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

factors were also involved, we “need not minimize the effect of the actions of federal, state and local
governmental officers and agencies, and the actions of loaning institutions and real estate firms, in the
establishment and maintenance of segregated residential patterns—which lead to school segregation.”
† In 1948, Robert Weaver, long before becoming the first African American to serve in the cabinet,
wrote a book called The Negro Ghetto that documented how government segregated the nation. In
1965, Kenneth B. Clark, the social psychologist whose research was relied upon by the Supreme Court
in Brown v. Board of Education, published Dark Ghetto, which described the lack of opportunity in
New York City’s Harlem. In 1968, the Kerner Commission (the National Advisory Committee on
Civil Disorders) published its influential report that concluded: “[W]hite society is deeply implicated
in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones
it.” A definitive scholarly study of how public policy segregated Chicago is Making the Second
Ghetto, published in 1983 by Arnold R. Hirsch. A similar study of Cleveland, A Ghetto Takes Shape:
Black Cleveland, 1870–1930, was published by Kenneth L. Kusmer in 1978. One of the more
important books on American race relations of the past decade or more is Michelle Alexander’s The
New Jim Crow, published in 2010. She uses the term ghetto frequently.