 I'm Dan Stagemann. I'm the college's director of research. And I'm here to welcome you, sorry, to the opening talk in the Office for the Advancement of Research's sixth annual book talk series, featuring Richard Rothstein on his acclaimed 2017 book, The Color of Law. We're honored today to have with us John J. College's president, Carol Mason, who will be providing introductory remarks. But first, I'd like to thank the publisher, W.W. Norton, for providing a number of complimentary copies of Color of Law. We've distributed those to the students of Professor J. Borchert's class who are here today and who have in turn graciously agreed to provide the first few questions for our audience Q&A. Where are our Professor Borchert students out there? I just want to make sure I know who you are. OK, wonderful. Well, when we get to the Q&A, you will be the first we call upon. And without further ado, please welcome President Carol Mason. Good afternoon, everybody. And so poor Dan had to do a song and dance to Stahl while I left a budget meeting to get here. And I have to tell you a funny story. So the attorney general was supposed to be giving a speech, and she was really late. She was really late. I kept doing everything I could. And finally, I just had to give the mic to somebody else because I was like, I don't know what else to say to Stahl. So I'm glad I didn't make you have to tap dance up here. So thank you all for coming to this book series today. And I'm so excited about this particular topic. So today we have the privilege of having Professor Richard Rothstein join us for a highly anticipated book talk. His powerful book, The Color of Law, A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America is a meticulous, heartbreaking look into our country's discriminatory housing policies. Residential racial segregation is an issue that fits into our justice-focused curriculum. But it's more than just a topic our students to discuss in the classroom. It's an issue that affects our daily lives. John Jay students come from every borough and neighborhood in New York City, and they represent a diverse array of races, ethnicities, religions, and nationalities. But as Professor Rothstein has shown, like every other city in America, New York is racially segregated. And I have to tell you, I grew up in Amityville on Long Island. And I grew up actually until I was an adult and bought a townhouse in Chapel Hill, I had only lived in black neighborhoods. My neighbors were all people who looked just like me every place I'd lived in my adult life until I bought a townhouse in Chapel Hill. Now that was by choice in my later years and my adult years. But when my parents raised me in Amityville, the reason they ended up in Amityville is because when they tried to get a mortgage, they weren't able to get a mortgage, but my father had a friend who was a mortgage broker. And he put my father's mortgage application in the middle of the stack that he was submitting to people to fund their mortgages, and they either had to accept everybody, including my father, or turn down everybody. So that was how they got a mortgage as black people in the 1950s to buy a house on Long Island. And so I lived what you're talking about. Today, in many places, people have a choice, but in many they don't. And that means for many of our students, they come from segregated neighborhoods, neighborhoods composed of folks who look just like them, which is a lot of times by choice, but sometimes it's not. And for me, it was a choice because I liked being able, because I worked in an environment that was predominantly white. I liked coming home to a neighborhood where there were people that looked like me because it gave me comfort. But the question is, what is the choice that you have? And that means that when our students come to John Jay, for some of them, this may be the first time they're experiencing diversity and really America's melting pot. And so this is an opportunity for us to give them a diverse experience in their education environment. At John Jay, we pride ourselves on being a place where any student from any background can find social and economic mobility through education. But with this country's history of residential racial segregation, that social mobility might still be out of reach for many people. I remember driving through Atlanta and wondering in Atlanta, a city that is the leadership in civic and business is so heavily African-American and wondering why our students who are from low incomes could not see what they could become. And then one day I was driving through going to the Braves game and I took a wrong term and I wound up in a housing project. And there was one way in and one way out. And that was a metaphor for me of what these young people were experiencing. So the environment in which people live can sometimes limit their opportunities and their exposure to opportunity. And so today, Professor Rothstein is going to help us unpack the complicated history behind residential racial segregation and explain the unjust ramifications it left behind. So please join me in welcoming Professor Rothstein. Okay, thank you again. As you all know, in the mid 20th century, this nation made a resolution that we were going to abolish racial segregation. We came to the conclusion that the separate but equal system that we had developed allegedly across the country was a fraud. We knew that segregation was immoral. That it was harmful to both blacks and to whites, even that it was unconstitutional. Civil rights lawyers began in the 1930s by attacking racial segregation in law schools because they figured that if judges couldn't understand anything else, they might be able to understand that you couldn't get a good legal education in a segregated law school. And then they went on, they built on that precedent to challenge racial segregation in colleges and universities. Those precedents were then incorporated in an attack on elementary and secondary education. And in 1954, as I'm sure you know, the Brown versus Board of