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

Other institutions also helped. In 2009–10 I had the privilege of
participating in a year-long seminar (led by Professors Rob Reich of
Stanford University and Danielle Allen, now at Harvard) at the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton. As I described in Chapter 9, I had been
ruminating at the time about the Supreme Court’s Parents Involved
decision, in which the Court rejected school desegregation efforts because,
it claimed, schools were racially homogenous only because their
neighborhoods were “de facto” segregated through no fault, or little fault, of
state policy. At the Institute for Advanced Study, seminar participants
developed research proposals for new directions in their work, and I
decided to look further into my hunch that the “de facto” basis of the
Parents Involved decision was seriously flawed. I concluded the seminar by
writing a proposal that summarized what I had learned. Seminar papers
were published as chapters in Education, Justice, and Democracy (2013),
edited by Allen and Reich. The Color of Law is little more than a fuller
documentation of the claims made in that chapter.
My feeling that de jure residential segregation was at the root of the
nation’s ongoing racial problems in education and other fields had its own
roots. Fifty years ago, as a very young man, I worked as an assistant to
Harold (Hal) Baron, research director of the Chicago Urban League.
Alexander Polikoff, the attorney representing Dorothy Gautreaux in her suit
against HUD and the Chicago Housing Authority (I described this litigation
in Chapter 2), had obtained a discovery order permitting Hal to search the
authority’s archives. Correspondence and board minutes going back thirty
years were boxed up and stored in the basement of one of the Robert Taylor
Homes high-rise towers. I spent part of a hot summer in that basement,
collecting evidence that the government had purposely used public housing
to ensure that African Americans were concentrated away from white
neighborhoods. This experience planted the seeds of my skepticism
regarding the contemporary Supreme Court’s belief in de facto segregation.
Just as this book was going to press, Hal Baron passed away. The Color
of Law is one of his progeny. I wish he could have seen it. I hope he would
have been proud to take credit.
In 2010, I began to spend considerable time in Berkeley, California,
because my children (and grandchildren) had all settled in the San
Francisco Bay Area. When I described the theme of my research to