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

ghetto. Some incidents involved move-in violence like that experienced by
the Myerses; others involved white teenagers defending what they
considered a neighborhood boundary that African Americans should not
cross. Although in some cases perpetrators might have been difficult to
identify, it is improbable that police were incapable of finding a sufficient
number to prevent repetitive conflict.
In the Los Angeles area, cross burnings, dynamite bombings, rocks
thrown through windows, graffiti, and other acts of vandalism, as well as
numerous phone threats, greeted African Americans who found housing in
neighborhoods just outside their existing areas of concentration. In 1945, an
entire family—father, mother, and two children—was killed when its new
home in an all-white neighborhood was blown up. Of the more than one
hundred incidents of move-in bombings and vandalism that occurred in Los
Angeles between 1950 and 1965, only one led to an arrest and prosecution—
and that was because the California attorney general took over the case after
local police and prosecutors claimed they were unable to find anyone to
charge.
Although the 1968 Fair Housing Act made violence to prevent
neighborhood integration a federal crime and the Department of Justice
prosecuted several cases, frequent attacks on African Americans attempting
to leave predominantly black areas continued into the 1980s. The Southern
Poverty Law Center found that in 1985–86, only about one-quarter of these
incidents were prosecuted, but the share in which charges were brought grew
rapidly from 1985 to 1990, up to 75 percent. That such an increase in the
rate of prosecution was possible suggests how tolerant of such crimes police
and prosecutors had previously been. Still, the center documented 130 cases
of move-in violence in 1989 alone.
During the mid-twentieth century, local police and the FBI went to
extraordinary lengths to infiltrate and disrupt liberal and left-wing political
groups as well as organized crime syndicates. That they did not act similarly
in the case of a nationwide terror campaign against African Americans who
integrated previously white communities should be deemed, at the least,
complicity in the violence. Had perpetrators been held to account in even a
few well-publicized cases, many thousands of others might have been
prevented.