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

number nineteen: “Buy partnership in the community. ‘Restricted residential
districts’ may serve as protection against persons with whom your family
won’t care to associate, provided the restrictions are enforced and are not
merely temporary.” There was little doubt about who the persons to be
avoided might be.
The conference documents themselves, written and endorsed by some of
the nation’s most prominent racial segregationists, clarified what restricted
residential districts should accomplish. One member of the conference
planning committee was Frederick Ecker, president of the Metropolitan Life
Insurance Company, who chaired a committee on financing homeownership.
His report, adopted and published by the federal government, recommended
that zoning laws be supplemented by deed restrictions to prevent
“incompatible ownership occupancy”—a phrase generally understood to
mean prevention of property sales to African Americans. Under Ecker’s
leadership, a few years after the conference concluded, Metropolitan Life
developed the largest planned community in the nation, Parkchester in New
York City, from which African Americans were barred. When one apartment
was sublet to a black family, Ecker had them evicted.
The Hoover conference’s committee on planning new subdivisions
included Robert Whitten, who had designed Atlanta’s racial zoning scheme
in 1922 that flouted the Supreme Court’s Buchanan decision. Another was
Lawrence Stevenson, president-elect of National Association of Real Estate
Boards, which had recently adopted its ethics rule prohibiting agents from
selling homes to African Americans in white neighborhoods. The committee
was headed by Harland Bartholomew, who ten years earlier had led the St.
Louis Plan Commission in using zoning to evade Buchanan, while enforcing
segregation.
One of the conference’s thirty-one committees was devoted to Negro
housing. Its report was written by the prominent social scientist, Charles S.
Johnson, with help from other African American experts. It documented
violence against African Americans who attempted to live in previously
white neighborhoods but issued no call for measures to prevent this. With
just a hint of disapproval, it described court permission for zoning and other
legal devices to impose segregation. It concluded by recommending “the
removal of legislation restrictive of Negro residence” and “that Negroes
follow the trend in urban communities and move out into subdivisions in