Education, Supreme Court decision prohibited segregation in elementary and secondary schools, at least by law. The Brown decision then gave life, new life to a civil rights movement in many places led by young people, like many of you, that succeeded in 1960s in abolishing segregation and employment, in lunch counters and restaurants, in buses, in interstate transportation, even in water fountains. And yet, despite this civil rights movement, despite our abolition of segregation and all of these forms of American life, despite our understanding that it was immoral and harmful to both blacks and whites, we left untouched the biggest segregation of all, which is that every metropolitan area in this country is residentially segregated. I've lived in many of them. Every one that I've lived in had clearly defined areas that were white or mostly white, clearly defined areas that were black or mostly black. And we've all accepted this as part of the natural environment, all of us. I'm not exempting myself. We all accepted this as part of the natural environment, something that we thought was too bad. We all think segregation in the neighborhood is too bad, but not something that we can do anything about. And in order to rationalize our inaction, our rationalize our failure to do anything about the biggest segregation of all, we've adopted the national myth. The myth is that racial segregation in neighborhoods, unlike all the other segregations that we abolished, racial segregation in neighborhoods just sort of happened by accident. It happened because white homeowners refused to sell homes in white neighborhoods to African-Americans or maybe real estate agents or banks discriminated in whom they sold houses to or whom they lent money to buy. Or maybe it's just that black people and white people like to live with each other in the same race. And that's why we have segregation. Or maybe it's because African-Americans typically, on average, have lower incomes than whites. And so they can't afford to move to middle-class white neighborhoods. All of these individual, accidental reasons, uncoordinated private activity, not organized by government, not the result of rules and laws and regulations like the other segregations. All of these are what have created racial segregation. And if it happened by accident, it can only unhappen by accident. It's not our responsibility to do anything about. We've given a name to this myth. The name we give it is de facto segregation. It's a term that all of you are familiar with. I've used it, you use it. The de facto segregation explanation is shared by liberals and conservatives, by Democrats and Republicans, by African-Americans and whites. We all refer to de facto segregation. It turns out, and what I'm going to speak with you about today, is the de facto explanation for residential segregation is another myth. It has no basis in fact, has no basis in reality. Of course, it was private discrimination. But without government requirement, without government rules, regulations, structures, private discrimination would have not had the force, would not have been able to create the segregated landscape that we know today. It was government policy, not private activity, that was designed to ensure that African-Americans and whites could not live near one another in our country that has created the situation we have today. And the segregation that we have today, this segregation that we call de facto, is the underlying cause of most of our most serious social problems. We don't name it as the cause. We try to deal with the social problems on their own without examining the cause. But I got to this, some of you may know, I used to be an education writer. I was the education columnist at the New York Times for a while. I got to this because I understood that the achievement gap in schools between blacks and whites was primarily the result of residential segregation. If you take children, the most seriously economically and socially disadvantaged children in this country, who may be coming to school in poor health, living in polluted neighborhoods, in great stress because of family economic insecurity or homeless, and you take children like that and you concentrate them in single schools. We call that concentration segregated schools. You concentrate children that these most serious disadvantages in single schools, it's inconceivable that schools can overcome these disadvantages and achieve, on average, at the level that schools in communities where children come to school well rested and well nourished and without serious stress come to school with. It's not to say that some disadvantaged children don't achieve at higher levels than typical middle class children. Of course they do. There's a distribution of outcomes for every human characteristic. You know that. But on average, a child who comes to school with lead poisoning or asthma or stress, as I said, is going to achieve at a lower average level than a child who comes to school well rested and well nourished and secure, economically secure. So schools in this country are segregated because the neighborhoods in which they're located are segregated. And so neighborhood segregation underlies the achievement gap that our social policy, our school policy worries so much about. And public health. African-Americans have lower life expectancies than whites, on average, higher disease rates from some of the most serious diseases. It comes in large part from living in polluted neighborhoods, from living in neighborhoods without access to good food, to healthy food, in neighborhoods of high stress, in neighborhoods without good healthcare institutions. That, too, is a symptom of residential segregation. And certainly, the violence that we've all observed in the last few years between police and young men exists only because we concentrate the most disadvantaged young men in this country, in single neighborhoods without access to good jobs, without access to transportation even, to get to those jobs without hope, and without the ability to