Previous
Chapter 7
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Color of Law, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
De Jure vs. De Facto Segregation
Segregation and the Preservation of Racial Caste
Racism, Profit, and Political Gain
Separation of Powers, Legal Activism, and Minority Rights
Summary
Analysis
Rothstein recalls the story of Frank Stevenson, who was unable to reduce his commute time because the “FHA- and VA-insured subdivisions” sprouting up near the Ford Motor plant where he worked were only open to white people. A major developer of these neighborhoods was a man named David Bohannon, who also built Rollingwood in Richmond. One of the neighborhoods where Stevenson was barred from moving was the enormous whites-only San Lorenzo Village, “the nation’s largest wartime government-insured project,” which Bohannon built nearby with the support of the FHA.
Rothstein again returns to the example of Richmond to emphasize how the different elements of segregation that he has outlined in his different chapters all work together to reinforce one another: Frank Stevenson and middle-class African American people like him had to overcome numerous layers of obstacles and discriminatory policies in order to have any chance at the same housing opportunities that were available to essentially all white people. David Bohannon’s prominent place in the Richmond property market reveals how the power to discriminate and decide who could live where was incredibly concentrated, held in the hands of a few individuals at the top of federal agencies and construction companies, which were irreparably shaped by their individual prejudices.
Themes
In Part I, Rothstein recounts how a pro-integration religious Quaker organization called the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) sought to help black Ford workers find housing in all-white Milpitas. Since no existing neighborhood would accept African American people, the AFSC decided to build its own. Although FHA restrictions prevented the AFSC from getting a loan, it managed to get a favor from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company through a “Quaker connection.” With financing secured and help from the UAW, the AFSC next looked for a building site. When it found one, the local government “rezoned the site from residential to industrial use,” and when it found another, the same government rejected its proposal. By changing regulations, another town stifled the AFSC's third proposed site, and a landowner refused to sell the AFSC a fourth site when he realized “that the project would be integrated.” Defeated, “the [AFSC's] builder gave up.”
The AFSC’s exasperatingly convoluted uphill battle to build housing for black Ford workers reveals the incredible power of the 20th century’s system of interlocking, segregationist regulations and prejudices around housing. Whether they justified their actions through explicit racism or supposedly “economic” reasoning that was clearly racist anyway, essentially everyone involved in the process of constructing the AFSC’s subdivision found a way to avoid contributing to integration, even when it would not personally affect them in any way. Local governments (the subject of this chapter) were particularly egregious offenders. The AFSC’s breakthroughs were the product of extraordinary luck and exceptions to the normal order of things—without its lucky “Quaker connection” and white integrationist allies to help push for integration and negotiate with the establishment, for instance, it is very unlikely that the AFSC would have made any progress at all.
Themes
Another builder was hired, but refused to create the integrated neighborhood the AFSC demanded. Finally a third builder signed on to the project, despite having “no previous experience” in real estate development. Finally, this third builder found a plot of land and began construction on the development, Agua Caliente. But Agua Caliente happened to sit next to David Bohannon’s project in-progress, a white neighborhood called Sunnyhills, and Bohannon soon convinced the city of Milpitas—whose mayor was a real estate agent—to hike the price of Agua Caliente's sewer access tenfold. In protest, Ford workers refused to buy the new houses, and the ASFC's builder and Bohannon both got tired of fighting and sold off their projects to “a new developer recruited by the UAW,” who combined the two projects into one and kept the name Sunnyhills.
Bohannon’s influence over the Milpitas mayor again shows how private biases not only infiltrate, but largely run, local city planning processes. Although Rothstein never mentions the word, “NIMBY-ism” (with NIMBY meaning “Not In My Back-Yard”) is a common term for the kind of unfortunate city planning situations that result from well-meaning but self-interested people vetoing undesirable projects in their own neighborhoods. In turn, this often leads to these projects being built in the poorest, most disadvantaged, and least politically powerful neighborhoods (which are quite often majority-African American ghettos).
