The Color of Law

This book is so important. It shows how the government upholds white supremacy and how segregation was structurally imposed by government policy. It explains why Black communities struggle with income, education, housing even today. Incredibly infuriating but very insightful and well researched. Here are my notes.

By failing to recognize that we now live with the severe, enduring effects of de jure segregation, we avoid confronting our constitutional obligation to reverse it.

If San Francisco, Then Everywhere?

This chapter talks about how even in so-called “progressive” cities, segregation was deeply shaped by policy. Both political parties were complicit. They aren’t just “racist mistakes”, they’re a function of capitalism and a tool to divide the working class.

Our system of official segregation was not the result of a single law that consigned African Americans to designated neighborhoods. Rather, scores of racially explicit laws, regulations, and government practices combined to create a nationwide system of urban ghettos, surrounded by white suburbs.

When we consider problems that arise when African Americans are absent in significant numbers from schools that whites attend, we say we seek diversity, not racial integration. When we wish to pretend that the nation did not single out African Americans in a system of segregation specifically aimed at them, we diffuse them as just another people of color.

We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies. Although most of these policies are now off the books, they have never been remedied and their effects endure.

Black workers who earned steady wages at war industries could save to buy small plots in unincorporated North Richmond, but because the federal government refused to insure bank loans made to African Americans for housing, standard construction was unaffordable.

Public Housing, Black Ghettos

Public housing blocks were intentionally segregated. Urban ghettos were institutionalized (with organizations like the Public Works Administration, U.S. Housing Authority, Federal Works Administration) that enforced income inequality.

In Norris, Tennessee, where the TVA was headquartered, the government developed a model village with 500 comfortable homes, leased to employees and construction workers. The village, though, was open only to whites, while the TVA housed its African American workers in shoddy barracks some distance away. A TVA official explained that the town was being reserved for whites because “Negroes do not fit into the program.”

Ickes established a “neighborhood composition rule”: federal housing projects should reflect the previous racial composition of their neighborhoods. Projects in white areas could house only white tenants, those in African American areas could house only African American tenants, and only projects in already-integrated neighborhoods could house both whites and blacks.

PWA projects also concentrated African Americans in low-income neighborhoods in Detroit, Indianapolis, Toledo, and New York where, for example, the PWA created two segregated projects: the Williamsburg Homes in a white neighborhood was for whites, and the Harlem River Houses in a black neighborhood was for African Americans.

As someone who lived in Austin, the remnants of this remain today:

The first USHA-funded projects were built in Austin, Texas, largely because of aggressive promotion by its congressman, Lyndon Johnson. Segregated projects were constructed for African Americans in East Austin’s black neighborhood and for whites on the Westside. As elsewhere, the projects were used to create a more rigid segregation than had previously existed. Austin’s city planners had recently developed a proposal that included shifting African Americans who were scattered throughout the city to a single Eastside ghetto; the public housing plan advanced this scheme.

In 1984, investigative reporters from the Dallas Morning News visited federally funded developments in forty-seven metropolitan areas. The reporters found that the nation’s nearly ten million public housing tenants were almost always segregated by race and that every predominantly white-occupied project had facilities, amenities, services, and maintenance that were superior to what was found in predominantly black-occupied projects.

Racial Zoning

Zoning laws explicitly prevented Black families from purchasing homes in white neighborhoods.

Later in the twentieth century, when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) developed the insured amortized mortgage as a way to promote homeownership nationwide, these zoning practices rendered African Americans ineligible for such mortgages because banks and the FHA considered the existence of nearby rooming houses, commercial development, or industry to create risk to the property value of single-family areas. Without such mortgages, the effective cost of African American housing was greater than that of similar housing in white neighborhoods, leaving owners with fewer resources for upkeep.

On Your Own Home

The FHA and the like prevented Black families from getting mortgages.

For Levittown and scores of such developments across the nation, the plans reviewed by the FHA included the approved construction materials, the design specifications, the proposed sale price, the neighborhood’s zoning restrictions (for example, a prohibition of industry or commercial development), and a commitment not to sell to African Americans. The FHA even withheld approval if the presence of African Americans in nearby neighborhoods threatened integration.

Private Agreements, Government Enforcement

Legal contracts prevented sale to Black families.