participate in schools that aren't themselves segregated. That, too, is a result of residential segregation. And yet, we spend all of our policy time worrying about school reform or public health initiatives or criminal justice reform, as I'm sure many of you were involved in, without ever dealing with the underlying cause of all of these things, which is residential segregation. And as I said, we excuse ourselves from doing it with a myth. Well, I want to spend a few minutes with you this afternoon hoping to demolish that myth because the residential segregation of every metropolitan area in this country was created by government policy. So let me, and let me say, before I go into the descriptions of it, that if that's correct, and by the end of this talk, I hope you'll understand that it's correct, if it's correct that racial segregation was created by government policy, then it's this unconstitutional segregation of water fountains, which you spent so much time worrying about. And if it's unconstitutional, then we have an obligation as American citizens, all of us, as Americans, to remedy it because if racial segregation of neighborhoods was created by government violations of civil rights, then we have an obligation to remedy it in the same way that we remedied the other segregations that we began by speaking about. So as I said, let me spend some time describing some of the chief ways in which the government segregated this country. One of them was with public housing policy, and we all think we know what public housing is. It's a place where poor people live, lots of single mothers with children, lots of those young men without hope and engaged in formal unlawful economic activity. That's not how public housing began in this country. Public housing began in this country in a new deal, and it was a program not for poor people, but for working class families who could pay rent, but for whom no housing was available because no housing was being constructed in the Depression for working class families. Poor people weren't permitted into public housing. In order to get into public housing, you had to have a good employment record. You had to be employed even in the Depression. You had to have a good employment record. You had to have good furniture. They inspected your furniture to make sure that you would maintain the high standards of public housing. The Public Works Administration, one of the first new deal agencies, built public housing for working class families, and everywhere in the country, it segregated it in the North, in the Midwest, in the Mid-Atlantic States, even in the South, but not only in the South. And it segregated it even in communities that were integrated before the public housing was developed. Now that may surprise you, but in the mid-early 20th century, we had many integrated urban neighborhoods in this country. We would be stunned if we were transported back to the mid-early 20th century to see the extent of integration that existed in urban areas. For the simple reason that most jobs were located in a single downtown district, a factory district, workers who worked in this district, whether they are African-American or Irish immigrants, or Italian immigrants, or Polish immigrants, or Jews, or rural migrants, all of them had to be able to walk to work because they had no volumobiles, which they get there. So they had to be able to walk to work or maybe take short streetcar rides. They had to live in the same broad neighborhoods that were close to the downtown factory districts. So these were integrated neighborhoods. Some of you may have read the autobiography of Langston Hughes, the great African-American poet, novelist, playwright, and it's called The Big C. I don't know, have any of you read it? In his autobiography, go back and look at it again. You'll see that he describes how he grew up as an adolescent in an integrated Cleveland neighborhood, downtown Cleveland. We don't think of downtown Cleveland as having integrated neighborhoods today. He grew up in an integrated downtown Cleveland neighborhood. He says his best friend in high school was Polish. He dated a Jewish girl. I'm not saying this was the norm in mid-20th century America, but it was much less rare than it is today. The Public Works Administration in the 1930s went into that neighborhood when Langston Hughes grew up. It was an integrated neighborhood, demolished housing, and built two separate projects. One for whites, one for African-Americans, clearly segregated, and with that and other projects built elsewhere in the city of Cleveland created a pattern and reinforced the pattern of segregation that otherwise would never have developed with such strength. In my book, The Color of Law, I like to talk about the self-satisfied places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example. The area between Harvard and MIT called the Central Square Neighborhood. Maybe some of you are familiar with it. In the 1930s, the Central Square Neighborhood was about half black and half white. It was an integrated neighborhood. The Public Works Administration demolished housing in that neighborhood, built segregated housing, two separate projects were built by the government, one for whites, one for African-Americans. Other segregated projects were built elsewhere in the Boston area, creating a pattern of segregation that otherwise might never have developed, or if it developed would not have developed with such strength that it still determines the landscape of Boston today. Even in the South, in Atlanta, they may have segregated water fountains then, but they didn't segregate neighborhoods for the reason that I said, you had to be able to walk to work. An area near downtown Atlanta called the Flats was an integrated neighborhood, a low-income neighborhood. The government demolished housing there and built a segregated project for whites only, forcing African-Americans who lived in that neighborhood to double up with relatives or find housing elsewhere. During World War II, the process became even more accentuated. During