Themes
By the time the UAW’s builder found a workaround to get mortgages for its buyers, it was too late. First, most white Ford workers had already found homes in segregated neighborhoods, so they did not go to Sunnyhills. Secondly, all the “delays, legal fees, and financing problems” made Sunnyhills prohibitively expensive for most Ford workers. And finally, most African American workers already accepted that they would have to commute from Richmond and gave up on moving to Sunnyhills, although a few eventually did. Regardless, even today, Milpitas has almost no black residents. As new factories opened up in Milpitas over the last half-century, they justified only hiring white people by citing the area's demographics—one such factory simply refused to hire anyone who did not live nearby, in the “almost exclusively white” town.
Even when they win, integrationists still lose: although the AFSC and UAW managed to actually get integrated Sunnyhills built against all odds, this did not make the project a success. Rather, the endless opposition they faced ultimately took its toll nevertheless and still prevented Milpitas from being integrated. This reflects a general trend throughout the 20th century: because of systematic discrimination, comparable housing is almost always more expensive for African American people buyers and renters than for white ones.
Themes
Get the entire The Color of Law LitChart as a printable PDF.
In this chapter’s Part II, Rothstein notes that Milpitas shows local governments’ “extraordinary creativity” in promoting segregation. These examples are not “aberrations,” but rather part of “a national system” that tried “to maintain the status of African Americans as a lower [racial] caste” and “preserv[e] the badges and incidents of slavery.”
Rothstein’s passage about “badges and incidents of slavery” is crucial because it has important legal consequences: this is the language that Congress has used to interpret the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition against policies that “perpetuate[] the characteristics of slavery.” So Rothstein is making a clear legal argument that local governments’ systematic, discretionary favoritism toward white people constitutes a violation of the Constitution.
Themes
In Part III, Rothstein notes that Milpitas’s local government was using “common segregation tactics” that were popular across the United States. In 1954 near Philadelphia, a city council demanded that a proposed integrated neighborhood meet a number of onerous conditions never imposed on white neighborhoods. Based on these conditions, white families in the area sued the developer with the city’s support, and the new project was canceled. Similarly, in a Chicago suburb in 1959, the local government approved a planned project before finding out that it would be integrated. When it did, local white people held a protest and vandalized the houses under construction, and then the city government seized the land to stop construction. (A legal challenge failed, as the government had previously proposed seizing the same land but had been rejected by voters.)
Remember that Rothstein has never suggested that government made people racist—as these examples show, in many cases white Americans were enthusiastic about enforcing segregation. This underhanded collaboration between the local government and private white neighborhood activists blurs the line between different forms of segregation—that is, the government made provisions to ensure that de jure segregation would look de facto. This kind of local discrimination is hard to combat, because in any specific instance it is impossible to prove that local governments acted on racially discriminatory grounds—and yet it is easy to see how the pattern, in its entirety, proves racial discrimination.
Themes
In Part IV, Rothstein notes that local governments frequently turned proposed African American neighborhoods into parks, which was difficult to challenge in courts. He discusses the famous 1969 case of Black Jack, a white St. Louis suburb that organized to prevent African American people from moving in. This led to a legal battle, in which the court noted that the neighborhood’s white people were motivated by racism and specifically blamed the alliance between government and the real estate industry as responsible for St. Louis’s segregation. After five years, the proposed housing project was finally allowed to go ahead, but worsening economic conditions made the building impossible. When it comes to building integrated housing, Rothstein concludes, “justice delayed is justice denied.”
The conclusion that “justice delayed is justice denied” in housing issues is central to Rothstein’s argument in this book: because courts can only stop discrimination after it has happened, housing segregation has impacts for generations and perpetuates itself by entrenching disadvantaged communities further in poverty. Since even illegitimate challenges to integration can ultimately stymy it by creating delays and cost overruns, Rothstein contends that government must actively promote integration—in the same way that, for instance, colleges and universities have pursued integration through affirmative action—rather than simply legalizing it and expecting it to happen overnight.
