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

Frequently, the African Americans who attempted to pioneer the
integration of white middle-class neighborhoods were of higher social status
than their white neighbors, and they were rarely of lower status. The incident
that provoked Baltimore to adopt its racial zoning ordinance in 1910 was a
prominent African American lawyer moving onto a majority white block.
Economic zoning without racial exclusion could not have prevented Frank
Stevenson or his African American co-workers from moving into Milpitas
subdivisions where many of their white Ford union brothers were settling.
To ban Frank Stevenson and his friends, different tools were needed. The
federal government developed them in full contempt of its constitutional
obligations. First, the government embarked on a scheme to persuade as
many white families as possible to move from urban apartments to singlefamily
suburban homes. Then, once suburbanization was under way, the
government, with explicit racial intent, made it nearly impossible for African
Americans to follow.
I
THE FEDERAL government’s policy of racial exclusion had roots earlier in the
twentieth century. The Wilson administration took the initial steps. Terrified
by the 1917 Russian revolution, government officials came to believe that
communism could be defeated in the United States by getting as many white
Americans as possible to become homeowners—the idea being that those
who owned property would be invested in the capitalist system. So in 1917
the federal Department of Labor promoted an “Own-Your-Own-Home”
campaign, handing out “We Own Our Own Home” buttons to schoolchildren
and distributing pamphlets saying that it was a “patriotic duty” to cease
renting and to build a single-family unit. The department printed more than
two million posters to be hung in factories and other businesses and
published newspaper advertisements throughout the country promoting
single-family ownership—each one had an image of a white couple or
family.