World War II, hundreds of thousands of workers flocked to centers of war production in order to take jobs in defense plants that hadn't previously, jobs that hadn't previously existed during the Depression. They overwhelmed the communities in which these plants were located. They couldn't absorb the influx of workers suddenly as we ramped up war production very, very rapidly. Again, in my book, I talk about another self-satisfied area, Berkeley, California. Just north of Berkeley, a suburb of Berkeley is called Richmond. It was the center of shipbuilding during World War II. There was no shipbuilding there before the war. Richmond was a small, sleepy town of 20,000 whites, virtually no African-Americans, well, no African-Americans were living there. There were a few in the outskirts working as domestics and white families homes. There were very few African-Americans living anywhere on the West Coast before World War II. Hundreds of, 100,000 workers flocked to Richmond. It went from zero employment, the shipyards there to 100,000 by the end of the war. Some of those workers brought their families, so you had an influx in population of maybe 300,000 people into a community of 20,000. I don't know if any of you ever have thought about or already considered how you grow a community from 20,000 to 300,000 in just four years. It's quite a challenge. The only way it could be done was by the federal government building housing for these workers and it built segregated housing. It built housing for the African-American workers along the railroad tracks in the industrial area. It was temporary shoddy housing. It built more stable housing for the white workers and their families and the residential areas of Richmond. The city of Richmond justified the different quality of housing by saying that the African-Americans who came there would have to leave at the end of the war anyway, so there was no need to build stable housing for them. And the government built housing, as I say, along the railroad tracks in Richmond and south of that in Berkeley and in Albany, creating a pattern of segregation there and with other projects elsewhere in San Francisco and in Los Angeles and in Portland and in Seattle, creating segregation that otherwise did not exist and had not existed in those cities and it still exists today. After World War II, there was still an enormous housing shortage in the country. During the Depression, no housing had been built except for those public works projects that I described and a few other public housing projects. During World War II, it was actually forbidden. It was unlawful to use construction materials to build housing for civilians except for war workers and defense plants. And so this enormous housing shortage was then exacerbated by millions of returning war veterans coming home and needing housing. President Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt, was faced with this enormous housing shortage and he proposed a vast expansion of the national public housing program in order to handle this influx. And remember, I said earlier, public housing was not for poor people. These were returning war veterans. These were working families, working people. The African-Americans and the whites both had jobs in the post-war boom. The African-Americans know these good jobs as the whites, but they could all afford to rent housing. There was no housing for them. So President Truman proposed a vast expansion of the national public housing program. Conservatives in Congress opposed Truman's proposal. Not because it was for poor people, because it wasn't for poor people. It was for working class families. Not because it was for blacks. It was always segregated and they didn't object to that. They opposed it because they believed that public housing was socialistic and the government shouldn't be involved in public housing. The private market should take care of it, not that the private market was taking care of the needs of returning war veterans. And so the Conservatives came up with a strategy to defeat Truman's proposal for a National Housing Act that we refer to as a poison pill strategy. Some of you may be familiar with that term. A poison pill strategy is a strategy that opponents of a program employ by proposing to a bill that they oppose an amendment that they think can pass. But once the amendment is attached to the bill, it makes the entire bill unpalatable and the bill goes down to defeat. So Conservatives in Congress proposed an amendment to Truman's 1949 Housing Act that said, from now on, all public housing has to be integrated. No more segregation in public housing, no more discrimination in public housing. Of course it was a cynical idea, proposal of theirs, they didn't want public housing at all. But their calculation was that they would vote for this amendment requiring nondiscrimination in public housing. Northern liberal Democrats would join with them creating a majority, the amendment would pass, and then when the full bill as amended came up before Congress, the Conservatives would flip and vote against the final bill, they would be joined by Southern Democrats and the bill would go down to defeat. Northern liberals campaigned against the integration amendment in 1949. Now you're all young people, but to me, 1949 wasn't so long ago. Jackie Robinson only been in Brooklyn Dodgers for two years by then, it's just yesterday. I mean, you should have seen him steal home. It was great. In 1949 liberals campaigned against the integration amendment. The leading liberal in the Senate was a Senate from Illinois called Paul Douglas. Some of you who know your history may have heard the team, but another was Hubert Humphrey who later became Vice President. He was called Mr. Civil Rights. They campaigned against the integration amendment. Paul Douglas got up on the floor of the Senate and made a speech in which he said something along the following lines. He said, I want to say to my Negro friends that you'll get more housing. If it's segregated, then you will if we get no