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

for those forced to relocate by future interstate highway construction, but by
then the interstate system was nearly complete.
VI
IN SOUTHERN and border states and in some northern cities where explicit
school segregation was practiced before the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown
decision, authorities developed another tactic to impose residential
segregation where it would not otherwise exist: placing the only schools that
served African American children in designated African American
neighborhoods and providing no transportation for black students who lived
elsewhere. African American families who wanted their children to be
educated had no choice but to find new housing in the newly segregated
areas.
When in 1928 Austin, Texas, adopted its master plan that proposed a
single African American neighborhood on the Eastside, the document
explicitly lamented the Buchanan ruling. It noted that “there has been
considerable talk in Austin, as well as other cities, in regard to the race
segregation problem. This problem cannot be solved legally under any
zoning law known to us at present. Practically all attempts at such have
proven unconstitutional.”
Unable to legislate explicit segregation, the master plan proposed creating
an “incentive to draw the negro population to this [Eastside] area.” The
incentive was to relocate segregated schools and other public services for
African Americans to Austin’s Eastside. These actions were effective, and
soon almost all African Americans in Austin had moved east. For example,
in 1930, the integrated neighborhood of Wheatsville had an African
American population of 16 percent. In 1932, its segregated school for
African American pupils was shut down, and by 1950 the community’s
African American population was 1 percent.
The city closed other schools and parks for African Americans outside the
Eastside area that had been designated for their residence. Additional
inducements for African Americans to consolidate were created by the