. Yet, as Rothstein breaks down in case after case, private activity could not have imposed segregation without explicit government policies ( de jure segregation) designed to ensure the separation of African Americans from whites.

A former columnist for the  New York Times  and a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, as well as a Fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Rothstein has spent years documenting the evidence that government not merely ignored discriminatory practices in the residential sphere, but  promoted  them. The impact has been devastating for generations of African-Americans who were denied the right to live where they wanted to live, and raise and school their children where they could flourish most successfully.

While the Fair Housing Act of 1968 provided modest enforcement to prevent future discrimination, it did nothing to reverse or undo a century’s worth of state-sanctioned violations of the Bill of Rights, particularly the Thirteenth Amendment which banned treating former slaves as second-class citizens. So the structural conditions established by 20th century federal policy endure to this day.

At every step of the way, Rothstein demonstrates, the government and our courts upheld racist policies to maintain the separation of whites and blacks—leading to the powder keg that has defined Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston, and Chicago.  The Color of Law is not a tale of Red versus Blue states. It is sadly the story of America in all of its municipalities, large and small, liberal and reactionary.

As William Julius Wilson has stated: “ The Color of Law is one of those rare books that will be discussed and debated for many decades.”

What readers of The Color of Law have written:

“Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law is one of those rare books that will be discussed and debated for many decades. Based on careful analyses of multiple historical documents, Rothstein has presented what I consider to be the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation.” (William Julius Wilson, author of The Truly Disadvantaged )

“Richard Rothstein’s  The Color of Law  offers an original and insightful explanation of how government policy in the United States intentionally promoted and enforced residential racial segregation. The central premise of his argument, which calls for a fundamental reexamination of American constitutional law, is that the Supreme Court has failed for decades to understand the extent to which residential racial segregation in our nation is not the result of private decisions by private individuals, but is the direct product of unconstitutional government action. The implications of his analysis are revolutionary.” (Geoffrey R. Stone, author of Sex and the Constitution )

“A masterful explication of the single most vexing problem facing black America: the concentration of the poor and middle class into segregated neighborhoods. Rothstein documents the deep historical roots and the continuing practices in law and social custom that maintain a profoundly un-American system holding down the nation’s most disadvantaged citizens.” (Thomas B. Edsall, author of The Age of Austerity )

“Through meticulous research and powerful human stories, Richard Rothstein reveals a history of racism hiding in plain sight and compels us to confront the consequences of the intentional, decades-long governmental policies that created a segregated America. The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book.” (Sherrilyn A. Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund)

“Racial segregation does not just happen; it is made. Written with a spatial imagination, this exacting and exigent book traces how public policies across a wide spectrum―including discriminatory zoning, taxation, subsidies, and explicit redlining―have shaped the racial fracturing of America. At once analytical and passionate,  The Color of Law  discloses why segregation has persisted, even deepened, in the post–civil rights era, and thoughtfully proposes how remedies might be pursued. A must-read.” (Ira Katznelson, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Fear Itself)

“This wonderful, important book could not be more timely. It shows how federal, state, and local government housing policies made the United States two societies, separate and unequal, and used public power to impose unfair, profoundly damaging injuries on African Americans. The book is filled with history that’s been deliberately buried even as its tragic consequences make headlines in Ferguson, Tulsa, Dallas, Staten Island, Charleston―and throughout the country. With its clarity and breadth, the book is literally a page-turner: once one begins on this journey with Richard Rothstein, one is not likely to stop before the conclusion, with a determination that the injustices described must be redressed fully and immediately.” (Florence Roisman, William F. Harvey Professor of Law, Indiana University)

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The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (review)

• Dann J. Broyld
• University of California Press
• Volume 42, Number 3, August 2020
• pp. 168-170
• View Citation

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Author Interviews

'the color of law' details how u.s. housing policies created segregation.

NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with author Richard Rothstein about his new book, The Color of Law , which details how federal housing policies in the 1940s and '50s mandated segregation and undermined the ability of black families to own homes and build wealth.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

This is the day in 1954 that the Supreme Court issued its famous ruling desegregating schools, Brown versus Board of Education. Today, schools remain largely segregated, and the author Richard Rothstein argues that's because housing is segregated. Even today, black and white people generally don't live in the same neighborhoods. Rothstein's new book is called "The Color Of Law: A Forgotten History Of How Our Government Segregated America." Welcome to the program.

RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: Thank you very much.

SHAPIRO: So the basic argument of your book is that while racist individuals might have contributed to housing segregation in specific cases, there was an overwhelming amount of government policy at the state, local and federal level that explicitly forced black people to live in different places from white people. And I have to admit that reading this book, the geographic scope, the longevity, the sheer creativity of these policies really took me by surprise.

ROTHSTEIN: It takes many people by surprise. This whole history has been forgotten. It used to be well-known. There was nothing hidden about it. The federal government pursued two important policies in the mid-20th century that segregated metropolitan areas. One was the first civilian public housing program which frequently demolished integrated neighborhoods in order to create segregated public housing.

The second program that the federal government pursued was to subsidize the development of suburbs on a condition that they be only sold to white families and that the homes in those suburbs had deeds that prohibited resale to African-Americans. These two policies worked together to segregate metropolitan areas in ways that they otherwise would never have been segregated.