housing at all. And on that basis, Northern liberals defeated the integration amendment. The full 1949 housing act came up before Congress as an ongoing segregated program. It passed. The federal government used that vote in Congress as its justification for continuing to segregate all housing programs in the country, not just public housing, for the next 15 years. Under that program, many of the high-rise towers that we're familiar with, not in New York as in New York, everybody lives in high-rises, but elsewhere in the country public housing high-rises that were built in Chicago places like Cabrini Green, probably the most famous of them or Robert Taylor Holmes or in St. Louis, the Pruitt-Iago Towers. These were all built under the 1949 Housing Act. A Pruitt-Iago in St. Louis was actually two projects, the Pruitt projects for African-Americans, the Iago projects for whites. The subtitle of my book is A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. It wasn't hidden. In the open, everybody knew this was going on. It's not as though African-Americans happened to apply to the Pruitt projects and whites just happened to apply to the Iago projects because they like the sound of the name. These were explicitly designated by race, by the government. Well, very soon after these projects were built under the 1949 Housing Act, a development occurred elsewhere, everywhere in the country. It was quite striking. The African-American projects like Pruitt in St. Louis or Robert Taylor Holmes in Chicago, any of these developed long waiting lists. Many, many more people wanted those apartments than were available. And the white projects developed large numbers of vacancies. Everywhere this happened. Soon the situation became so untenable, so conspicuous. You couldn't have two projects in a city, one of which had long waiting lists and the other which had large vacancies. And so the government began to open up all of the projects to African-Americans. Soon the projects became all African-American or virtually all African-American. At about the same time, we're talking now the 1950s, industry left the cities. It moved to, it no longer needed to be located in those central factory districts that I talked about before and no longer needed to be located near railroad terminals or deep water ports and rivers. It could now get its parts and ship its final products by truck because highways were being built. So industry left the cities. The people living in public housing became poorer and poorer with less access to good jobs. Eventually the government had to start subsidizing the public housing because people couldn't afford to pay for it and rent. And we got the kind of public housing that we're familiar with today, housing for poor people. Why did all these vacancies occur in the white projects and not in the black ones? And that's because of another federal program that was probably even more powerful in creating segregation in this country than the public housing program. And that's a program by another New Deal agency, the Federal Housing Administration. President Mason referred to it, obliquely before. It was a program by the Federal Housing Administration that was designed to suburbanize the entire white working class population into single family homes and all white suburbs. This was an explicitly, racially explicit federal program. It was designed to create all white suburbs and get whites out of cities, leaving cities to African-Americans. You're familiar with these projects. You may not know it, but you're familiar with them. The biggest one, best known one was Levittown, east of here in Nassau County. Maybe some of you also recall having heard a song that Pete Seeger used to sing. It was written by Malvina Reynolds about the little boxes on the hillside made of tickey-tackey and they all looked the same. If you heard that song, that's a song about a development about just as large as Levittown, south of San Francisco. And between Levittown and San Francisco, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these suburbs were built by the Federal Housing Administration. In Levittown, someone like William Levitt, the developer of Levittown, could never have assembled the capital to build 17,000 homes in one place, for which he had no buyers, where no bank would be crazy enough to lend Levitt money to build 17,000 homes and wait in the hopes he might sell them. The only way Levitt could get the capital to buy the land, to design the homes, to build the homes, was by going to the Federal Housing Administration, submitting his plans for the development, including those plans had to be a guarantee never to sell a home to an African-American. The Federal Housing Administration even required that Levitt and the builder of little boxes on the hillside and all the other suburbs in between required that they place a clause in the deed of every home, prohibiting resale to African-Americans or rental to African-Americans. This was not the action of rogue bureaucrats in the Federal Housing Administration. This was a written policy. And I cite the policy, I think as I recall, I actually may have photographs of some of the clauses in the Federal Underwriting Manual. The Federal Underwriting Manual is a manual that was given to appraisers across the country who had to evaluate the applications of builders who wanted to build these suburbs. And the Underwriting Manual prohibited approving developments that were for different social, were for different social classes, it had to be for the same social and racial class. The manual even prohibited a loan to build suburbs that were all white, but that might be near where African-Americans were living because those suburbs, according to the manual, quoting roughly, ran the risk of infiltration by different racial classes. That's the language of the Federal Housing Administration. This is written. There's nothing de facto about this. De facto segregation is the other myth. And with these policies, the Federal Housing Administration created white suburbs around every city