Themes
In Part V, Rothstein explains that governments not only segregated suburbs to keep African American people out, but also segregated cities’ downtowns to ensure “that white commuters, shoppers, and business elites would not be exposed to black people.” To achieve this, they did what’s known as “slum clearance.” While urban African American neighborhoods “were indeed blighted,” government responses usually involved relocating African American people to equally-impoverished neighborhoods elsewhere.
Again, governments used a legitimate need—the dilapidation of urban, primarily African American neighborhoods—as an excuse to pursue a completely different agenda (the segregation of city centers) that left the original problem intact. This bait-and-switch strategy was clearly motivated by racism, and it resulted in de jure segregation.
Themes
Building interstate highways was a popular excuse to “destroy urban African American communities.” Builders and lobbyists actually convinced cities to accept highway construction by promising to eliminate black residents. In one Michigan town, officials routed a highway through a neighborhood that was 87 percent black. The federal government did not care that the project was motivated by “overt [racial] prejudice,” and by the time the courts pointed this out after more than a decade, the damage was already done—most of the black residents had “move[d] into the Detroit ghetto.” Similar proposals in Miami, Camden, and Los Angeles were also approved not despite their racially discriminatory effects, but because of them. And displaced residents almost never got help “finding adequate and safe new housing,” or paying the cost of moving. When the government finally mandated such assistance in 1965, “the interstate system was [already] nearly complete.”
In this case, as in those of cities constructing parks and clearing downtowns to keep black people away, racism is the cause of urban development, rather than merely its effect (which is what the “de facto segregation myth” purports). City planners built highways in order to displace black residents, connecting white suburbanites to the city center and disconnecting African American people from it in one fell swoop. Here, too, the court ruling does nothing to change or reverse the segregationist policy it declared unconstitutional—it rather just serves as a footnote reminding the public that what happened was illegal. But the message to local governments is clear: the steepest punishment they will get for segregation is a slap on the wrist that nonetheless allows this segregation to remain in place.
Themes
In Part VI of this chapter, Rothstein explains one last segregation tactic, which was particularly popular in the South before the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954: local governments zoned school systems so that black students had to live in segregated ghetto neighborhoods to get an education. Unhappy that “all attempts at [segregation through zoning laws] have proven unconstitutional,” the Austin, Texas city government relocated all black schools and public services to one neighborhood, and African American people essentially had to vacate the rest of the city in order to access those services. Once they did, “municipal services in the neighborhood declined” in quality, and the city government welcomed “industrial facilities in[to] the area.” Even some northern cities like Indianapolis did this, too.
This example of racist social engineering is particularly notable because it is what motivated Rothstein to study residential segregation in the first place: he studied segregation and racial achievement gaps in public schools for many years, until he realized that American schools remained segregated because American neighborhoods were still segregated, too. School segregation and residential segregation are intimately tied, and this is one clear example of how residential segregation ensures inferior services for African American people.
Themes
Raleigh, North Carolina, is today famous for its integrated schools, made possible by a busing system that brings African American, low-income students from the city’s southeast to its wealthier, whiter northwestern neighborhoods. In fact, schools also caused this geographical segregation: early in the 20th century, school boards relocated all black schools to the city’s southeast, destroying “two relatively prosperous African American neighborhoods” in the process. Atlanta did something similar: in integrated neighborhoods, it designated areas for white people and African American people, and closed schools that were in the wrong areas. By moving white schools to the suburbs, the city forced white families to move there too. And Houston did this, too, convincing black residents to move into ghettos by overwhelmingly locating black schools, services, and even hospitals in those areas.
Raleigh is now famous simply because it committed an egregious historical wrong (like many, if not all, American cities) and has been one of the very few places to take any affirmative action to remedy that wrong. Again, its example shows how government actively impoverished African American people, specifically by targeting integrated and middle-class black neighborhoods for destruction and relocation. This also helps explain the gap between black and white income and wealth, which in turn remains an important part of the reason that many African American families still cannot afford single-family homes. Raleigh and Houston’s strategy of simply locating all relevant services in poor neighborhoods explains why Rothstein continues to use the word “ghetto” for such areas: African American people were confined to certain neighborhoods by policy, and unable to move anywhere else.
Themes