SHAPIRO: The book gives so many different examples of how this played out, and one of the worst offenders is the FHA, the Federal Housing Administration. Explain why this one government agency has so much influence over where people live and what the FHA did to prevent black people from buying and owning homes.

ROTHSTEIN: Perhaps the best-known example is Levittown, just east of New York City, but there were subdivisions like this all over the country. What the federal government did in the 1940s and '50s, it came to a developer like Levitt, the Levitt family that built Levittown. That family could never have assembled the capital necessary to build 17,000 homes on its own.

What the federal government did, the FHA, is guarantee bank loans for construction and development to Levittown on condition that no homes be sold to African-Americans and that every home have a clause in its deed prohibiting resale to African-Americans.

SHAPIRO: The FHA policies here were not merely incentives or encouragements. You tell the story of progressive, idealistic developers who wanted to build integrated housing communities and were absolutely unable to do so. And we're not just talking about in the Deep South here.

ROTHSTEIN: We're not talking about the Deep South at all. We're talking of the North, the West, the Midwest. The great American novelist Wallace Stegner got a job right after World War II at Stanford University. There was an enormous civilian housing shortage. He joined and helped to lead a co-operative of 400 families who bought a large tract outside Stanford University where they wanted to build single-family homes.

The FHA refused to insure those homes refused to provide the capital for construction because the 400-member co-operative had three African-American members. The co-operative tried to resist the FHA's demand, promising the FHA that the number of African-Americans in the co-operative wouldn't exceed the percentage of African-Americans in California as a whole.

The FHA refused that compromise. Finally, the co-operative had to disband because they couldn't go ahead with the project. They sold the land to a private developer, who with FHA guarantees built single family homes with racially exclusive deeds.

SHAPIRO: Your book also explains one way in which black neighborhoods became undesirable. You described zoning laws in which black parts of town were officially zoned for industrial plants, waste disposal, other things that we would consider a blight. And meanwhile, those businesses were explicitly kept out of white neighborhoods in the same cities.

ROTHSTEIN: Yes, there are examples in St. Louis and Los Angeles, neighborhoods that once they had African-American residents were rezoned to permit industrial and toxic uses. Those rezonings turned those neighborhoods into slums. White families outside those neighborhoods looked upon the neighborhoods, saw slums and concluded that African-Americans were slum dwellers and that if they moved into their neighborhoods, into the white neighborhoods, they would bring those conditions with them.

SHAPIRO: Why were all of these policies put in place? Was it just overt racism on the part of policy makers? What actually was the motivation?

ROTHSTEIN: Well, that's very hard to know. And one thing that should be remembered is that it can't be blamed simply on the standards of the time because there were people who dissented. People did know better, but they had other priorities. And they caved in to private prejudice and some of their constituents. They themselves were prejudiced. It was assumptions about racial superiority, but it also was cowardice in not confronting popular views about racial superiority.

SHAPIRO: So as you lay out this history, these segregationist, discriminatory, harmful structures were built over the first half of the 20th century, and then Congress passes the Fair Housing Act in 1968 which says many of those practices were illegal, unconstitutional and they stop - for the most part, the worst ones. Why doesn't that solve the problem?

ROTHSTEIN: Well, because all the Fair Housing Act could do was prohibit future discrimination. But by the time the Fair Housing Act was passed, the patterns of segregation had been firmly established. Simply passing a Fair Housing Act did not enable African-Americans who were previously living in urban areas to relocate to the suburbs from which they'd been excluded. I gave the example earlier of Levittown in 1947-48, when those homes were built with a racially restrictive policy.

Those homes sold for about $8,000 a piece or $100,000 more or less in today's currency. African-Americans, working class families could have bought those homes. Today though, those homes sell for $300,000, $400,000. They're no longer affordable to working class families. In the ensuing two generations, the white families who moved into those homes gained that $200,000, $300,000 in equity appreciation.

African-Americans living in rented apartments, prohibited from moving to the suburbs, gained none of that appreciation. The result is that today nationwide, African-American incomes on average are about 60 percent of white incomes, but African-American wealth is about 5 to 7 percent of white wealth. That enormous difference is almost entirely attributable to unconstitutional federal housing policy practiced in the mid-20th century.

SHAPIRO: The current secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, has criticized what he calls social engineering programs that are meant to help black homeowners or renters. It sounds as though you're arguing that the first two-thirds of the 20th century were social engineering to harm black people in homeownership and that maybe it will require some social engineering to undo that harm.

ROTHSTEIN: Yes. What I tell Secretary Carson is that the reforms that he's criticizing are an attempt to undo social engineering. Clearly he's right that when you try to engineer social policy the way that is necessary to reverse segregation, there are some unintended consequences.

There will be prices to be paid, but those prices are small compared to the costs of the social engineering that was conducted in the first two-thirds of the 20th century by the federal government. And that's a price that we have to pay to rectify a serious constitutional violation.

SHAPIRO: Richard Rothstein is with the Economic Policy Institute and the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. His new book is "The Color Of Law: A Forgotten History Of How Our Government Segregated America." Thank you so much.