As early as the nineteenth century, deeds in Brookline, Massachusetts, forbade resale of property to “any negro or native of Ireland.” Such provisions spread throughout the country in the 1920s as the preferred means to evade the Supreme Court’s 1917 Buchanan racial zoning decision

The result was a city whose African American population was encircled by all-white suburbs. Boeing’s property deeds stated, for example, “No property in said addition shall at any time be sold, conveyed, rented, or leased in whole or in part to any person or persons not of the White or Caucasian race.” An African American domestic servant, however, was permitted to be an occupant.

In developments with FHA production financing for builders, the agency recommended—and in many cases, demanded—that developers who received the construction loans it sponsored include racially restrictive covenants in their subdivisions’ property deeds.

White Flight

White families left neighborhoods as soon as Black families moved in. This was economically incentivized.

The FHA justified its racial policies—both its appraisal standards and its restrictive covenant recommendations—by claiming that a purchase by an African American in a white neighborhood, or the presence of African Americans in or near such a neighborhood, would cause the value of the white-owned properties to decline. This, in turn, would increase the FHA’s own losses, because white property owners in the neighborhood would be more likely to default on their mortgages.

“Blockbusting” is where speculators bought properties in borderline black-white areas, rented or sold them to Black families at above-market prices, and persuaded white families in the area that it was turning into a ghetto so they would sell their homes for less than their worth.

Blockbusters’ tactics included hiring African American women to push carriages with their babies through white neighborhoods, hiring African American men to drive cars with radios blasting through white neighborhoods, paying African American men to accompany agents knocking on doors to see if homes were for sale, or making random telephone calls to residents of white neighborhoods and asking to speak to someone with a stereotypically African American name like “Johnnie Mae.” Speculators also took out real estate advertisements in African American newspapers, even if the featured properties were not for sale. The ads’ purpose was to attract potential African American buyers to walk around white areas that were targeted for blockbusting. In a 1962 Saturday Evening Post article, an agent (using the pseudonym “Norris Vitchek”) claimed to have arranged house burglaries in white communities to scare neighbors into believing that their communities were becoming unsafe.

IRS Support and Compliant Regulators

The IRS and insurance companies promoted segregation: churches, hospitals, universities, etc. in segregated areas were granted tax-exempt status.

At Stuy-Town here in NYC, Black tenants were explicitly barred (even though it was developed to house WW2 veterans). Stuy-Town was only possible because of government subsidies, and the government knew about these policies and supported it.

After Parkchester was completed in 1942, Metropolitan Life embarked on a new project, the 9,000-unit Stuyvesant Town housing complex on the east side of Manhattan. For the development, New York City condemned and cleared eighteen square city blocks and transferred the property to the insurance company. The city also granted Metropolitan Life a twenty-five-year tax abatement, whose value meant that far more public than private money was invested in the project. The subsidies were granted despite Metropolitan Life’s announcement that, like Parkchester, the project would be for “white people only.” Ecker advised the New York City Board of Estimate that “Negroes and whites don’t mix. If we brought them into this development … it would depress all of the surrounding property.”

The Federal Home Loan Bank Board, for example, chartered, insured, and regulated savings and loan associations from the early years of the New Deal but did not oppose the denial of mortgages to African Americans until 1961. It did not enforce the new race-blind policy, however—perhaps because it was in conflict with the board’s insistence that mortgage eligibility account for “economic” factors.

A case that the City of Memphis brought against Wells Fargo Bank was supported by affidavits of bank employees stating that they referred to subprime loans as “ghetto loans.” Bank supervisors instructed their marketing staffs to target solicitation to heavily African American zip codes, because residents there “weren’t savvy enough” to know they were being exploited. A sales group sought out elderly African Americans, believing they were particularly susceptible to pressure to take out high-cost loans.

Local Tactics

This chapter deals a bit with police harrassement or negligence of Black neighborhoods. It also talks about slum clearance, a policy that involves demolishing substandard structures and replace it with new infrastructure.

Slum clearance reinforced the spatial segregation of African Americans as well as their impoverishment. This, in turn, led to further segregation because the more impoverished African Americans became, the less welcome they were in middle-class communities.

They used highways to create physical barriers between urban areas, divide communities, and displace Black people.

One slum clearance tool was the construction of the federal interstate highway system. In many cases, state and local governments, with federal acquiescence, designed interstate highway routes to destroy urban African American communities. Highway planners did not hide their racial motivations.

In 1956, the Florida State Road Department routed I-95 to do what Miami’s unconstitutional zoning ordinance had intended but failed to accomplish two decades earlier: clear African Americans from an area adjacent to downtown. An alternative route utilizing an abandoned railway right of way was rejected, although it would have resulted in little population removal. When the highway was eventually completed in the mid-1960s, it had reduced a community of 40,000 African Americans to 8,000.