in the country, a doughnut, a noose of white suburbs around African-American neighborhoods everywhere. Well, how does this, is this any more than interesting history? Does it affect the racial landscape that we have today? In fact, it does. It determines the racial landscape that we have today. The white working-class families, and these were working-class families as these suburbs were developed for, not wealthy people. The homes sold in those days for, they were 750 square foot homes. That's how big Levittown houses were at the time. And the same thing is true of these other developments. They sold for $8,000, $9,000 a piece. In today's inflation-adjusted dollars, that's about $100,000, maybe a little less. Easily affordable. To both white and black working-class families returning war veterans, whites were subsidized to buy them. African-Americans prohibited from moving into these suburbs. The subsidy to whites was so great that the white returning war veteran could buy a home in Levittown, move from public housing, and pay less in his monthly housing costs than he was paying for rent in public housing. So that's how the country got suburbanized. Well, those homes in places like Levittown, or the name of the little boxes is Westlake and south of San Francisco, those homes now sell for what, 300, 400, $500,000 in some parts of the country even more. The white families who were subsidized by the Federal Housing Administration on a racial basis to move to these suburbs gained over the next few generations, 200, 300, $400,000, maybe more in equity from the appreciation of their homes. They gained wealth. Middle-class families in this country today gained what wealth they have primarily from the equity they have in their homes. It's only the rich people who get wealth from playing the stock market. White families gained wealth through this process. African-Americans were prohibited from participating in this wealth-generating project. The white families used that wealth to send their children to college. They used it to finance their retirements or supplement their retirements. They used it to take care of medical or unemployment emergencies, and they used it to bequeath it to their own children who then had down payments for their own homes. African-Americans prohibited from participating in this policy had none of those activities to participate in. The result is that today, African-American incomes on average in this country are about 60% of white incomes. It's still a gap. It's a considerable gap, 60%. African-American wealth is 10% of white wealth on average. We don't expect a 60% income ratio to generate a 10%, a 60% wealth ratio. There's nothing different about the income that blacks and whites earn. They can each save money from their income if that was how wealth was generated. But it's not. It's a 10% wealth ratio, a 60% income ratio. That entire disparity is entirely attributable to unconstitutional federal housing policy that was practiced in the mid-20th century, and that not only has never been remedied, but we've never tried to remedy. We never even tried. We have seduced ourselves into believing that African-American wealth is low because African-Americans aren't industrious because they don't save, because they don't wanna work because they're lazy. And it not only has polluted our culture, but it's also created all of the social inequalities that I described before, because the wealth gap is, of course, one of the ongoing contributors to the racial segregation that we have still today. Well, as I said, if we understand this history, we will understand that we have an unconstitutional, call it an apartheid system of housing in this country, and that we have as American citizens an obligation to remedy it. The remedies are easy to understand and to develop. It's not hard to figure out how to remedy this situation. I can describe a few of them perhaps in a minute, but what's really hard is to develop the political will to do so, but it's not impossible. I made a joke before about my being an old man, but I remember things, a time when things that we now take for granted were impossible. And so I don't accept for a minute that things that seem impossible to us now may not be possible at some future time if we develop the political will, a new civil rights movement that's going to take this on. In the course of writing this book, I caused myself to examine the American history textbooks that are used in high schools across the country. I examined all the most commonly used textbooks. Not a single one of them tells this story. They all lie about it. The most commonly used American history textbook in high schools, when I looked at these, so three or four years ago I guess when I was completing this research, was something called the Americans. Some of you are recent enough in high school that maybe you used the Americans. Anybody use a textbook called the Americans in high school? Okay, it's the most commonly used one. 1,200 pages of American history. One paragraph that sub-headed discrimination in the North, not segregation, discrimination in the North. And the one sentence in that paragraph that reads as follows, in the North African Americans found themselves forced into separate housing. That's it. They woke up one morning, they looked out the window and they said, hey look, we're in segregated housing. It's a crime to be teaching this kind of nonsense. The textbooks brag about the great work that the Federal Housing Administration did in creating suburbs for working class families, helping them into the middle class. Never mention of the fact that this was done on a racially exclusive basis. They talk about the great economic programs and they work great economic programs of the New Deal. Like building housing for people who had none. Never once mentioning it was done on a segregated basis. If the next generation doesn't learn this history any better than we've learned it, they're gonna be as poor a position to remedy as we've been. So one of the things that I urge everybody to do