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

for elevating a woman who, in the governor’s view, should properly be a
janitor.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, at times an outspoken integration advocate,
occasionally challenged her husband’s administration policy. In 1939 she
resigned her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution after
it barred the African American singer Marian Anderson from performing in
its hall. She was the first white resident of Washington, D.C., to join the
local NAACP chapter. Mrs. Roosevelt’s opposition to segregation was so
well known (notorious, in many circles) that the FBI sent agents through the
South to attempt to verify rumors that black domestic workers had formed
“Eleanor Clubs” to advocate for higher wages and the right to eat at the same
tables as the families they served.
During World War II, the Boilermakers excluded African Americans, but
the United Auto Workers did not. Martin Carpenter, director of the U.S.
Employment Service, reacted to Roosevelt’s 1941 fair practices order by
consolidating separate white and African American employment offices in
Washington, D.C. Congressmen threatened to hold up appropriations unless
Carpenter abandoned his plan. He did so, but his attempt illustrates that
segregation was not a uniform “standard of the time” but only a standard of
many.
Some twentieth-century segregationists acknowledged their own
hypocrisy. University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins
worked to keep African Americans away from the university vicinity but
claimed privately that he disagreed and was only following wishes of the
university trustees. Hutchins later said that he “came nearer to resigning over
this than over any other issue,” but he did not. He understood that invoking
“standards of the time” could not justify acquiescence to the trustees’ views;
he knew better.
If we excuse past leaders for rejecting nondiscrimination standards that
were held by some, we undermine our constitutional system. The Bill of
Rights and the Civil War Amendments exist to protect minorities and
individuals from majority opinion, not from unanimous opinion. But it really
doesn’t matter whether we blame Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, or
their appointees for supporting segregation. No matter how conventional
their racial policies were, they violated African Americans’ constitutional
rights. The consequences define our racially separate living arrangements to