State-Sanctioned Violence

Black families that tried to integrate faced bombings and violence.

For two months law enforcement stood by as rocks were thrown, crosses were burned, the Ku Klux Klan symbol was painted on the wall of the clubhouse next door, and the home of a family that had supported the Myerses was vandalized. Some policemen, assigned to protect the African American family, stood with the mob, joking and encouraging its participants. One sergeant was demoted to patrolman because he objected to orders he had been given not to interfere with the rioters.

During much of the twentieth century, police tolerance and promotion of cross burnings, vandalism, arson, and other violent acts to maintain residential segregation was systematic and nationwide.

In the Los Angeles area, cross burnings, dynamite bombings, rocks thrown through windows, graffiti, and other acts of vandalism, as well as numerous phone threats, greeted African Americans who found housing in neighborhoods just outside their existing areas of concentration.

KKK members in the police department!

The officer testified that about half of the forty Klan members known to him were also in the police department and that his superiors condoned officers’ Klan membership, as long as the information did not become public.

Suppressed Incomes

Through various ways like job exclusion and wage discrimination, Black people’s incomes were suppressed. Income and housing inequality go hand in hand.

We cannot understand the income and wealth gap that persists between African Americans and whites without examining governmental policies that purposely kept black incomes low throughout most of the twentieth century. Once government implemented these policies, economic differences became self-perpetuating. It is not impossible, but it is rare for Americans, black or white, to have a higher rank in the national income distribution than their parents. Everyone’s standard of living may grow from generation to generation, but an individual’s relative income—how it compares to the incomes of others in the present generation—is remarkably similar to how his or her parents’ incomes compared to others in their generation.

Many local governments taxed African Americans more heavily than whites. The effects of these government actions were compounded because neighborhood segregation itself imposed higher expenses on African American than on white families, even if their wages and tax rates had been identical. The result: smaller disposable incomes and fewer savings for black families, denying them the opportunity to accumulate wealth and contributing to make housing in middle-class communities unaffordable.

The army and navy effectively operated shipbuilding yards, munitions makers, and aircraft and tank manufacturers. Yet federal agencies both tolerated and supported joint management-union policies that kept African Americans from doing any but the most poorly paid tasks in defense plants.

African American autoworkers who commuted from distant urban neighborhoods incurred annual costs attributable to the travel of $1,000 to $1,500 each in 1970, or about 10 percent of their annual gross incomes, far more than if they had lived in Mahwah or its vicinity. The African American autoworkers’ incomes were also depressed because the excessive travel contributed to job losses when workers were fired for absenteeism that was partly attributable to transportation obstacles.

Looking Forward, Looking Back

If African Americans were permitted to vote freely, their political power would be no different from that of others. If discrimination were prohibited in hiring, it would take some years for African Americans to gain comparable seniority, but once they did so, their workplace status would no longer be inferior. Once we prohibited segregation in hotels and restaurants, patrons of any race could be served. Likewise, if segregation was abolished on buses and trains, passengers of both races could sit in any empty seat the next day. The past had no structural legacy—we could use the same buses and trains, and no gargantuan social engineering was needed to make the transition to integration.

Schools are more segregated today than they were 40 years ago mostly because the neighborhoods in which schools are located are so segregated.

Residential segregation is hard to undo because:

• Parents’ economic status is commonly replicated in the next generation, so depressed incomes become a multigenerational trait
• The value of white suburban housing appreciated substantially over the years, increasing wealth inequality between white and blacks
• Federal subsidies for low-income families’ housing have been used mainly to support those families’ ability to rent apartments in minority areas where economic opportunity is scarce, not in integrated neighborhoods

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination, but it was not primarily discrimination (although this still contributed) that kept African Americans out of most white suburbs after the law was passed. It was primarily unaffordability.

Movement from lower ranks to the middle class has always been difficult for all Americans. The US has less mobility than many other industrialized societies.

This reality challenges a fantasy we share: that children born into low-income families can themselves escape that status through hard work, responsibility, education, ambition, and a little luck. That myth is becoming less prevalent today, as more Americans become aware of how sticky our social-class positions are.

African American families today, whose parents and grandparents were denied participation in the equity-accumulating boom of the 1950s and 1960s, have great difficulty catching up now.