is to look in your communities about how this is being taught and challenge your local school boards or principals or teachers or superintendents to remedy it. Now as I said, there are many remedies. If we had the will, if we had the understanding that we have not a de facto situation but what the Supreme Court calls it the jury situation. Of state sponsored segregation, we understand our obligation to remedy it. The remedies are easy to understand. We could abolish for example the kinds of zoning laws that suburbs around the country have to maintain their exclusivity both racial and economic. Prohibiting the construction of townhouses or apartments or even single family homes and small lot sizes. If we understood that those zoning ordinances were designed to perpetuate and serve to effect a continuation of segregation that was created on an unconstitutional basis we would understand that those zoning laws are themselves an offense and need to be challenged. We have low income programs that subsidize low income housing. There's a tax credit program that the Treasury Department runs called the Low Income Housing Tax Credit for developers to build housing for low income families. It's almost always built in already existing low income neighborhoods reinforcing segregation. We have another low income program that could be changed easily. We could easily create a priority for using those tax credits in high opportunity communities. We have another program that subsidizes a renters ability to rent that's called the Housing Choice Voucher Program, the Section 8 Voucher, it's commonly used. That also reinforces segregation because the rules of the Section 8 Voucher Program guarantee that it will be used mostly to rent apartments in already low income communities. We could easily modify the way that program is designed to ensure that families whose rent is subsidized can afford to move into high opportunity communities. So I can go on and on talking about remedies but that's not on the agenda at this point. What is on the agenda is developing an understanding of the offense to our constitutional democracy that residential segregation presents and the will to do something about it. So I want to thank you for your attention and Dan, I'm happy to answer questions. So we did promise the first few questions to Professor Borchard's class. I hope you guys have been thinking about that. I see one hand. So have you experienced something in regards of discrimination that really spoke to you or if you witnessed it? I'm sorry, say that again. Have you experienced or witnessed something in regards of discrimination that spoke to you or like it really left an impact on you? Have I experienced personally discrimination? If you saw something like witnessed it or it happened to you? Well, I grew up in a all-white community. I didn't realize it at the time. I accepted it as sort of normal. I guess you might say that. But certainly, and I said I've lived in many metropolitan areas in the course of my many careers and every one of them was residentially segregated. So I've never experienced discrimination myself, but I've seen the effects of it all around me. Hi, I have a few questions. My first question is, why do you think the textbooks leave such a fundamental history out and doesn't teach us the truth of what happened? They leave it out. Why do all of us have this? Have you ever used the term de facto segregation? I have. Why? Why do you use it? Because you don't know this history. Right, but that's what, well, in history books, we look upon those books to teach us what we don't know. Well, maybe you should be more skeptical of history books. Well, I am. I mean, let me just say this. This, as I said before, the subtitle of my book is a forgotten history. This was all once well known. Nothing hidden about it. And when I did the research for my book, I didn't have to dig very deep. I read all, you know, but it's all been isolated. Nobody has, before as far as I know, or at least, that's not true, nobody in the last 25 years has tried to pull this all together to show that we have a system of residential segregation. Textbooks conform to the conventional wisdom. They don't say anything that's controversial. And since the conventional wisdom, even promulgated by the Supreme Court, is that what we have in this country is de facto segregation. That's what textbooks repeat. But we should challenge it. Hi. My question for you is, you mentioned solutions earlier. I know you're not specifically talking about them, but do you feel that a solution to this problem is something that will come over time with newer generations teaching the next generation how to fix the problem? Or do you think there needs to be an inciting incident for this to actually get solved? Or do I think what was the second part? If there needs to be a sort of inciting incident for something to be solved? Well, in past civil rights movements, were successful because of a combination of litigation, of marches, of demonstrations, of civil disobedience. In many cases, it was led by young people, like many of you in this room. I'm actually quite hopeful that that can happen again because there are signs of an awakening of consciousness about our racial history that never before existed. We're having a more accurate and passionate discussion about race in this country today than we've ever had, I think, before in American history. The fact that you've invited me here today is an example of this. This wouldn't have happened five, 10 years ago. We have Southern white politicians removing statues that commemorate slavery and the defenders of slavery. We have a Black Lives Matter movement of young people that emerged after the shooting in Ferguson. We have not just my book, but a number of books that have become fairly well known that deal with these problems evicted by Matthew Desmond, for example. So I think that I'm quite hopeful. I think that it's certainly true that there's been a resurgence of explicit white supremacy encouraged by our current president, but it's