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Bill Myers
A white property developer who built all-white suburbs, including Rollingwood, in Richmond, California during and after World War II. When work was already underway on his Sunnyhills project in Milpitas, California, Bohannon found out that a religious group was trying to build an integrated neighborhood for Ford Motor workers next door. He called on the mayor for a personal favor and nearly got this neighboring project cancelled, but eventually sold Sunnyhills to another developer when he could not. Bohannon’s actions demonstrate both the depths of white anxiety about living near African Americans and the disproportionate power that corporate figures had in convincing the government to perpetuate segregation.
David Bohannon Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by David Bohannon or refer to David Bohannon. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 8
Quotes
The Milpitas story illustrates the extraordinary creativity that government officials at all levels displayed when they were motivated to prevent the movement of African Americans into white neighborhoods. It wasn’t only the large-scale federal programs of public housing and mortgage finance that created de jure segregation. Hundreds, if not thousands of smaller acts of government contributed. They included petty actions like denial of access to public utilities; determining, once African Americans wanted to build, that their property was, after all, needed for parkland; or discovering that a road leading to African American homes was “private.” They included routing interstate highways to create racial boundaries or to shift the residential placement of African American families. And they included choosing school sites to force families to move to segregated neighborhoods if they wanted education for their children.
Taken in isolation, we can easily dismiss such devices as aberrations. But when we consider them as a whole, we can see that they were part of a national system by which state and local government supplemented federal efforts to maintain the status of African Americans as a lower caste, with housing segregation preserving the badges and incidents of slavery.
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Explanation and Analysis:
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David Bohannon Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by David Bohannon or refer to David Bohannon. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 8
Quotes
The Milpitas story illustrates the extraordinary creativity that government officials at all levels displayed when they were motivated to prevent the movement of African Americans into white neighborhoods. It wasn’t only the large-scale federal programs of public housing and mortgage finance that created de jure segregation. Hundreds, if not thousands of smaller acts of government contributed. They included petty actions like denial of access to public utilities; determining, once African Americans wanted to build, that their property was, after all, needed for parkland; or discovering that a road leading to African American homes was “private.” They included routing interstate highways to create racial boundaries or to shift the residential placement of African American families. And they included choosing school sites to force families to move to segregated neighborhoods if they wanted education for their children.
Taken in isolation, we can easily dismiss such devices as aberrations. But when we consider them as a whole, we can see that they were part of a national system by which state and local government supplemented federal efforts to maintain the status of African Americans as a lower caste, with housing segregation preserving the badges and incidents of slavery.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
