The Color of Law

The Color of Law

by

Richard Rothstein

The Color of Law: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Rothstein contrasts common stereotypes about public housing with “the reality” that it was built primarily “for working- and lower-middle-class white families,” “not heavily subsidized” by the government, and intended to fill housing shortages, not to house people who couldn’t afford housing. New York and Boston, for instance, vetted potential tenants for “undesirable” traits before giving them housing.
Public housing is a natural topic for the first of Rothstein’s many chapters that deal with specific government segregation techniques. Not only is it clearly an example of de jure government policy, but it is also inextricably associated with black poverty in the American popular imagination. It also shows how austerity and privatization over the 20th century—the same factors that have concentrated African American people in ghettos—have gradually turned public services into a last resort for the poor in the United States, whereas it is normal for everyone to use them in most other developed countries.
Themes
In Part I of this chapter, Rothstein notes that the first non-military government housing in the United States consisted of apartments for white defense workers (and not their black colleagues) during World War I. These were sold to private companies after the war. Then, from the 1930s-1950s, the United States “faced a serious housing shortage,” largely because housing construction froze during the Great Depression and the military took “all construction material” during World War II.
Again, this origin story for public housing runs contrary to most Americans’ assumptions about it. World War I housing was explicitly segregated, de jure, and offers a good example of how government can provide quality housing to citizens if it so chooses. While today the problem is a lack of political will, in the 1930s-1950s the problem was literally a lack of material, resources, and labor to build sufficient housing.
Themes
While “[the] New Deal created the nation’s first public housing for civilians,” it was explicitly segregated. For instance, the Tennessee Valley Authority created “a model village […] open only to whites” and all of the labor camps at the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) work-relief program were segregated—when local governments tried to integrate some such camps, the federal government mandated that they be segregated. And “even segregated African American CCC camps” were too controversial for some localities to accept.
The New Deal was incredibly significant in 20th-century American history because it was responsible for both keeping a generation out of poverty during the Great Depression and constructing much of the infrastructure that helped the United States develop economically over the following decades. However, because of both federal and local racism, its economic benefits were largely unavailable to African American people. Again, the federal government willfully and unconstitutionally neglected the needs of part of the American population, which constitutes de jure discrimination because the laws did not equally protect or benefit all.
Themes
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In Part II of the chapter, Rothstein reveals that non-New Deal public housing under Roosevelt was “even more rigid[ly]” segregated. In fact, Harold Ickes, the rather liberal head of the Public Works Administration (PWA) was controversial for giving “one-third of the units” to African American families, even though all his projects were segregated. Ickes developed the “neighborhood composition rule,” building projects in neighborhoods of the same race. Local governments “designated [areas] exclusively for black residents,” and the PWA built black-only projects there. Even in places where neighborhoods weren’t already segregated, the PWA built exclusively white or black public housing in order to change the composition of neighborhoods.
While President Franklin Roosevelt is often seen as a benevolent populist who prioritized the interests of normal working people in a time of need, he clearly did not do so for all working people. At the same time, it is clear that he was struggling against even more racist elements in the American government. But as Rothstein emphasizes at the end of his book, this does not mean Roosevelt’s racism and discriminatory policies can or should be forgiven. The “neighborhood composition rule” is an excellent example of how a program intended to discriminate and segregate can be disguised as objective and benevolent in order to win political support and/or avoid challenges in the courts. Still, the government’s racism lies in its assumptions: is there any good justification for segregating public housing or keeping neighborhoods homogeneous in the first place?
Themes
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Rothstein offers some examples of how PWA projects intentionally segregated previously integrated areas. For its first project in 1935, the PWA destroyed an integrated Atlanta neighborhood to build whites-only public housing, which forced the neighborhood’s African American inhabitants to move to segregated, increasingly overpopulated African American areas that soon became “slums.” The year before in St. Louis, the city government demolished two integrated neighborhoods in order to build two new, segregated ones. The PWA did this again in Cleveland, constructing segregated housing projects in a historically integrated neighborhood. One representative project for white people had “a community center, playgrounds, and plentiful green space,” but black-only projects “rarely” had such amenities. Similar policies “also concentrated African Americans in low income neighborhoods in Detroit, Indianapolis, Toledo, and New York.”
