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

constantly under threat, lasted only another four years; in 1961, they sold
their Levittown home and returned to the African American neighborhood in
York, Pennsylvania, where they had previously lived.
Does the failure of police to protect the Gary and Myers families
constitute government-sponsored, de jure segregation? When police officers
stood by without preventing the intimidation these families endured, were
the African American families’ constitutional rights violated, or were they
victims of rogue police officers for whom the state was not responsible?
Certainly, we cannot hold the government accountable for every action of
racially biased police officers. Yet if these officers’ superiors were aware of
racially discriminatory activities conducted under color of law, as they surely
were, and either encouraged these activities or took inadequate steps to
restrain them, then these were no longer merely rogue actions but expressed
state policy that violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of due
process and equal protection.
If we apply that standard to police behavior in Rollingwood and in
Levittown, we must conclude that law enforcement officers conspired to
violate the civil rights of the Garys and of the Myerses and that this
unremedied conspiracy of government authorities contributed to de jure
segregation of the communities for whose welfare they were responsible.
II
WHAT THE Gary and the Myers families experienced was not an aberration.
During much of the twentieth century, police tolerance and promotion of
cross burnings, vandalism, arson, and other violent acts to maintain
residential segregation was systematic and nationwide.
The attacks on African American pioneers, sanctioned by elected officials
and law enforcement officers, could not have been attributable to whites’
discomfort with a lower social class of neighbors. Wilbur and Borece Gary
and Bill and Daisy Myers were solidly middle class. Because more affluent
communities were closed to them, the African Americans who were
victimized by such mob action often had higher occupational and social