Suppressed History: The Intentional Segregation of America's Cities

Until the last quarter of the 20th century racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but is the result of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States. Segregation by intentional government action is not "de facto." Rather, it is what courts call "de jure:" segregation by law and public policy. This article discusses how racially explicit government policies to segregate metropolitan areas were neither subtle nor intangible and were sufficiently controlling to construct the "de jure" segregation that is now present in neighborhoods (and hence in schools). African Americans were unconstitutionally denied the means and the right to integration in middle-class neighborhoods, and because this denial was state sponsored, the nation is obligated to remedy it. [This article is excerpted from "The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America" by Richard Rothstein. Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2017.]