Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York, NY: Liveright, 2017). 345 pp. (hard cover), ISBN: 978‐1‐63149‐285‐3

• Published date: 01 November 2019
• Author: Ulf Zimmermann
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13119
• Date: 01 November 2019

938 Public Administration Review • Novem ber | Dece mber 2 019

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 79, Iss. 6, pp. 938–940. © 2019 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13119.

Reviewed by: Ulf Zimmermann

Kennesaw State University

Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How

Our Government Segregated America (New York, NY: Liveright,

2017). 345 pp. (hard cover), ISBN: 978-1-63149-285-3

Americans live in highly segregated

metropolitan areas. How this came about is

usually explained as a purely de facto process:

If and when African Americans moved into white

neighborhoods, whites moved out. This soon escalated

into “white flight”; banks discriminated by refusing

to lend in poor (read: black) neighborhoods; real

estate agents steered whites into white neighborhoods

and blacks into black ones; owing to historical

circumstances, African Americans had less education

and hence less income, which in turn meant lesser

housing and so on. As Chief Justice John Roberts

summed it up in a 2007 school segregation case,

such segregation might have resulted from “societal

discrimination” (xiii) but “remedying discrimination

‘not traceable to [government’s] own actions’” can

never justify a constitutionally acceptable, racially

conscious remedy. “Where [racial imbalance] is a

product not of state action but of private choices, it

does not have constitutional implications” (xiv).

Exactly contrary to this, Rothstein’s book

demonstrates that racially explicit government

policies to segregate our metropolitan areas

… were neither subtle nor intangible, and

were sufficiently controlling to construct

the de jure segregation that is now with us

in neighborhoods…. The core argument

of this book is that African Americans were

unconstitutionally denied the means and the

right to integrate in middle-class neighborhoods,

and because this denial was state-sponsored, the

nation is obligated to remedy it. (xiv)

Rothstein builds his argument by adducing case after

case of policies, starting with the federal ones, from

the New Deal and World War II to the immediate

postwar decades. Because of the massive housing

crisis precipitated by the Depression, the federal

government first provided housing for civilians via the

New Deal, but this was not really “public” as it was

segregated from the outset. Tennessee Valley Authority

(TVA) projects, for example, provided decent houses

for whites but only shoddy barracks for African

Americans (if any at all).

When the government was gearing up for WW II,

Richmond, across the bay from San Francisco, had the

region’s greatest concentration of African Americans.

They had been drawn there by employment

opportunities at the then largest shipbuilding complex

in the country. Area employers had hired the remaining

able-bodied white men and all the white women they

could and only then turned to African American men

(and eventually African American women as well).

Housing became a severe problem for them with this

population explosion because the Federal Housing

Administration (FHA) would, unconstitutionally, not

insure loans for black homeownership. When they

wanted, nonetheless, to buy property nearby, locals

incorporated Milpitas expressly to keep it white, and

as these buyers wanted to create a housing cooperative,

the new city council banned apartments and stipulated

that only single-family housing be built.

But let us digress to see how we arrived at such FHA

practices to begin with. Terrified by the 1917 Russian

revolution, federal officials, Rothstein reminds us,

decided that communism could be beaten back in

the United States if as many white people as possible

owned their own homes. They told schoolchildren

that it was a “patriotic duty” to “Own-Your-Own-

Home” (60). In support, the National Association of

Real Estate Boards (NAREB) adopted an “ethics” rule

prohibiting agents from selling to African Americans

in white neighborhoods (62).

Homeownership was, however, extremely expensive for

everyone and was made even more difficult to maintain

by the Depression. President Roosevelt’s New Deal

created the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC)

to buy up loans in danger of foreclosure and to turn

these into mortgages to be paid off in 15 (later 20)

years, with full amortization (ownership) at the end.

To ensure that the HOLC, and subsequently the FHA,

Ulf Zimmermann was born in Germany,

received a Ph.D. from the University of

Texas at Austin, and has taught public

administration and urban affairs for more

than a couple of decades.

E-mail: uzimmerm@kennesaw.edu

Book Reviews

Galia Cohen, Editor