ROTHSTEIN: Thank you.

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BOOK REVIEW: The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

By Nancy Fahey Smith, NASJE Western Region Director

“ An unjust law is no law at all.” —St. Augustine

This quote from St. Augustine says it all for me after reading Richard Rothstein’s well-researched book The Color of Law ( AMAZON ). As an educator who spent the last 10 plus years working for the courts, where the rule of law reigns supreme, this book challenged what I thought I knew about segregation, racism, public housing and the law. As such, this enlightening book is valuable to judges and court employees for understanding who comes to court and how they get there.

While currently most public housing is targeted towards the poor, in its early days, public housing was built for working- and middle-class families. Since few houses were constructed during the Depression, a huge shortage of housing developed in the 1930’s. When the economy ramped up with as WWII began, millions of workers, both white and African-American, migrated to cities where those factories offered work. The government invested in public housing to provide war workers with homes. But rather than make this housing available to all workers in all areas, the laws passed by Congress and the policies of the Public Works Administration, and later the Federal Housing Authority, required subdivisions to be segregated. The 1949 Federal Housing Act, which Mr. Rothstein calls the “poison pill” of housing legislation, affirmed segregation practices in law. In addition, many more white subdivisions were built than African-American subdivisions, forcing black people into crowded conditions or dwellings far from their work sites as they tried to find adequate housing. In addition, black subdivisions tended to be built in less desirable locations, for example, near heavy industry and dumps, where polluted conditions compromised the health of those forced to live there. No other choices were available to them.

In addition, African-American workers were hired only for the most menial and lowest-paying positions, until the dire need for workers forced war industries to hire them for any position for which they had the aptitude. But the greater pay these workers earned did not allow them access into white subdivisions even when they could afford to live there.

According to Mr. Rothstein, and supported in public record, the results of forcing segregation where it had previously not existed or was minimal, like in California, were many, and continue to exist and harm African-Americans today. In addition to negative health conditions mentioned above, another result of forced segregation was overcrowded neighborhoods which turned into slums. With housing for African-Americans in short supply, families subdivided their homes and took in renters, multiple families shared homes, and the resulting overcrowding caused neighborhoods to go downhill. In addition, housing segregation reinforced school segregation, and black schools were underfunded and inferior to white schools. Since black families could not buy houses that they could afford in better neighborhoods, they were not able to accumulate wealth and education the way white families could, a disparity that continues today. Mr. Rothstein explains clearly how government-sanctioned housing segregation negatively impacted, and continues to negatively impact, black families in areas of health, achievement gaps, wealth disparities, and mass incarceration.

As an example of how housing segregation continues to hurt African-American families, Mr. Rothstein shows how in the time prior to the great recession of 2008-2009, lenders targeted low-income people and African-Americans (both working- and middle-class) for toxic mortgages in far greater numbers than middle class white Americans. When the recession occurred, these families lost most of the wealth they had earned over decades. African-Americans who lost their wealth with their homes far exceeded white Americans in the same situation.

Mr. Rothstein finishes his book with possible remedies to the continued discrimination against African-American families. His solutions are sometimes radical, a fact he admits. As one example, he cites the gentrification of older neighborhoods around city centers. Mr. Rothstein states that while gentrification is not necessarily a bad thing, unless something is done to help the poorer neighbors living in these neighborhoods so that they can either upgrade their homes and stay or purchase reasonable housing elsewhere, gentrified neighborhoods end up richer, whiter enclaves and poorer residents end up in slums since those areas are often all they can afford when rents become unaffordable where they used to live.

The Color of Law is rich with well-documented history and details of how public housing became segregated, how it hurt African-Americans, and how it continues to harm them. The fact that this segregation was de jure and not de facto provides a rich area to begin a discussion with judges and other court employees. This book is recommended for all court employees and is an excellent choice for any law and literature class or book club discussion.

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The Color of Law & Residential Segregation: A “Walking Toward Justice” Webinar

6:07 PM PDT on September 28, 2017

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Redlining, the practice of denying loans to communities of color in the 1930s, was one of many ways segregation was embedded in the DNA of cities and continues to shape their growth and development today. Source: Mapping Inequality – the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab

On Wednesday, September 27, America Walks hosted a wide-ranging discussion of Richard Rothstein's important and timely book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Government Segregated America , moderated by Charles Brown (Senior Researcher with the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center), and featuring author Rothstein (research associate at the Economic Policy Institute), Tamika Butler (Executive Director of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust), Sonia Jimenez (Business Manager and Lead Consultant of Ximenes & Associates, Inc.), and myself (Communities Editor at Streetsblog L.A.). The webinar was the first in America Walks' new series, " Walking Toward Justice ," developed in collaboration with Brown in an effort to provide an open forum for exploration of the intersection of history, race, class, gender, and politics with mobility.

The webinar opened, as one might expect, with a straightforward discussion of the core thesis of the book and its myriad implications for planning.

For those that haven't read The Color of Law , it addresses the myth that the current forms of segregation we see in our metropolitan areas evolved naturally and therefore cannot be remedied through policy. Instead, Rothstein argues, segregation is the product of explicit federal, state, and local policy designed to both insulate whites from blacks and other non-whites and give whites a leg up in the process.

