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Reverse Redlining
A city east of San Francisco, in the famously “liberal and inclusive” Bay Area, that Rothstein repeatedly uses as an example of de jure residential segregation. Home to Frank Stevenson, Wilbur Gary, and numerous other African Americans who fought in or worked in manufacturing plants during World War II, Richmond was strongly divided by government housing policies that ensured comfortable suburban neighborhoods like Rollingwood for white people, while crowding African Americans into inadequate housing in polluted, industrial areas. As the rest of the Bay Area developed through the proliferation of white-only subdivisions, Richmond was left as one of the only cities where African Americans could find a home, and was gradually transformed into a ghetto and slum as the government began divesting from public services and segregating schools there.
Richmond, CA Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by Richmond, CA or refer to Richmond, CA. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1
Quotes
Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state housing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto.
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Richmond, CA Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term Richmond, CA appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: If San Francisco, Then Everywhere?
...then chances are it happened in many other places, too. The historically industrial city of Richmond has the largest African American population in the Bay Area, and Rothstein tells its history...
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...I of the chapter, Rothstein examines Mr. Stevenson’s life story in order to show how Richmond typifies American housing segregation. Born in a Louisiana town deemed “the poorest place in America,”...
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During World War II, Richmond’s shipyards had to hire women and African American people, and the city’s populated expanded rapidly...
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The government built “officially and explicitly segregated” housing to accommodate Richmond’s population boom. African American people lived in “poorly constructed” temporary housing in industrial areas, while...
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...would free public apartments for African American people, who “became almost the only tenants of Richmond public housing.” While most African American people lived in public housing, many—like Stevenson—lived without public...
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When he arrived in Richmond during World War II, Frank Stevenson quickly found work at a Ford Motor auto manufacturing...
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...Ford to build a larger plant in Milpitas, which is an hour’s drive southwest from Richmond. Suburbs began arising to house this plant’s workers, and the government ensured that loans would...
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...of this chapter, Rothstein notes that, just a few years after Frank Stevenson moved to Richmond, the renowned writer Wallace Stegner moved near Milpitas, to teach at Stanford University. Unable to...
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Chapter 8: Local Tactics
...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...
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...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,...
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Chapter 9: State-Sanctioned Violence
Rothstein returns to Richmond, California, where African American World War II veteran Wilbur Gary wanted to buy a house...
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Chapter 10: Suppressed Incomes
...was initially resistant to letting African American people work at the Ford Motor plant in Richmond, for example, but eventually agreed to let them take progressively better-paying and more skilled jobs....
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...Part IX, Rothstein tells the story of Mahwah, New Jersey. Just as Ford moved from Richmond to Milpitas in California, it moved from a small site near New York City to...
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Chapter 12: Considering Fixes
...story of Frank Stevenson and his wife Rosa Lee, who ultimately raised their children in Richmond’s segregated school system. Their daughters went to an overcrowded, all-black school that was nearly integrated...
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