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

Americans, was constructed in a neighborhood adjoining the
Eastside black ghetto. The city plan did not call for segregating the
Mexican American population into a single zone, although the
public housing project contributed to their greater isolation.
p. 24, 2 Bowly 1978, 24; Hirsch 1983. 1998, 14; Choldin 2005. The racial
identification of these projects was reinforced by their naming.
Julia C. Lathrop and Jane Addams were white, early-twentiethcentury
social workers and reformers whose careers were devoted
to serving low-income white immigrant populations. Ida B. Wells,
an African American, was one of the founders of the NAACP. Such
use of naming to identify projects or neighborhoods by race has
continued into more recent times, as many cities have renamed
boulevards going through African American neighborhoods after
Martin Luther King, Jr. Many fewer boulevards going through
white communities are named after him.
p. 25, 3 Vale 2002, 37, 55, 80; USCCR 1967, 65.
p. 26, 1 Cunningham 16–19; Stainton and Regan 2001, 12.
p. 26, 2 Weaver 1948, 171–74. In 1945, the federal government finally
accepted a small number of African American families in Willow
Run housing, after setting aside a segregated section for them. In
1946, African Americans were finally permitted to live throughout
the project. By this time, however, it was too late for a substantial
integration program to take hold. With the end of the war, jobs at
the bomber plant were disappearing, and many white families were
returning home. Unfilled vacancies developed in the white sections
of the project, so permitting African Americans to occupy these
units did not deny any white workers and their families the
preferential treatment to which they had been accustomed.
Eventually, as more white families departed, many to return to the
rural communities and smaller towns from which they had
migrated, the Willow Run project became increasingly black.
African American workers had come to Willow Run not only for
jobs but also to escape racial violence and exploitation in the
South. For them, returning home when bomber plant jobs
disappeared was not an attractive option.
p. 26, 3 This is another example of how the government used naming to
identify projects by race. Because the project was intended for
African Americans, it was named after Sojourner Truth, an African
American abolitionist before and during the Civil War.