The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein (Liveright)

By Wendy Parris

This summer, I found myself holed up at my mother’s house north of Austin, Texas, reading Richard Rothstein’s excellent 2017 polemic against state-sponsored residential segregation and its toll on black Americans, The Color of Law. I also was binge-watching the classic, 1950s-era family sitcom Father Knows Best at night. This unlikely pairing helped contextualize the book (and TV show). It was fortuitous, in the way that even a pandemic can bring about unexpected openings in one’s life.

Significant when published, The Color of Law is essential reading now. As Rothstein shows in example after example, residential segregation wrapped itself like barbed wire around the best neighborhoods throughout the nineteenth and well into the middle of the twentieth century, keeping black people out. This segregation was the result of individual acts of prejudice, certainly, but also of overtly racist federal, state and local laws. Rothstein argues that state-sponsored residential segregation violated the 5th, 13th and 14th amendments; as such, we have a national responsibility to redress its legacy.

I had the book in my car as I drove with my 12-year-old son from my charming, rented bungalow near the ocean in Los Angeles to my mother’s sprawling suburban “modern prairie-style” house in Texas. Instead of touring tiny Texas towns and checking out Austin’s foodie scene as we usually do, we would be on “lockdown” inside my mom’s house for the duration of our visit. I decided to fill the time by reading, and also by creating a 10-day “Cruise to Nowhere” in the house, based loosely on the Love Boat—daily activities; no ports of call. With my social life shuttered due to the pandemic, I had a lot of time and my hands, and my son and I had spent the three weeks before our road trip planning theme nights, lectures and entertainment, and brainstorming about items to dip into the chocolate fountain we ordered for the midnight buffet.

On our Cruise-to-Nowhere ’50s night, we “screened” Father Knows Best in the “Lounge” (my mom’s living room). The show, originally broadcast from 1954 to 1960, introduces viewers to the Andersons, a typical American family living in Ohio: a stay-at-home mom and working dad, three children, and another very important “character” in their lives—their spacious, two-story house with its dormer windows and lush front yard surrounded by a white picket fence. Every episode of Father Knows Best starts with a full screen shot of the house, and for good reason: home ownership has long been synonymous with living the American Dream. While plenty of other values presented by Father Knows Best have been challenged and duly trampled in subsequent decades, the connection between home ownership and happiness remains, and between good neighborhoods and good schools, good air, and good opportunities. There’s one major problem with this formula for success, as Rothstein points out: blacks have been systematically excluded from it.

Take home loans. In 1934, FDR and Congress created the Federal Housing Administration, ushering in revolutionary banking practices that made home-buying a possibility for many. The FHA’s federally insured loans covered 80-percent of the purchase price of a new home and could be paid off over 20 years. Part of every payment went toward principal, not just interest. These were amazing innovations that allowed middle-class people to buy homes. Unless they were black. From 1934 well into the 1960s, federal appraisers color-coded neighborhoods by risk. White neighborhoods were generally green, meaning, “Go, bank go!” African American neighborhoods? Red, as in: “Stop! Don’t lend money here!” This meant that whites got FHA loans to buy houses, but blacks did not.

Denied loans, aspiring black homeowners had to make large down payments on mortgages with high interest rates—if they had the money, which white families didn’t need, and could get a mortgage, which they often couldn’t. Some black families bought on contract, a risky, exploitative installment plan in which they built no equity. If a home dropped in value, perhaps because a waste dump opened nearby—as happened and continues to happen in minority neighborhoods—they couldn’t sell because they didn’t really own. Contract buyers also could be evicted due to one missed payment.

The FHA meanwhile went on to subsidize huge housing developments such as Levittown, New York and Levittown, Pennsylvania, where veterans could buy homes with no money down. Unless they were black, in which case, they couldn’t buy at all. Federal subsidies only went to developments that excluded blacks.