Evidence for this thesis is meticulously detailed on page after page: how integrated or non-white neighborhoods were demolished to make way for the construction of public housing for middle-class whites during the Great Depression and, later, freeways; how mortgages were denied to blacks and other members of "inharmonious" groups, including black veterans returning from war; how developers were able to get federally guaranteed loans to build entire subdivisions on the condition that the homes would never be sold or rented to African Americans; how local authorities looked the other way when black families' homes were fire-bombed; and how blacks were denied opportunities for wealth accumulation via home ownership or gainful employment. The resulting yawning gap between black and white wealth , Rothstein says, must be attributed to the denial of home ownership to African Americans.

It's a damning look at what the effort to institutionalize and uphold white supremacy hath wrought.

Whether this history is truly "forgotten," as the book's subtitle suggests, or one that we, as a nation, have conveniently pretended not to remember, it is one that - thanks to the way that these policies flouted the protections embedded within the 5th, 13th, and 14th amendments , Rothstein argues - we are constitutionally obligated to remedy.

To right these historical wrongs, he makes clear again and again, we must first acknowledge them.

On this, Rothstein couldn't be more correct, the panelists agreed, while expressing enthusiasm for a book that had shone such a clear light on the history of how our metropolitan areas came to be.

Over the course of the hour-and-a-half-long webinar, however, it became very clear that determining exactly what the full scope of those wrongs were and how we might go about confronting them is complicated. And that one's positioning in relation to those wrongs can have a significant impact on how one defines them as well as the kinds of solutions one might deem appropriate.

When asked how white privilege intersected with the privileges that had been deliberately accorded to whites, for example, Rothstein said that he did not use that term and did not focus on it.

"We're all in this together," he said, explaining that he did not find it productive to cast blame. It would be impossible to build the coalition needed to correct these injustices, he continued, by making others "feel guilty for policies they are not responsible for."

Certainly, white families had benefited, he acknowledged. "But it wasn't their fault."

It was a surprising statement given the history that Rothstein himself had laid out within the book.

White citizens had fire-bombed the homes of black families, protested the integration of schools, signed contracts agreeing never to sell their homes to African Americans, found creative ways to zone their communities, sued their neighbors for selling to black families, formed roving gangs to harass and beat up folks of color, chased blacks out of sundown towns and denied them services, and lobbied to protect their own communities from environmental harm, among many other things. The policies that facilitated segregation were neither self-generating nor self-sustaining. And the larger system those policies helped build could never have denied rights to African Americans so successfully for so long without both active and passive buy-in from the very community that expected to reap benefits from it.

Even webinar attendees were quick to note the disconnect.

Brown read a comment from one such viewer who stated unequivocally, "To deny white privilege when you studied policies to demonstrate how white people have been privileged is absurd."

Which, of course, it is.

Whiteness is the standard against which things tend to be rendered valid or invalid, the central experience around which our institutions are built, and the lens through which we frame problems, propose solutions, and measure success. It is a state of affairs that is only possible because of the extent to which whites deployed policy to their advantage at the expense of everyone else. You personally may not have firebombed a black person's home, but your positioning (if you are a white person or someone with a degree of privilege) is a direct result of the extent to which policies that benefited your community turned a blind eye to practices aimed at constraining the mobility of folks of color. It's a truth that doesn't necessarily require you to feel "guilty," per se. But it does render you complicit if you are unwilling to examine your positioning or participate in the dismantling of the long-standing barriers that continue to deny others the validation, access, mobility, and power you enjoy.

As Butler noted in her remarks, she understood both strategically and intellectually the importance of not making people feel "guilty" in coalition-building. But she also argued that that approach centered whiteness. It put white feelings and white discomfort about privilege above the actual ongoing generational pain lived by those that had been tangibly harmed by discriminatory policies. Moreover, it invalidated the experience of the black community, her own experience included, and once again relegated them to the margins. Adhering to such an approach, she argued, would both uphold white privilege and continue to limit our ability to make real change in the way we plan for and govern our cities.

Picking up on Butler's point, Jimenez spoke of the fact that this history is generally absent from our curricula, making these conversations all the more difficult and leaving marginalized communities that much more vulnerable by robbing them of voice. Engaging people where they were and ensuring dialogues were inclusive - however uncomfortable they might be - was essential to moving forward.

My own comments suggested the omission of the tremendous harm the enforcement of segregation had done to the overall well-being of communities had made it easier to push aside uncomfortable questions of privilege and responsibility. The trauma resulting from what non-white communities, and particularly the black community, had endured had to be acknowledged and engaged, I said. Not just to give that pain its due, but also because there was great resilience and strength within the communities that had managed to survive and thrive in their own way, even as every avenue seemed to be closed off to them. There was much to be celebrated in that resilience, I contended, and much to be learned.

Uncomfortable conversations are about more than validation of communities' experiences, however. They are essential to our ability to arrive at better solutions, as seen in an exchange about integration.

When asked about how to avoid displacement in the effort to integrate communities - a solution he advocates for - Rothstein said without hesitation that "every community should be gentrified."