While public housing supported white communities, it impoverished African American ones, not because of an income or education difference between black and white residents—although there was such a gap, it did not cause segregation—but rather because it deliberately devoted resources to white communities, leaving African American people with inadequate housing and few government services relative to their population. This difference in services is one of the critical reasons that Rothstein considers segregation a way of keeping African American people as second-class citizens. The pattern of deliberate de-integration through public housing is different, and substantially worse, than simply exacerbating segregation according to the “neighborhood composition rule”—because it destroys integrated neighborhoods in the process too.
Themes
But the PWA housing program was short-lived, and from 1937 onwards, localities had to apply for federal subsidies from the U.S. Housing Authority (USHA), which nevertheless continued to create “new racially homogeneous communities” while claiming outwardly to leave neighborhoods’ racial makeup untouched. Austin, Texas saw “the first USHA-funded projects,” in which the neighborhood-owned Emancipation Park was razed to make way for a blacks-only housing project. And when cities “already had distinct African American neighborhoods,” PWA and USHA projects reinforced segregation by constructing housing projects in these neighborhoods, for instance in Chicago. While “New Deal public housing” is not solely responsible for segregation in American cities, it was a very important contributor, as it essentially turned neighborhoods that housed both white people and black people into “the segregated ones that now seem so unexceptional.”
These cases are even more egregious examples of how government used its power to construct public housing and segregate neighborhoods at the same time. While conducted by the government, this was a relatively informal process, in the sense that it relied on individual government agents’ discretion and willingness to stretch the law. As Rothstein later emphasizes, while there is nothing illegal about destroying a park to build a housing project, consistently destroying public land to develop low-quality housing in black neighborhoods, while also making an effort to construct high-quality housing with minimal adverse impacts in white neighborhoods, constitutes an unconstitutional pattern of discrimination. A good comparison is employment discrimination: while it is very difficult to rule that any individual instance of a nonwhite person being rejected from a job counts as racial discrimination, a pattern of such instances does clearly constitute discrimination. However, in the cases of both housing and employment discrimination, this becomes difficult to stop because the courts need to recognize such a pattern and find a way to legally block individual instances of it from occurring in the future.
Themes
Quotes
Rothstein begins Part III of this chapter by explaining how the 1940 Lanham Act provided funding to construct public housing for defense workers during World War II, but effectively only did so for white people. After the War, “local governments, with federal support,” pushed for segregation all around the United States. Rothstein focuses on three examples here, from Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco.
During and after World War II, government still took responsibility for housing precisely because it conceived of housing the (white) population as one of its responsibilities. However, Americans living in the 21st century likely realize that this is no longer the case—this function has since been delegated entirely to the private real estate industry, with government left to provide housing only for those too poor to find their own housing. This, too, is a de jure form of second-class citizenship—but, like segregation in the past, it is legal and widely considered right, in the United States, for the poor to receive inferior services because they are poor.
Themes
Boston’s early public housing projects were completely segregated—and five years after the city was ordered to desegregate them in 1962, virtually nothing changed. (For instance, one project remained 97% white, and the one across the street 98% black.) The university suburb of Cambridge built a similar pair of side-by-side segregated projects, on top of what used to be an integrated working-class area.
Notably, in this case, a court order did little to provide justice, because the local government simply refused to obey it. Like the example of the San Francisco Bay Area, the example of Boston (and especially Cambridge, which is home to famous institutions like Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) also serves to remind Rothstein’s readers—many of whom may be upper- and middle-class white liberals living in these areas—that they, too, are partially responsible for segregation and obligated to reverse it.
Themes
Detroit was already very segregated by World War II, and subsequent government policies enforced this arrangement. In one egregious case, a congressman with support from the Federal Housing Administration made the Federal Works Agency (FWA) fire its director and reassign a proposed blacks-only housing project located in his congressional district to all white people. The planned project for African American people was shifted to “an industrial area deemed unsuitable for whites,” which was also near “a white neighborhood,” so the First Lady made the president cancel it and the FWA returned to its original plans. Then, “whites in the neighborhood rioted,” and the vast majority of those arrested and injured were black. Detroit’s mayor won reelection in 1945 by “stirring up [white] fear of integration,” and the next mayor put a stop on most public housing construction in white areas because he feared “Negro invasions.”