Cities, counties and private citizens doubled down on the federal government’s racist laws and preceded them. In Baltimore, a 1910 ordinance made it illegal for blacks to buy a house on a block where the majority of homeowners were white, and vice-versa. In St. Louis, a planning engineer appointed in 1916 was charged with classifying building types and proposing new zoning rules that would, as he explained, prevent the movement into “finer residential districts . . . by colored people” He also reclassified some black neighborhoods as industrial, allowing manufacturing plants and landfills to be built next to homes and schools, along with businesses barred from white, single-family zoned neighborhoods such as bars, liquor stores and houses of prostitution.

The role of the government in residential segregation was news to me, and to my son and niece and nephew, for whom I played the short documentary based on the book, called Segregated by Design, during our Cruise-to-Nowhere’s “Legal Roundtable.” By the 1970s, racially motivated zoning decisions were made more obliquely, on the “down-low,” rather than typed up in official language. Still, the fear of integration, and the history of residential segregation remained. My mom, who grew up in Ohio during the Father Knows Best years, remembered that black people had to be out of Upper Arlington, outside Columbus, by dark at least until 1965.

“Sundown laws” like the one in Upper Arlington existed around the nation, as did covenants and neighborhood associations forbidding sales of homes to blacks. Kansas City’s Country Club District served as a model for other developers.  Potential buyers had to join a district association that prohibited sales or rentals to blacks. The government didn’t create this kind segregation, but it didn’t step in to stop it either. In fact, as Rothstein points out, when black families moved into such developments, such as in 1951 in Cicero, Illinois, and in 1957 in Levittown, Pennsylvania, some white residents rioted and attacked their property, sometimes with the protection of the police (whose salaries were paid with public money, of course).

Even after the federal government passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, making it illegal to discriminate due to race, black families couldn’t recreate the potential wealth lost by being excluded from three decades of rising home values. Today, black Americans have about 60 percent the earnings of whites, but only 10 percent of the wealth. This gap is due largely to lack of generational homeownership. Nor can someone without family wealth necessarily buy a house today. My own 1200-square foot bungalow in Santa Monica, on its small lot with another equally small cottage, is estimated on Zillow to be worth $3.5 million, which is why I am a renter.

Segregation has exposed black communities to environmental toxins. As Rothstein writes, a 1983 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office showed a disproportionate number of commercial waste treatment facilities and uncontrolled waste dumps in black neighborhoods. Another study shows the percentage of minorities living near incinerators is 89 percent higher than the national median, statistically not a coincidence. Many black neighborhoods have long been overcrowded and underdeveloped, lacking adequate garbage pick-up, reliable sewage systems, good health care, good schools, and even access to fresh food. Studies have shown that people living in low-income neighborhoods are more susceptible to chronic disease, stress, mental illness and higher death rates. Low-income black kids growing up in segregated neighborhoods are less likely to move into the middle class than those in integrated neighborhoods.

As Rothstein points out, segregation allows for prejudice, which hurts all of us. “As a nation, we have paid an enormous price for avoiding an obligation to remedy the unconstitutional segregation we have allowed to fester. African Americans of course suffer from our evasion. But so, too, does the nation as a whole, as do whites in particular.” We see the toll in “. . . leaders who ignore the interests of white working-class voters to mobilize them with racial appeals.” We see it in the BLM protests and real rage, in the vilification and shooting of blacks, in the white supremacist screeds and waving of military grade weapons at black and white neighbors.

We have inherited the pain of this injustice. But we are also heirs to an inspiring history of advocacy and right-doing. Knowledge matters, but so does timing. The Immigration and Naturalization Act was passed in the tumult of the Civil Rights movement. Today’s political, racial and environmental tsunami make this a prime time to advocate for policies and programs to remedy these historical wrongs. We can start by reading, or rereading The Color of Law, and buying it for our friends and family (ideally from one of the many independent bookstores foundering in the pandemic). Or, if your relatives won’t read a book, send them the link to the video: segregatedbydesign.com. As Willa Cather wrote in The Song of the Lark, “There are some things you best learn in calm, and some in storm.” For those of us waiting out the pandemic in homes we love (or in our parents’ homes), The Color of Law is also a good primer in the roots of our own lucky freedom.

Wendy Paris is the author of Splitopia, and the co-author of Buy the Change You Want to See. She works as a journalist, essayist and ghostwriter."