Astute listeners to the webinar will hear me squeak, "Oh dear god!" and Brown step in a moment later to ask Rothstein to clarify what he meant.

The response had been involuntary - a visceral reaction, I explained, to the glossing over of the herculean effort that goes into making formerly red-lined communities "safe" and "hospitable" for better-off newcomers. Just as considerable societal muscle had to be expended to create and maintain spaces where whites felt comfortable during the period Rothstein explores, considerable effort is being expended now to make urban spaces "safe," "walkable," "vibrant," "welcoming," and free from "suspicious-looking" folks.

Today's processes may be more privately driven, particularly by real estate developers who understand the power of coded language and of rebranding neighborhoods as "up-and-coming," "edgy," "quaint," and "eclectic." But cities continue to play a role, too, working to "reclaim streets for people" via "place-making" and "re-imagining" efforts that both ignore the extent to which black and brown folks were driven out of the public space and devalue the community those residents managed to forge in private spaces. Ultimately, the results are the same: the erasure of visual, cultural, and, eventually, physical traces of the people that don't fit within white-centered visions of community.

The lens Rothstein had deployed allowed no room for contemplation of these dynamics. His clinical examination of discriminatory policies - while incredibly thorough - had largely been limited to the economic implications of segregation (wealth gaps, population distribution, etc.).

It appears, at least in part, that he had chosen such a narrow lens in order to be able to more easily identify concrete constitutional obligations to the groups that these policies had left behind. But that sort of de-contextualized approach to policy-making is one that Butler had pointed to early on in her remarks as a sign of privilege - the luxury of not having to consider more intricate forms of harm and how they might complicate the ability of those that had been harmed to move forward.

Communities had not just been divided by race or denied the ability to accumulate wealth, in other words. The very well-being of white communities had been inextricably linked to the marginalization, suppression, isolation, and incarceration of their black counterparts over generations.

Solutions that fail to acknowledge that legacy or engage the traumas and barriers it generated can't help but perpetuate those structural injustices.

All told, it was not the conversation I and some of the other panelists expected to have going in, especially given that we viewed the book as having something very powerful to say about the role of white supremacy in the development of our cities. But it was a very honest and necessary conversation about how positioning and privilege can factor in to the way we conceptualize problems and the solutions we are likely to propose. It also underscores the urgency of Tamika's call for inclusion - true inclusion - if we are ever going to truly get beyond our not-particularly-distant segregationist past.

"I'm beyond the diverse society. I don't want just a diverse society. Just having diversity means that when we look around the room, we just have different faces and different abilities and different genders and different gender identities sitting around that table. I want those folks who are around that table to also be involved in the decision-making. I want them to have the power to guide where we go. Segregation has prevented us from ever getting to inclusion ...I don't see folks like me being the folks of power making decisions. When you don't even have us at the table, but then also bring us to the table and don't let us speak or say anything, in both situations we're invisible. And I think segregation has allowed us to continue to make certain folks invisible."

Many thanks to America Walks for hosting this discussion and giving us the space to problematize and dig into the parameters of privilege. Many thanks to Charles Brown for having the vision to see what this conversation could be and ably guiding us along that path. Many thanks to Richard Rothstein for writing such a tremendous book and being willing to tread uncomfortable ground with us. And many thanks to the panelists, Sonia Jimenez and Tamika Butler, who I am grateful to continue to learn from every day.

Please join Brown and America Walks for the next installment in the Walking Towards Justice Series , slated for some time in the new year.

* During the webinar I mention an article called "Equity 101: Bikes v. Bodies on Bikes." Find that here .

Sahra is Communities Editor for Streetsblog L.A., covering the intersection of mobility with race, class, history, representation, policing, housing, health, culture, community, and access to the public space in Boyle Heights and South Central Los Angeles.

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The Color of Law

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In his book The Color of Law , author and historian Richard Rothstein makes the case that the modern American metropolis was created with deliberate, de jure segregation, with the help of things including racial zoning, redlining, and a phenomenon known as "The Great Migration" and "White Flight." And ultimately, as the book's subtitle suggests, The Color of Law talks about how the U.S. Government "segregated America."

When it was released, The Color of Law received positive reviews. Kirkus Reviews, for example, loved the book and wrote that it is "An informed, important exposé of the nation’s institutionalized racism that would have been even more reader-friendly with the inclusion of more individual case histories." Publisher's Weekly also liked the book, opining that "This compassionate and scholarly diagnosis of past policies and prescription for our current racial maladies shines a bright light on some shadowy spaces."

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The Color of Law Questions and Answers

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Study Guide for The Color of Law

The Color of Law study guide contains a biography of Richard Rothstein, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Book Summary The Color Of Law , by Richard Rothstein

Widely acclaimed upon its publication in 2017, The Color of Law demonstrates that racial residential segregation—the fact that some neighborhoods are almost exclusively African American while others are almost exclusively white—is the result of explicit government policy rather than personal choice and random chance. From the conclusion of the Civil War through to the present day, federal, state, and local governments have enacted laws to confine African Americans to particular areas and prevent them from moving into others. These policies have had a profound and lasting impact on African Americans, affecting their educational and job opportunities, economic well-being, and physical health.

