Exclusionary Zoning LawsĪnother key cause of racial residential segregation in the US was the enactment of discriminatory zoning laws.

Under oath, the authority’s chairman admitted that the agency was purposely trying to confine African Americans to particular locations in the city. For example, in 1952, the NAACP took the San Francisco public housing authority to court, claiming that though the authority had promised to make all new construction integrated, it was trying to build a new segregated project. (White workers were also subsidized to rent rooms from private landlords.)Īfter WWII, city-level public housing authorities used segregated public housing to ghettoize their African American residents. Black workers were housed close to worksites in shoddily constructed units, while white workers lived in sturdier projects further inland. For example, they had to abide by the “neighborhood composition rule”-that is, they had to reflect the racial composition of the neighborhood around them.ĭuring WWII, segregated projects were constructed near shipyards to house the influx of war workers. Projects were segregated as a matter of policy. By confining African Americans to subpar public housing in undesirable areas, federal, state, and local authorities promoted (1) the segregation of their cities and (2) the transformation of predominantly Black areas into slums.

One of the most important methods by which government segregated cities was the construction of segregated public housing (“projects”) from World War I through to the 1960s and 1970s. These three conditions apply to contemporary African American neighborhoods.) Public Housing as a Segregating Agent (A note on terminology: Rothstein uses “Black” and “African American” interchangeably, and refers purposefully to “ghettos.” A “ghetto” describes a residential area with a concentrated minority, a shortage of opportunity, and significant barriers to exit. The distinction between de jure and de facto segregation is paramount, because de jure segregation is unconstitutional: It infringes the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.Įach section below covers a specific way in which racial residential segregation was realized, from the segregation of public housing to labor-market discrimination. In other words, racial residential segregation in the United States is de jure (“by law”) rather than de facto (in this context, “by virtue of personal choices or random circumstances”). Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law argues that racial residential segregation-the fact that some neighborhoods are almost exclusively African American while others are almost exclusively white-is the result of explicit government policy rather than personal choice. 1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of The Color Of Law

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein