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

Americans in North Richmond, all students at the Verde School receive
subsidized lunches, and 58 percent of its parents have not completed high
school.
Richmond’s school board could easily segregate its elementary schools
because Richmond’s neighborhoods were segregated, but for junior and
senior high schools, the district created artificial boundaries that prevented
many African American students from enrolling in their local schools.
Instead, the district transported them to predominantly African American
schools that were already more congested than the white ones. Whites also
had to travel longer distances to avoid attending heavily African American
schools nearer their homes. The assistant superintendent explained at a 1958
public meeting called to protest the segregation that the boundaries “assign
to [mostly black] Richmond Union High School the bulk of students who
can benefit from the shop program there and . . . the existing boundaries of
[mostly white] Harry Ells High School are valid because the students who
are grouped there are those who can profit from the academic program.”
Civil rights protests forced the school district to redraw the high school
attendance boundaries in 1959, but because of neighborhood segregation,
African Americans remained concentrated in two of the eleven junior high
schools and in Richmond High School. That’s where Terry, the youngest of
the Stevenson girls, graduated in 1970. Off and on, she took community
college courses but never completed a college degree. She worked all her
life, in day care centers and as a nursing assistant, and had six children of her
own.
Terry Stevenson’s two sons are warehouse workers. Of her four
daughters, two are certified nurse assistants, one answers phone inquiries at
a bank, and one is a security guard. Terry Stevenson’s sisters also have
children. They include a paralegal working at a law firm, a pharmacist
assistant, a clerical worker at a government social service agency, and a
department store sales clerk.
What might have become of these Stevenson grandchildren if their
parents had grown up and attended school in an integrated Milpitas, not in a
de jure segregated Richmond? Should they now have partners with similar
occupations, their household incomes are unlikely to rise above the fourth
income quintile of Americans. How much farther on the socioeconomic
ladder would they have been able to climb if they had grown up in a well-