The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (z-lib.org).epub

Denver, 1961. When a few African Americans moved to a middle-class white
neighborhood, speculators panicked white homeowners into selling at a deep discount.
AS PUBLIC HOUSING packed African Americans into urban projects, and
federal loan insurance subsidized white families to disperse into singlefamily
suburban homes, other racial policies of federal, state, and local
governments contributed to, and reinforced, the segregation of metropolitan
areas. One was the willingness of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to
grant tax-exempt status to churches, hospitals, universities, neighborhood
associations, and other groups that promoted residential segregation.
Another was the complicity of regulatory agencies in the discriminatory
actions of the insurance companies and banks they supervised.
The Color of Law does not argue that merely because government
regulates a private business, the firm’s activities become state action and, if
discriminatory, constitute de jure segregation. Such a claim would eliminate
the distinction between the public and private spheres and be inimical to a
free democratic society. But because of slavery’s legacy, the Constitution
gives African Americans a special degree of protection. The three
constitutional amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—
adopted after the Civil War were specifically intended to ensure that African
Americans had equal status. When government regulation is so intrusive that
it blesses systematic racial exclusion, regulators violate their constitutional
responsibilities and contribute to de jure segregation.
Real estate brokers don’t become government agents simply by dint of
their state licensure. But when state real estate commissions licensed
members of local and national real estate boards whose published codes of
ethics mandated discrimination, acts to establish de jure segregation were
committed. Similarly, universities, churches, and other nonprofit institutions
cannot be considered state actors simply by dint of their tax exemptions. But
we have a right to expect the IRS to have been especially vigilant and to
have withheld tax-exempt status when the promotion of segregation by
nonprofit institutions was blatant, explicit, and influential.