In this groundbreaking history of the mode rn American metropolis\, Richard Rothstein\, a leading authority on housin g policy\, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially div ided through de facto segregation--that is\, through individual prejudices \, income differences\, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather\, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions pass ed by local\, state\, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. \; Through extraord inary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic)\, Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s\, showing how this process o f de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning\, as millions of A frican Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to t he north. \; As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and L ife of Great American Cities\, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now \, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history\, showing how gover nment policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban ar eas rapidly deteriorated\, the great American suburbanization of the post- World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally\, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by suppo rting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods. \; The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did noth ing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet r ecent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore\, Ferguson\, and Minn eapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest.
\n"The American landscape will never l ook the same to readers of this important book" (Sherrilyn Ifill\, preside nt of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund)\, as Rothstein's invaluable examinatio n shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way f or the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past
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