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

toward the end of that period. In the 1960s, the income gap between them
and white workers narrowed somewhat. The incomes of African American
janitors and white production workers grew at the same pace, and the gap
between them didn’t much narrow, but more African Americans, who
previously would have been employed only as janitors, were hired as
production workers, and they made gradual progress into better jobs in the
skilled trades, at least in unionized industry. African Americans remained
mostly excluded, however, from highly paid blue-collar occupations—the
construction trades, for example. In most government jobs (teaching, the
federal civil service, state and municipal government) but not in all, African
Americans made progress: they were hired in city sanitation departments, for
example, but rarely as firefighters. Overall, African American incomes
didn’t take off until the 1960s, when suburbanization was mostly complete.
From 1973 until the present, real wages of working- and middle-class
Americans of all races and ethnicities have been mostly stagnant. For those
with only high school educations, or perhaps some college, real earnings
declined, as production workers with unionized factory jobs were laid off
and found employment in service occupations where the absence of unions
meant wages would be much lower. †
Just as the incomes of all working-class Americans, white and black,
began to stagnate, single-family home prices began to soar. From 1973 to
1980, the African American median wage fell by one percent, while the
average American house price grew by 43 percent. In the next decade wages
of African American workers fell by another percent, while the average
house price increased yet another 8 percent.
By the time the federal government decided finally to allow African
Americans into the suburbs, the window of opportunity for an integrated
nation had mostly closed. In 1948, for example, Levittown homes sold for
about $8,000, or about $75,000 in today’s dollars. Now, properties in
Levittown without major remodeling (i.e., one-bath houses) sell for
$350,000 and up. White working-class families who bought those homes in
1948 have gained, over three generations, more than $200,000 in wealth.
Most African American families—who were denied the opportunity to
buy into Levittown or into the thousands of subdivisions like it across the
country—remained renters, often in depressed neighborhoods, and gained no
equity. Others bought into less desirable neighborhoods. Vince Mereday,