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Author drills into federal government's role pushing segregation

 
Author and journalist Richard Rothstein. [Handout photo]
Author and journalist Richard Rothstein. [Handout photo]
Published July 23, 2018

Before researching his latest book, Richard Rothstein had some vague ideas about why residential segregation took root in so many communities during the 20th century.

Like many of us, he had little reason to doubt the de facto explanation: A history of segregation carried over from the days of slavery was continue by the white public's general bigotry, rogue actors and private sector discrimination.

Now the author and journalist has a more precise answer: The federal government made our communities that way. He effectively argues in his latest book that our housing policies and practices created much of the residential segregation beginning after World War I and then perpetuated it throughout much of the century.

"I have to say I was surprised at how big a role the government played in this unconstitutional segregation," Rothstein said when we talked earlier this month. "It was systematic and widespread and effectively shut out many African-Americans from the benefits of homeownership."

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Rothstein presents his strong case in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, which he will discuss as part of the Speakers Who Inspire series at the Mahaffey Theater on Tuesday.

During our interview, he spoke eloquently on the topic, with an obvious passion. He explained how his publisher thought it would be sexier to title the book "the hidden history." Rothstein, however, argued that this wasn't hidden; it was done in the open. The policies were written down in many cases, and politicians and bureaucrats routinely talked about the discriminatory practices in public.

That's where Color of Law is at its best, as it piles up examples of how the federal government used lending and other policies to favor whites over blacks. During and after World War II, for instance, the country needed a lot more housing. The government, Rothstein found, would not back desegregated developments. To secure lending or government incentives, they had to be white or black only.

Rothstein even found examples of the government refusing to support proposed "whites only" developments if they were too close to existing African-American communities. One example: The Federal Housing Administration backed a development in Detroit only after the builder put up a 6-foot high concrete wall to separate it from a nearby African-American community.

"They wanted to make sure African-Americans couldn't even walk into the new community," Rothstein said.

New developments open to "whites only" sold homes to returning veterans for what would be about $100,000 today, or about twice the average household income, a price that most middle class families could afford.

Many of the homes in the white communities are now worth $500,000, or even more, Rothstein said. Developers build black-only communities, but they were often in less desirable locations and construction wasn't as good, Rothstein found. It's no wonder white families in this country are about 10 times as wealthy as their black counterparts, he argued.

That enormous disparity in wealth is largely "attributable to the unconstitutional federal housing policies practiced in the mid 20th century," he said. "Whites were allowed to benefit from rising home prices… Many African-Americans today remain trapped in rental apartments in low opportunity communities, where they send their children to school with other disadvantaged children. The wealth gap, the health gap, the education gap are also attributable in many ways to these policies."

One of the rationalizations for segregating communities was that African-American homeowners would lower property values. Rothstein does a good job in the book of eviscerating that argument.

"The FHA had plenty of evidence to show that actually the opposite was true," Rothstein said. "Property values went up when African-Americans moved into all white neighborhoods because they had such fewer housing options and they were willing to pay more for the same housing."

Rothstein used other examples to show how several communities, from a neighborhood in Cleveland to several cities in the West, were desegregated and benefiting from it, until the federal policies came along and enacted policies that separated the races.

"Another of the rationalizations for these policies were that they were only respecting local attitudes," Rothstein said. "But that's nonsense because these policies were often imposed on communities where they was no previous pattern of residential segregation."

The federal government's openly discriminatory policies began to wind down in the 1960s, though some cities and towns continued to enact their own.

Rothstein's book is better as a history lesson than it is as a guide for moving forward. He makes some proposals — a ban on zoning that prohibits multi-family housing, which can freeze low-income families out of affluent neighborhoods — but only after a disclaimer about how they would be very difficult to enact in today's political climate.

"Undoing the effects of (this residential) segregation will be incomparably difficult," he writes in the book. "To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done."

Contact Graham Brink at gbrink@tampabay.com. Follow @GrahamBrink.