1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of The Color Of Law

Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law argues that racial residential segregation—the fact that some neighborhoods are almost exclusively African American while others are almost exclusively white—is the result of explicit government policy rather than personal choice. In other words, racial residential segregation in the United States is de jure (“by law”) rather than de facto (in this context, “by virtue of personal choices or random circumstances”). The distinction between de jure and de facto segregation is paramount, because de jure segregation is unconstitutional: It infringes the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.

Each section below covers a specific way in which racial residential segregation was realized, from the segregation of public housing to labor-market discrimination.

(A note on terminology: Rothstein uses “Black” and “African American” interchangeably, and refers purposefully to “ghettos.” A “ghetto” describes a residential area with a concentrated minority, a shortage of opportunity, and significant barriers to exit. These three conditions apply to contemporary African American neighborhoods .)

Public Housing as a Segregating Agent

One of the most important methods by which government segregated cities was the construction of segregated public housing (“projects”) from World War I through to the 1960s and 1970s. By confining African Americans to subpar public housing in undesirable areas, federal, state, and local authorities promoted (1) the segregation of their cities and (2) the transformation of predominantly Black areas into slums.

Projects were segregated as a matter of policy. For example, they had to abide by the “neighborhood composition rule”—that is, they had to reflect the racial composition of the neighborhood around them .

During WWII, segregated projects were constructed near shipyards to house the influx of war workers. Black workers were housed close to worksites in shoddily constructed units , while white workers lived in sturdier projects further inland. (White workers were also subsidized to rent rooms from private landlords.)

After WWII, city-level public housing authorities used segregated public housing to ghettoize their African American residents . For example, in 1952, the NAACP took the San Francisco public housing authority to court, claiming that though the authority had promised to make all new construction integrated, it was trying to build a new segregated project. Under oath, the authority’s chairman admitted that the agency was purposely trying to confine African Americans to particular locations in the city.

Exclusionary Zoning Laws

Another key cause of racial residential segregation in the US was the enactment of discriminatory zoning laws. Zoning laws are local ordinances that limit how certain “zones”—or areas—in a municipality can be developed; racial zoning laws restricted African Americans from owning property in certain areas.

After the Supreme Court ruled racial zoning unconstitutional in Buchanan v. Warley , city authorities found workarounds and subterfuges that allowed them to continue segregating by race . Two such strategies were:

1) Economic Zoning

Officials passed ordinances limiting certain neighborhoods to single-family homes affordable only to middle-income people . Because African Americans had been historically and systematically discriminated against in the job market, many were lower-income and so could only afford housing in apartment buildings— structures that were banned by these ordinances. The result was that areas zoned for single-family homes stayed or became white while areas that allowed multiple-family dwellings stayed or became African American.

2) Industrial Zoning

Certain areas in municipalities are zoned specifically for industry to protect residents from nuisances like noise and air pollution. To further segregate their cities in the wake of Buchanan , city officials zoned areas near predominantly Black neighborhoods for industry. This move lowered property values in those areas , thereby reducing the current residents’ wealth and limiting their opportunities to move out .

An example of this method can be seen in South Central Los Angeles, a predominantly Black area. In the 1940s, the city began using “spot” rezoning ordinances to move automobile junkyards and commercial factories into the area , thus ghettoizing the residents.

Federal Loan Discrimination

The shortcoming of economic zoning—at least as far as segregationists were concerned—was that it was race-blind: If a Black family were wealthy enough, they could live in an economically zoned neighborhood. In order to keep African Americans confined to particular neighborhoods, the federal government pursued a two-pronged approach. First, it appraised areas that were majority African American as “risky” (a process known as “redlining”); then it denied loan guarantees and financial support to Black families attempting to live outside those areas.

The agency doing the denying was the Federal Housing Administration (“FHA”). Created to increase home ownership by insuring private bank mortgages and facilitating more advantageous terms, the FHA systematically discriminated against Black families. Their reasoning was that integration led to a “reduction in [property] values.”

Private Sector Abuses

Not all efforts to maintain and further residential segregation originated with the federal government; three common strategies—restrictive covenants, blockbusting, and contract sales—developed among private enterprises. Nevertheless, the federal government consistently condoned—or, at the very least, ignored—these injustices .

Restrictive Covenants

Restrictive covenants are stipulations in deeds that obligate the owner of the property to undertake certain actions or follow...

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The Color Of Law Summary Shortform Introduction

Widely reviewed and discussed when it was published in 2017, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law makes the case that racial residential segregation —the fact that African Americans largely live in discrete areas separate from white Americans—is the result of explicit government policy (“de jure” segregation) rather than personal preferences or random processes (“de facto” segregation). That is, historically, African Americans didn’t choose to live almost exclusively among themselves ; rather, they were compelled to do so by** an array of discriminatory policies designed and implemented by...

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The Color Of Law Summary Introduction

Before he delves into the discrete means by which government sponsored racial residential segregation, Rothstein discusses the terminology he’ll be using throughout the book and offers a brief history of de jure segregation.

