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

President Kennedy’s 1962 executive order attempted to end the financing
of residential segregation by federal agencies. In 1966, President Lyndon
Johnson pushed to have a housing discrimination bill passed, but in a rare
legislative defeat, the Senate killed his proposal. Two years later, civil rights
advocates tried again, and this time the Senate eked out by the narrowest of
margins a Fair Housing Act that prohibited private discrimination in housing
sales and rentals; shortly after, pressured by national emotion following the
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968, the House of
Representatives enacted the law. For the first time since 1883, when the
Supreme Court rejected the Civil Rights Act’s ban on housing
discrimination, government endorsed the rights of African Americans to
reside wherever they chose and could afford.
This law is now a half-century old. You might think that fifty years would
be long enough to erase the effects of government promotion of and support
for segregation. But the public policies of yesterday still shape the racial
landscape of today.
Where other civil rights laws have fallen short, the failures have been in
implementation and enforcement, not in concept. Their design was
straightforward. If African Americans were permitted to vote freely, their
political power would be no different from that of others. If discrimination
were prohibited in hiring, it would take some years for African Americans to
gain comparable seniority, but once they did so, their workplace status
would no longer be inferior. Once we prohibited segregation in hotels and
restaurants, patrons of any race could be served. Likewise, if segregation
was abolished on buses and trains, passengers of both races could sit in any
empty seat the next day. The past had no structural legacy—we could use the
same buses and trains, and no gargantuan social engineering was needed to
make the transition to integration.
Ending school segregation was much harder, but how to achieve it was
clear: districts could revise local school attendance boundaries so that
children of either race could attend their neighborhood schools, and districts
could upgrade the lower-quality schools that African Americans had
attended, so that all facilities would be equal. Certainly there was massive
resistance after 1954, when the Supreme Court ordered the dismantling of
separate black and white school systems, yet in principle school
desegregation in most locales was easy. And if achieving it the next day was