WASHINGTON FORCED SEGREGATION ON THE NATION: IT'S TIME TO REMEDY THE EFFECTS OF THAT TERRIBLE POLICY.

AuthorRothstein, Richard

IN 1940, THE federal government required a Detroit builder to construct a six-foot-high, half-mile-long, north-south concrete wall. The express purpose was to separate an all-white housing development he was constructing from an African-American neighborhood to its east. The builder would be approved for a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loan guarantee he needed only if he complied with the government's demand.

Today, most African Americans in every metropolitan area remain residentially concentrated or entirely separate. That fact underlies or exacerbates many of the nation's most serious social and economic problems, from relatively low intergenerational mobility to the disproportionate prevalence of hostile encounters between police and disadvantaged black youths in neighborhoods without access to good jobs. The Detroit wall offers a striking illustration of an underappreciated truth about this shameful situation: Racial segregation in America was, to a large degree, engineered by policy makers in Washington.

Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights litigators won court victories that desegregated law and graduate schools, then colleges and, with 1954's Brown v. Board of Education ruling, elementary and secondary schools. These legal victories helped to spur a civil rights movement that, in the 1960s, forced an end to racial segregation in public transportation, in public accommodations, in employment, and in voting.

Yet despite those victories, America has left untouched the biggest segregation of all: Progress in the desegregation of neighborhoods has been minimal.

In low-income, racially segregated communities, children are in poorer health, are under greater stress from parents' economic insecurity, and have less access to high-quality early childhood, after-school, and summer programs. When children with these and other challenges are concentrated in a single school, their problems can overwhelm teachers, and educational outcomes suffer. The "black-white achievement gap," a focus of education reformers, is substantially attributable to residential segregation.

This form of segregation is more difficult to eradicate than many others. After the abolition of discrimination on buses and at lunch counters, African Americans could take any empty seat on a bus or sit at any lunch counter. But the Fair Housing Act's prohibition of future discrimination in housing left previously segregated neighborhoods intact.

Americans have rationalized our failure to achieve desegregated neighborhoods by adopting a national myth shared by the left and the right, by blacks and whites: that what we see around us is defacto, not legally enforced, segregation. It's the result not of a government design to keep the races separated but rather of private prejudice, the personal preferences of both blacks and whites to live with same-race neighbors, and income differences that make integrated communities unaffordable to many African Americans.

This is a small part of the truth. In reality, explicit government policy in the mid-20th century--imposed in the name of promoting safety and social harmony--was the most powerful force separating the races in every metropolitan area, and the effects of that policy endure. Because racial segregation results from the open, racially explicit, purposeful action of federal, state, and local governments, our residential racial boundaries are unconstitutional; because they are unconstitutional, we have an obligation to ensure that our government remedies them; because we have forgotten the history of how residential segregation was created by government, we are handicapped in our ability to address it.

THE NEW DEAL'S SEGREGATED HOUSING PROJECTS

DURING THE DEPRESSION, to provide lodging for lower-middle-class white families, the New Deal created America's first civilian public housing. Some projects were built for black families as well, but these were almost always separate from the white projects. At the time, many urban areas were sites of considerable diversity, with black and white workers living within walking distance of downtown factories and other workplaces. Communities near train stations were often integrated, for example, because railroads would hire only African Americans as baggage handlers or Pullman car porters.

When Franklin Roosevelt became president, the nation was facing a desperate housing shortage. Many black and white working families lived in neighborhoods that, while integrated, could rightly be described as slums. To improve the quality of housing, as well as to provide jobs for construction...

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