In contrast to Boston, Detroit notoriously skews poor and industrial (although by no means less liberal), and many of Rothstein’s readers are likely familiar with its reputation for segregation, urban blight, and government neglect. This case shows how widespread and powerful racist and discriminatory attitudes were among white Americans—most importantly, those in government—during much of the 20th century. Discrimination was not always an individual decision by government actors, but also often an organizational mandate—in this case, at the federal (even presidential) level. Anyone who tried to fight the pattern of segregation, like the FWA director, would lose any power to fight it that they did have. So while segregation was technically against the law, every agent of the law was dedicated to enforcing it, and politicians were quick to harness white people’s racism for political gain. They had little interest in the (comparatively powerless) African American people who were harmed in the process.
Themes
Quotes
San Francisco was also formally segregated. The city tried to build an integrated housing project during World War II, but “the navy objected” and made it whites-only. Soon, white housing projects had lots of vacancies, while black ones did not have enough. Nevertheless, of the city’s next five projects, “four were for whites only” and the only black project was built in a neighborhood mostly vacated by “Japanese-origin families [who were sent] to internment camps.” The city housing authority even unanimously declared its opposition to “the commingling of races” and defense of the neighborhood composition rule, but activists soon convinced it to stop discriminating at least officially. However, nothing changed. North of San Francisco, the only mixed housing project was integrated accidentally, to officials’ surprise. But white people soon moved out, making the project majority African American.
This example again shows how local governments were less interested in performing their duty to provide required services to the population than in appeasing white people, even if this meant denying services to African American people. Notably, San Francisco’s discrimination was not based on taking any specific adverse action towards African American people—rather, it discriminated invisibly, by providing disproportionate benefits to white people. And the city’s refusal to follow its promise to stop discriminating again shows how executive agencies often remain free to ignore the laws if they so desire—which reinforces the need for strong judiciary systems and activist movements to hold government accountable. Finally, the construction of the all-black housing project in a neighborhood vacated by interned Japanese American people demonstrates how the government strategically makes concessions to minorities at the expense of other minority groups—which is a powerful way to maintain white supremacy without creating political tension.
Themes
Rothstein notes that the back-and-forth about segregation in San Francisco and Boston shows that “officials knew that the segregation they imposed was wrong, if not unconstitutional.” When the San Francisco city government mandated “nonsegregation” and the “nondiscriminatory” assignment of units, however, the housing authority refused to implement the plan and simply stopped building housing. Although “a compromise was eventually reached,” to integrate future projects but maintain the segregation in existing ones, the NAACP soon sued the city government and won—but the city ignored the judge’s order to integrate housing and started building new all-black housing projects instead.
Rothstein notes that officials were careful to stay inside the bounds of the law—not because this meant they were doing the right thing, but because this meant they could not be punished for doing something they “knew […] was wrong, if not unconstitutional.” Accordingly, the NAACP, courts, and city government’s efforts to stop segregation were meaningless because the actors actually in charge of housing policy refused to consider integration as a solution. Rather, the city needed dedicated integrationists inside the housing authority.
Themes
Quotes
In 1949, President Harry Truman proposed building new public housing, which precipitated a political fight about whether to prohibit segregation or not. Ultimately, the 1949 Housing Act permitted segregation to continue, and the federal government started “demolish[ing] black neighborhoods and replac[ing] them with housing for whites,” leading to the construction of “massive segregated high-rise projects” that gave priority to white people, all over the United States. And in the few places that were open to integration, state-mandated “local referendums” led projects for the poor to be “systematically vetoed,” especially if they were integrated. (The Supreme Court eventually defended these “referendum provisions” even though they were clearly racist.)
Rothstein again emphasizes that the government’s failure to integrate housing does not imply that nobody was fighting for integration; rather, people have always fought to protect minorities’ rights, just as others have fought to disenfranchise them—in 1949, the segregationists won yet again. Accordingly, the same high-rise projects that are today associated with black and Latinx poverty were actually built to help white people, even though they were not the group that most needed public housing. The fact that new construction inevitably burdened black communities (by destroying them) while benefiting white people (by giving them housing) demonstrates how those with the balance of power work in their own self-interest whenever possible. This happened not because local residents were necessarily virulent racists who wanted to deny black people housing altogether, but merely because they refused to let public housing be built in their neighborhoods.
