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

George Romney undertook his desegregation initiative only a few years
after a series of civil rights measures had been enacted into law and after the
assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders and
activists. It followed upon the release of a widely discussed report on the
causes of African American rioting, published by an investigatory
commission appointed by President Johnson and chaired by Illinois governor
Otto Kerner. Because of all this attention to the suppression of African
Americans and to the federal government’s partial responsibility for it, many
Americans were receptive to Romney’s argument, although they were not
sufficiently numerous or influential for him to prevail. Today many fewer
Americans are familiar with the extent of de jure segregation. The
intellectual and political groundwork has not been laid for a revival of the
George Romney program or for the Obama administration’s more modest
2015 rule. Americans are unaware of the de jure segregation history that
makes the rule necessary.
VI
IT IS not difficult to conceive of ways to rectify the legacy of de jure
segregation. In what follows, I’ll suggest a few, first some that could not be
enacted in today’s political environment, and then some modest reforms that
are still not politically possible but are within closer reach.
We might contemplate a remedy like this: Considering that African
Americans comprise about 15 percent of the population of the New York
metropolitan area, the federal government should purchase the next 15
percent of houses that come up for sale in Levittown at today’s market rates
(approximately $350,000). It should then resell the properties to qualified
African Americans for $75,000, the price (in today’s dollars) that their
grandparents would have paid if permitted to do so. The government should
enact this program in every suburban development whose construction
complied with the FHA’s discriminatory requirements. If Congress
established such a program and justified it based on the history of de jure
segregation, courts should uphold it as appropriate.