Richard Rothstein speaks forthrightly, directly and with clarity in his book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Powerfully argued and backed with facts that make a clear case, as observed in the book and stated on the Economic Policy Institute website, for “how federal, state, and local policy explicitly segregated metropolitan areas” [throughout the United States], “creating racially homogenous neighborhoods” that violate provisions of the Constitution of the United States of America.
An important underlying point to the larger message that Richard Rothstein offers with The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America is that, in the words of Ira Katznelson when praising the book, “Racial segregation does not just happen; it is made.” Rothstein speaks to the governmental, de jure segregation, that has persisted in the United States through housing and economic separation of the races from the the 13th Amendment and 14th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1865 and 1868.
Rothstein steps through the court case of Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company in 1926, the racial components of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) Underwriting Manual published in 1936, and the racial issues with the 1944 Federal Highway Act that focused on breaking up African American communities.
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America speaks to the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer case on racially restrictive covenants in city planning that aimed to maintain preferences for whites and restrictions against African Americans, 1954’s Brown v Board of Education of Topeka that aimed to stop keeping the races separated in educational opportunities, and 1977s Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation that maintained distinctions of single-unit and multi-unit homes in the presence of policies that seemed clearly intended to keep African Americans out of specific communities.
While it might be daunting that I have specified many cases called out by Richard Rothstein in his book while not mentioning some important others, my larger point is to say that the message doesn’t get lost in the details. The case of government action in driving segregation is articulated, as mentioned above, forthrightly, directly and with clarity. Rothstein makes the further case that the long running history of this segregation has lasting effects that requires more than simply adding no more harm. While the next step here is stated as a means of level setting, the book much more strongly aims to indicate the history and scope of the wrongs done in the name of segregating the races. Making things whole is the means of ending the injustice.
My rating for The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein is 4.25-stars on a scale of 1-to-5 stars.
Matt – Wednesday, December 23, 2020
Matt Lynn Digital 