Themes
Just before leaving office, Truman enacted “a new ‘racial equity formula’” that forced cities to build housing for the low-income black families who really needed it, but his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, reversed this policy. His administration decided that, although the Supreme Court had outlawed so-called “separate but equal” schools, this principle was still valid for housing. In fact, Eisenhower’s administration revoked the provision that said that separate housing for black and white people had to be “of equal quality,” even though it was never enforced in the first place.
Truman, who in Rothstein’s telling was the first president to pursue integration in any meaningful way, saw his efforts stymied by the pressure of subsequent governments and the Supreme Court’s apparent unwillingness to confront the harms of segregated housing. Rothstein points out that this happened at the same time as schools were being desegregated and the Civil Rights Movement was first emerging in the United States—and yet, in part because of opposition from the government, this movement completely failed to address residential segregation, one of the most consequential and enduring civil rights issues in the United States.
Themes
The movement for building dispersed housing rather than “high-rise ghettos” began in the 1950s and won federal support in the 1970s, but very few cities ever tried this policy out. Instead, local governments continued “segregat[ing] existing projects where integration might have been tolerated” and conveniently justified building all-black projects by citing existing housing shortages. By 1984, essentially all American public housing was segregated and conditions were better in “every predominantly white-occupied project” than in African American-occupied ones.
In yet another case, there is a complete disconnect between what experts decide should be done, on the one hand, and what the government actually chooses to do, on the other. This reflects the difficulty in turning integration into policyand points to the necessity of putting continued, consistent pressure on policymakers to take action—even though little has changed in public housing in more than three decades. Importantly, the obvious disparity in the quality of housing projects is clear evidence that segregation is not innocuous, despite what the white policymakers who implement it might say. Rather, it is a way to systematically deny rights and public services to African American people.
Themes
Quotes
In Part V of the chapter, Rothstein notes that public housing was all predominantly African American by the 1960s, and so activists switched to fighting the uniform construction of housing projects in neighborhoods that were already segregated. The Supreme Court ruled that the Chicago Housing Authority “unconstitutionally selected [public housing] sites to maintain the city’s segregated landscape”—until this ruling in 1976, the city had consistently rejected all integration, with support from the federal government. As in San Francisco, Chicago simply “cease[d] building public housing altogether” in response to the ruling. And it was too late to desegregate: the available land in white areas was gone, and white people were already moving out of cities and into suburban areas. This was a pattern throughout the country: for instance, a discriminatory voucher program in Miami, which subsidized only white residents to rent apartments, was not overturned until 1998, when it was “too late to reverse the city’s segregation.”
Yet again, local governments appear doggedly committed to segregation, to the point that they choose not to build housing at all rather than to build integrated housing. While this certainly results in part from inexcusable racism among officials and city planners, it also simply reflects the difficulty in convincing (even well-meaning) white people to accept integration in their neighborhoods. In short, white people’s personal interest in preserving segregation and maintaining the United States’s white supremacist racial hierarchy has essentially prevented the government from doing what it knows to be right (and has known for several decades). The problem continues to get worse, because local governments continue to choose inaction rather than pro-integration action. This points to the need for new kinds of policies and new forms of accountability for city governments in the 21st century.
Themes
In Part VI, Rothstein explains how “the real estate industry bitterly fought public housing of any kind” from its inception during the post-World War II housing shortage. From 1950 onward, by suppressing public housing and ensuring it was reserved “for the poorest families,” the real estate industry recaptured its market share among the middle class, destroyed the possibility of integrated public housing, and helped precipitate the decline in public housing’s quality and reputation over the next half-century. Rothstein wonders “what our urban areas would look like today” had the government “pushed in the opposite direction” and integrated public housing instead of forcibly segregating it.
Segregation is not only in the personal interests of middle-class white people (a group that usually includes the majority of the city planners and government officials who control public housing policy). It is also in the economic interests of the real estate industry, which cares only about its own profits, and not at all about justice. Even though government is supposed to balance the interests of private individuals against those of the general public—and especially disempowered people whose voices are underrepresented—in the case of housing policy, the government has done the opposite and acquiesced to the real estate industry’s demands to privatize all decent housing in the United States. As a result, the government has allowed a two-tier structure of rights and benefits to develop and consistently taken action to consign African American people to the lower tier. In closing this chapter, Rothstein emphasizes the degree of control that government does have over whether American cities are segregated or integrated, which serves as a reminder that positive change is possible and within reach—it just requires changing the way government acts.
Themes
Quotes