A Note on Terminology

The use of the term “ghetto” to refer to predominantly Black neighborhoods has become unacceptable, but Rothstein argues the term accurately denotes the situation of racial residential segregation, and therefore uses it in his work. A ghetto describes a residential area with a concentrated minority, a shortage of opportunity, and significant barriers to exit. These three conditions apply to contemporary African American neighborhoods .

It is also habit to despecificate the African American experience by referring generally to “people of color.” Rothstein resists this habit, because the policies he discusses were designed to disadvantage African Americans specifically .

Rothstein uses “African American” and “Black” interchangeably in accordance with contemporary norms. He also occasionally uses the (now unacceptable) term “Negro” in historical contexts when that was the preferred nomenclature.

The History of De...

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The Color Of Law Summary Chapter 1: Public Housing as a Segregating Agent

One of the most significant methods the federal government used to institute racial residential segregation was public housing policy. Throughout much of the 20th century, federal housing was segregated by race, and rules mandated that units for African Americans be built in predominantly African American areas and units for whites be built in predominantly white areas . These rules entrenched the racial makeup of areas that, but for the introduction of segregated public housing, could have remained—or been further—integrated.

A History of US Public Housing

In the contemporary imagination, public housing—or “projects,” as they’re colloquially known—is composed of dreary high rises, largely occupied by families of color headed by single mothers. This stereotype isn’t true: Present-day public housing can consist of attractive low-rise structures and count whites and BIPOC alike among its inhabitants. In fact, at least in its early history, public housing was the exclusive province of whites .

The first public housing units were built during World War I to accommodate war-industry workers. In this era, 83 projects housed 170,000 (white) workers. Although African...

The Color Of Law Summary Chapter 2: How Racial Zoning Laws Segregated Cities

Of course, public housing wasn’t the only means by which government furthered racial residential segregation. Another lever to separate whites from Blacks was racial zoning laws— rules that prohibited Blacks from owning property in white areas (and vice versa) . The following sections detail the history of racial zoning in the US and explain how discrimination continued even after racial zoning was declared unconstitutional.

Integration and Its End in the Reconstruction Era

In the aftermath of the Civil War, African Americans gained not only their physical freedom but also a slate of civil and political rights. Formerly enslaved people scattered across the country and, for about a decade, integrated towns and lived relatively unharassed.

These gains were quickly reversed, however, with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes as president in 1877. In order to secure his election, which was disputed, abolitionist Republicans cut a deal with racist southern Democrats: If the Democrats voted for the Republican Hayes, his administration would remove the federal troops occupying the South. (The federal troops were there to keep the peace and enforce the civil rights laws passed...

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The Color Of Law Summary Chapter 3: How the Federal Government Worsened Residential Segregation

The shortcoming of economic zoning—at least as far as segregationists were concerned—was that it was race-blind: Although many African American families were too poor to own single-family homes, not all were, and so if a Black family could afford to buy a single-family home, they could live in an economically zoned area .

Two policy objectives pursued by the federal government in the middle of the 20th century furthered the cause of segregation. Through agencies like the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the government (1) encouraged and financed the movement of white families out of urban centers and into suburban tracts and (2) withheld that support from African Americans, thereby consigning them to those urban centers.

The Rise of the Suburbs

The origins of the government’s discriminatory interventions in the private housing market can be found in the early twentieth century. Elected officials, wary of the communist takeover in Russia, theorized that the wider ownership of property would act as a bulwark against communism (because the more people who owned property, the more people who would be committed to the...

The Color Of Law Summary Chapter 4: The Public—Private Push to Segregate

Years before the FHA adopted explicitly discriminatory policies that furthered racial residential segregation, private homeowners and developers regularly included racist “restrictive covenants” with deeds to particular properties. These covenants were ignored, then propped up, by the federal government, and so constitute a further incidence of de jure segregation .

Restrictive covenants comprised the obligations a purchaser of a property was agreeing to when he or she assumed ownership. They included stipulations concerning the color(s) the home could be painted or what kinds of foliage an owner could plant. They also frequently included a clause that forbade the owner from selling or renting to an African American. In the 20s, it was not uncommon to find among the list of prohibitions—of constructing a slaughterhouse or smithy on the premises, of producing noxious odors through manufacturing—a line limiting the property to “people of the Caucasian race” (with the notable exception, of course, of domestic workers). Often all the homes in a particular area would feature racist restrictive covenants, thus limiting that area to whites only.

The problem with...

The Color Of Law Summary Chapter 5: How the IRS and Regulatory Agencies Furthered Segregation

Government’s contribution to racial residential segregation didn’t end with federal and local housing programs or the FHA. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), as well as an array of regulator agencies, also exacerbated segregation by neglecting their constitutional obligations not to promote prejudice or discrimination.

The Role of the IRS in Racial Residential Segregation

The IRS contributed to racial residential segregation by failing to follow its own rules against promoting discrimination. One important area in which it did this was in the determination of tax-exempt status for US entities. IRS rules obligate the agency to withhold tax exemptions from organizations that countermand official public policy or promote prejudice and discrimination. Yet, throughout the middle of the 20th century, the IRS regularly conferred tax-exempt status on entities that contributed to racial residential segregation.