Young African Americans are 10 times as likely to live in poor neighborhoods as young whites–66% of African Americans vs 6% of whites.

States refused to build transit lines connecting Black neighborhoods.

Over four decades, successive proposals for rail lines or even a highway to connect African American neighborhoods to better opportunities have been scuttled because finances were short and building expressways to serve suburbanites was a higher priority.

A review by Johns Hopkins University researchers concluded that the residents believed that the rail line “would enable poor, inner-city blacks to travel to the suburbs, steal residents’ T.V.s and then return to their ghettos.”

Considering Fixes

We might contemplate a remedy like this: Considering that African Americans comprise about 15 percent of the population of the New York metropolitan area, the federal government should purchase the next 15 percent of houses that come up for sale in Levittown at today’s market rates (approximately $350,000). It should then resell the properties to qualified African Americans for $75,000, the price (in today’s dollars) that their grandparents would have paid if permitted to do so. The government should enact this program in every suburban development whose construction complied with the FHA’s discriminatory requirements. If Congress established such a program and justified it based on the history of de jure segregation, courts should uphold it as appropriate. … I present this not as a practical proposal but only to illustrate the kind of remedy that we would consider and debate if we disabused ourselves of the de facto segregation myth.

Some options:

• Federal subsidies for middle-class Black people to purchase homes in suburbs that have been racially exclusive
• Ban on zoning ordinances that prohibit multifamily housing or that require all single-family homes to be built in large lots with high minimum requirements for square footage
  • Or instead, Congress could amend the tax code to deny the mortgage interest deduction to property owners in suburbs

Complementing a ban on exclusionary zoning is a requirement for inclusionary zoning: a positive effort to integrate low- and moderate-income families into middle-class and affluent neighborhoods. Two states, New Jersey and Massachusetts, currently have “fair share” requirements, based on income, not on race. They address the isolation of low-income families in urban areas and their absence from middle-class suburbs. They make a contribution to integration but do not take the additional step of helping to integrate middle-income African American families into white middle-class suburbs. Legislation in New Jersey requires suburbs that do not have a “fair share” of their metropolitan area’s low-income housing to permit developers to build multiunit projects that are frequently subsidized either with Section 8 or Low-Income Housing Tax Credit funds.

Fifty years of experience has shown that mobilizing the funds and support for revitalizing low-income communities is as politically difficult as integrating suburbs, so we continue to have more tax credit projects, and more Section 8 housing in segregated neighborhoods, without the surrounding community improvements that were promised. Revitalization does generally occur when a neighborhood becomes attractive to the middle class, but all too often the gentrification that follows does not include strict enforcement of inclusionary zoning principles, and it gradually drives the African American poor out of their now-upgraded neighborhoods and into newly segregated inner-ring suburbs.

FAQs

On crime rates in Black communities:

As Michelle Alexander reports in her important book, The New Jim Crow, young African American men are less likely to use or sell drugs than young white men, but they are more likely to be arrested for drug use or sale; once arrested, they are more likely to be sentenced; once sentenced, they are more likely to receive long jail terms.

Imprisoning nonviolent offenders in low-income neighborhoods has a multigenerational effect. Many young men who leave prison may have permanent second-class status, be unable to vote, get evicted from public housing, and be ineligible for food stamps. They would have to attempt to make a living in the underground economy and exposed to further incarceration.

Current trends predict that as many as one in three African American men born today can expect to spend some time in prison during their lifetimes, most for nonviolent crimes. Considering this, it is surprising that the African American college graduation rate is as high as it is

On single mothers in Black communities:

A recent survey found that 78 percent of never-married women of all races who hoped to be married were seeking a spouse with a steady job; this characteristic was more important than having similar religious beliefs, child-rearing philosophies, education, or race. If a community’s young men have high unemployment (or only low-wage work), the mothers of their children will have little incentive to marry them. Today, among African Americans between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four who have never been married, there are fifty-one employed males for every hundred females. For whites, Asians, and Hispanics, the number of employed men is approximately equal to the number of women. Unless the number of working, criminal-record-free men in African American neighborhoods increases, we are unlikely to succeed in reducing the number of women there who have children without the means to support and nurture them well.

On gentrification of Black neighborhoods:

Gentrification would be a positive development if it were combined with inclusionary zoning policies to preserve affordable housing in every neighborhood. But such policies are rare or weak. Inclusionary zoning should also be required of presently exclusionary suburbs. Were that to happen, all neighborhoods could make progress toward integration.