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

Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017) is a historical study of how the US government and legal system implemented and enforced de jure segregation. This guide cites the 2017 Kindle edition, and all pagination refers to location numbers.

Rothstein challenges the belief that segregation was de facto, or the result of individual choices. Rather, he shows how all levels of government created the system of residential segregation. Residential segregation has significant impacts due to the multigenerational nature of economic mobility. As African Americans were blocked from homeownership, a significant racial wealth gap emerged in the 20th century. White working- and middle-class people built equity, and the substantial appreciation of homes in the last 50 years means home are now unaffordable to many African Americans. That contemporary programs and laws by federal, state, and local governments continue to reinforce residential segregation is a key reason why desegregation has been so difficult to achieve.

Chapter 1 analyzes the racial segregation that emerged in San Francisco, considered a bastion of liberal progressiveness, during World War II. As people moved to the Bay Area in search of work, the government built segregated public housing to support the soaring population. Rothstein introduces Frank Stevenson, an African American man who moved to California during this time, to illustrate how de jure segregation impacted his life. Rothstein returns to Stevenson throughout the text to trace how this discrimination has endured in the present day. Chapter 2 outlines the history of public housing projects to document how the federal government shaped segregation, paying particular attention to the emergence of Black ghettos and the social opinion that public housing is for the poor.

In Chapter 3 Rothstein turns to local governments that used zoning laws to enforce segregation. He describes the various ways municipalities worked around the Supreme Court’s Buchanan v. Warley ruling, which determined racial zoning to be unconstitutional. Chapter 4 explores the promotion of homeownership by government agencies and the rise of the single-family home. Rothstein details how African Americans were deliberately excluded from this shift to the suburbs. Banks were discouraged from issuing loans in urban neighborhoods, for example, while federal agencies refused to insure mortgages for African Americans.

Chapter 5 examines how government agencies evaded court rulings that barred racial discrimination, including racial covenants, or contractual stipulations that prevented property owners from selling to African Americans. In Chapter 6 Rothstein turns to the phenomenon of white flight. He also discusses blockbusting, a method by which real estate brokers stoked fear about declining property values in White neighborhoods to purchase homes below their worth, only to sell them to African American families at inflated costs. Chapter 7 examines the failure of the IRS and other regulatory bodies to desegregate neighborhoods and ensure equitable access to housing. Rothstein also explains how discriminatory government policies persist today through practices like reverse redlining and subprime loans. Chapter 8 returns to local government regulations that enforced residential segregation. Some tactics included denying African Americans access to public utilities and building interstates to construct physical boundaries between segregated neighborhoods.

Chapter 9 examines the police’s failure to stop racial violence as an endorsement of segregation. Chapter 10 analyzes how African American incomes and wealth were stymied by racially discriminatory policies that perpetuated de jure segregation, such as the deliberate suppression of African American wages and the exclusion of African Americans from labor unions. Chapter 11 brings Rothstein’s history up to the present day. Although the Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965), and Fair Housing Act (1968) prohibited racial discrimination, the issue still persists, especially in housing. Residential segregation has proven especially difficult to eradicate, and its elimination is further complicated by government programs that still enforce segregation. Chapter 12 proposes some solutions to the ongoing problem of residential segregation. Rothstein asserts that recognizing de jure segregation, and the government’s continued hand in enacting and maintaining it, is an essential step toward successful desegregation.