For instance, tax-exempt religious entities like churches and synagogues regularly promoted segregationist policies . In the 1940s, priests in North Philadelphia, Buffalo, New York, and Los Angeles spearheaded efforts to keep African Americans from moving...

The Color Of Law Summary Chapter 6: The Cooperation of Localities

As much as federal policy contributed to racial residential segregation, the small-scale efforts by state and municipal governments to keep their communities segregated , when considered in their totality, also clearly point to a system of de jure segregation in the United States.

One of the strategies localities used was zoning laws (as discussed in Chapter 3): reserving neighborhoods for single-family residences or industry, thereby funneling African Americans into overcrowded multi-family structures and loud or toxic areas . Others include:

• Withholding access to public utilities, reclassifying roads needed by African American families as “private,” and condemning privately owned land slated for integrated housing
• Pursuing “slum clearance” projects
• Using the placement of segregated schools to segregate cities
• Sanctioning violence against African Americans attempting to integrate neighborhoods

Segregationist Strategies on the Small Scale

One approach pursued by local officials to keep white communities segregated was to condemn privately owned land in white areas that was slated for African American families .

An illustrative example...

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The Color Of Law Summary Chapter 7: Unequal Incomes and Racial Residential Segregation

Commentators inclined to argue against the fact of de jure segregation often point to other explanations for that segregation. One such explanation they put forward is the well-documented disparity between African Americans’ and whites’ incomes. According to this argument, racial residential segregation isn’t the product of purposeful governmental policy but rather African Americans’ lower incomes—if African Americans had higher earnings, they could live wherever they want, including areas where whites predominate.

However, this argument fails to account for the public policies whose express intent was to depress African American wages. In other words, Black Americans’ lower average incomes and wealth were too the product of purposeful government (in)action —and so part of the structure of de jure segregation.

In the following sections, we’ll trace the long history of labor market discrimination against African Americans before turning to the specific actions taken by entities like labor unions and the Fair Employment Practices Committee.

Labor Market Discrimination From Reconstruction to the New Deal

The story of African Americans’ unfair treatment in...

The Color Of Law Summary Chapter 8: The Lasting Effects of Historical Segregation

With the enactment of the Fair Housing Act in April 1968—a vote spurred by the tragedy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination—the private segregationist practices described above finally became explicitly illegal. (Of course, the public practices had been unconstitutional since the conclusion of the Civil War.)

However, unlike other Civil-Rights-Era statutes that protected African Americans’ right to vote or patronize any restaurant of their choosing—statutes whose benefits were felt immediately— the Fair Housing Act was powerless to rectify the decades of housing discrimination that preceded its passage. That is to say, despite African Americans’ being able to live wherever they want, racial residential segregation has persisted due to the US’s history of de jure segregation.

Racial residential segregation is difficult to remedy for a number of reasons, but three in particular: the unaffordability of quality housing, the unintended consequences of race-blind public polity, and flawed social programs.

The Unaffordability of Quality Housing

The Federal Housing Act enshrines in law the ability for African Americans to live wherever they can afford to. But**...

The Color Of Law Summary Chapter 9: What Is to Be Done?

If outlawing discrimination in the private sector and enacting public policies to help low-income families find housing have failed to remedy racial residential segregation, what solution is there? Because undoing racial residential segregation—and the intergenerational damage it has done to African American wellbeing—is a massive challenge, Rothstein is loath to offer remedies for fear they will inevitably come up short. Nevertheless, he proposes some initial steps that may, in time, lead to a more integrated, and thus more equitable, society. Those steps are:

• Acknowledging de jure segregation
• Understanding that segregation hurts everyone
• Educating US youth about racial residential segregation
• Financing integration directly
• Banning exclusionary zoning and implementing inclusionary zoning
• Reforming Section 8

Acknowledging De Jure Segregation

First and foremost, Americans must realize that racial residential segregation isn’t the result of personal choices or the random outcomes of the housing and labor markets. Rather, it is the legacy of explicitly discriminatory public policy that flouted the US Constitution and US laws. Once elected...

The Color Of Law Summary Postscript: Frequently Asked Questions

In the ten years Rothstein researched de jure racial residential segregation, he unsurprisingly encountered a number of questions about his findings. In the book’s final chapter, he addresses some of these questions.

Question #1: The public officials who pursued segregation were men of their time; isn’t it unfair to judge their behavior by present-day mores?

This question ignores the many voices, belonging to both whites and African Americans, decrying segregation when it was most entrenched. For example, in 1914, after Woodrow Wilson began segregating federal offices, Christian leaders condemned the move. Later, officials in FDR’s administration like Harold Ickes and Frances Perkins desegregated their departments’ cafeterias, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the president, was the first white person to join the Washington, D.C., chapter of the NAACP. During WWII, while the Boilermakers union excluded African Americans, the United Auto Workers accepted them.

The fact that there were dissenting voices at the time belies the claim that segregation was just “the way of the world” during the early and mid-twentieth century. And so, when we judge public officials...

Shortform Exercise: Reflect on The Color of Law

Reflect on racial residential segregation and its possible remedies.

Rothstein describes numerous strategies public officials and private citizens used to force African Americans to live separately from white Americans. Which of these strategies was the most surprising or disturbing to you? Why?

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