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

Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law charges the United States' government with enacting racially explicit policies that segregated American cities and their suburbs, cost economic inequality, and hampered social mobility. Rather than a manifestation of private practices, government policies and oversight, Rothstein argues, are de jure factors and not de facto agents. The book provides evidence that the racial and economic composition of American cities "did not develop out of thin air," but was the result of government-backed redlining, environmental racism, unconstitutional laws, and a bevy of other discriminatory barriers (ix).

Chapter 1, entitled "If San Francisco, Then Everywhere," explains that even in cities outside of the American South, where segregation was an outright practice, color lines were instituted "purposely" via governmental policies. Rothstein asserts, by employing Black war industry worker Frank Stevenson and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), that "if it could happen in liberal San Francisco … it not could but did happen everywhere" (14). Chapter 2, "Public Housing, Black Ghettos," explores the original purpose of public housing, which was to provide poor, working, and lower-middle-class white families with living space, particularly for workers in wartime industries during World War I and II. These projects included appealing low-rise complexes, plentiful green spaces, park benches, community centers, decorative murals, and playgrounds. As suburban single-family homes became affordable to whites via government-backed loans, ordinances prohibited Blacks from obtaining the same opportunities.

In chapter 3, "Racial Zoning," Rothstein underscores the significance of segregation ordinances that expelled "wrong-race residents" from areas deemed "white." The goal was to keep lower-income Blacks from dwelling near middleclass whites and to bar middle-class Blacks from purchasing homes in the same neighborhoods as their white counterparts through concealed zoning practices. These measures, for instance, zoned single-family neighborhoods "first-residential," insuring more subdivisions and limiting industrial development. This chapter demonstrates how the government intentionally sought to keep Black Americans in high-poverty neighborhoods and moreover near industrial and environmentally hazardous businesses. Rothstein provides examples of racial zoning from Montana to Florida and via Buchanan v. Warley.

Chapter 4, "Own Your Own Home," outlines the 1917 Department of Labor campaign of the same title, which aimed to persuade white families to move from urban apartments to single-family suburban homes. Before World War I, home ownership was challenging for anyone not purchasing a home with cash, because financing generally required 50 percent down, interest-only payments, and full repayment in five to seven years, which drove many to refinance with parallel terms. In 1933, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation was established to buy mort-gages subject to foreclosure and started to issue principal and interest loans with up to fifteen year, and later twenty-five year, repayment schedules. The development of redlining restricted Blacks from obtaining financing.

In chapter 5, "Public Agreements, Government Enforcement," Rothstein explains how prohibiting African Americans from buying homes by way of deeds and covenants limited to people of "Caucasian race" benefited the developers and white owners, and undermined Blacks and other minority groups. Courts aided in stopping perceived "Negro invasions," evicting Blacks from homes they purchased, and judges backed restrictive covenants by deeming them private agreements thereby not violating the Constitution, see Shelley v. Kraemer (1948).

Chapter 6, "White Flight," outlines the panic and phenomenon of "blockbusting" whereby speculators rented and sold homes to African Americans causing an exodus of whites from the neighborhood. Blockbusters used creative tactics; for example, they hired Blacks to walk white neighborhoods with baby carriages or drive cars with music blaring to symbolize the area was integrating. When whites relocated, the FHA justified its policies to deny Blacks access to their new communities to prevent property values from plummeting.

Chapters 7 and 8, "IRS Support and Compliant Regulators" and "Local Tactics," demonstrate how "blatant, explicit, and influential" federal racial policies translated to state...