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

Christian Ringdal, then a graduate student, undertook on my behalf a
search of UAW archives at the Walter Reuther Library of Wayne State
University. Mike Smith, archivist of the library, provided additional
documents that I was able to identify from his descriptions. Together with
minutes and correspondence I located at the San Francisco office of the
American Friends Service Committee (see my entries for this source in the
Bibliography, and my thanks to Stephen McNeil, assistant regional director
of the San Francisco AFSC office in the endnote to page 116, 2), the
documents that Christian Ringdal and Mike Smith found enabled me to
piece together the account of the search for integrated housing in Milpitas
in the mid-1950s. My thanks to each of them.
I could have told the story of de jure segregation without the help of
Frank Stevenson, but it would have been a drier, less accessible tale. I am so
grateful for his several meetings with me, despite his declining health. Mr.
Stevenson passed away on June 28, 2016, at the age of ninety-two. In
writing his story, I could not bring myself to refer to him as “Stevenson,”
consistent with the style rules for a book like this. He was “Mr. Stevenson”
to me, and I refer to him in that way in these pages. In a few other cases
where I have great respect for scholars or heroes of the struggle for
integration, I also employ honorific terms. If this seems jarring to you, don’t
blame my editors, blame me.
When I began to research the fruitless experiences of African American
Ford workers who attempted to find nearby housing when their jobs moved
to the suburbs, I intended to focus not only on Frank Stevenson but on a
Ford employee with similar experiences when the company’s assembly
plant in Edgewater, New Jersey, moved to suburban Mahwah. Jessica
Pachak, a Cornell University undergraduate, found important documents
related to Mahwah in the papers of Paul Davidoff at the Cornell University
library archives. Davidoff was the president of the Suburban Action
Institute that reported extensively on segregation of the New York City
suburbs. I visited the Mahwah Museum and benefited from the enormous
generosity of its then-president, Thomas Dunn, who during my visit and
subsequently provided me with the fruits of his own substantial research
into the shortage of affordable housing in suburban Bergen County.
Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumer’s Republic provides a wealth of information
about policies of segregation in suburban New Jersey. Her book’s source