been offset as well by a new willingness to talk about at least and to confront our racial history. You know, in 1998, I think it was, 20 years ago, President Clinton, who was aware of a lot of this, said he wanted to start a national conversation about race. And he spoke to himself for about a week, and then the conversation ended. And we're now having that national conversation. And I think it's very healthy, and I'm confident that it has the possibility, at least, of leading to a new civil rights movement. I just wanna make sure that we say his name if we're talking about the shooting in Ferguson, Michael Brown. So have all the students asked their questions? So it's a nature of a comment as well as of a question. So for me, having been somebody who did a lot of bond financing for the projects you talked about, I did not understand the origin and the history of how these programs are going to be. So I wonder, have you ever considered, or I think you should consider talking at the US Conference of Mayors and making sure our urban mayors understand this history and understand the role they're playing in perpetuating the segregation. I mean, without having the full understanding, because being able to articulate that the wealth gap happened because of the inequities in our housing program, and then having them being able to demand to Treasury and the others, that you've gotta reformulate these programs so that we can begin to redress this, I think is a place to consider having this conversation. Reactions? I agree. I think you should give that talk to the US Conference of Mayors. I'm an old man. I can't do this myself. You gotta help. But I agree. I'm speaking all over about this, but I need help. So I'm counting on you. Mr. Rothstein, I think this has been a fantastic talk. And thanks to all my students who are here. It's great to see all of you show up and interested in this topic. That's so important. I'm looking at this from, kind of from my grandmother's perspective, my grandmother's 87 years old, wait, 97 years old, grew up in Atlanta, still lives in Atlanta, and speaks in a much different way about race than many people do now that are half her age. And in a more positive, I would say, progressive way. And I can't help but tie this extreme kind of re-segregation of our communities to the rise of mass incarceration and all the mythologies that surround that. And I was wondering what you think, if you think this is as extricably linked as I believe it to be, to mass incarceration. Sure, but as I said earlier, one of the causes of mass incarceration, not the only one, because actually our incarceration of whites is higher than anywhere else in the world. So it's not just the incarceration of young African Americans. But one of the causes of mass incarceration is our concentration of the most disadvantaged young men in single neighborhoods where their oppositional behavior reinforces one another's, where they engage in a cycle of confrontation with the police that eventually leads to violence and arrests and stop and frisk and all the other things that you're familiar with. And if we weren't concentrating those men in single neighborhoods, the police would have to be stop and frisking everywhere and they wouldn't get away with it. So I agree that mass incarceration perpetuates it, but it's a cycle, it's residential segregation that also underlies it. And it would be minimized if we would desegregate. Good afternoon, Mr. Thank you for the conversation you had. I really had a pleasure listening to it. I had a brief question. What is your opinion about this mass movement that I feel is going on with whites now coming into urban neighborhoods that to certain people, which I live in Brooklyn Bed-Stuy, I do live in housing public authority and I do see tourists, such a big movement of whites and I do hear the murmurs of my neighbors. Oh, here comes these folks again and it bothers me because I see it as a movement for a better neighborhood. They see it as they're jacking up my rent, probably not seeing it correctly. Well, you're referring to gentrification, the common term for it. Yes. And gentrification could result in, as you say, integrated healthy neighborhoods if we preserved a share of housing in those neighborhoods for the people who traditionally have lived there. There's low and moderate income housing and that requires a number of policies to control gentrification. We can't prevent it. We can't prevent people from moving into those neighborhoods but we could generate integrated neighborhoods if we had rent control that was effective or property tax freezes that were effective or limits on condominium conversions. There are a number of policies we could implement that would regulate gentrification so that it became a stable form of integration rather than simply a conversion of a segregated low income community to a segregated high income community. But in addition, and this is the thing that the opponents of uncontrolled gentrification typically ignore is that even if we control gentrification, even if we had the policies I just referred to, many people would be displaced still. It's not that you can't have gentrification and nobody gets displaced. Many people, where do they get displaced too? Well, they get displaced typically to new segregated suburbs in the ring suburbs sort of simply shifting the segregated neighborhood from one place to another. So in order to control gentrification in a positive way, we not only need to preserve a share of housing in the gentrifying neighborhood for low and moderate income families, we also have to open up the suburbs so that the people who are displaced are not only displaced to a single new segregated place. I mean, how did Ferguson happen? Segregate a majority African-American suburb. People thought African-Americans lived in the cities. Had Ferguson become African-American? Well, it became African-American because 20, 30 years ago we had gentrification in downtown St. Louis. We had a different name for it in those days. We called it urban renewal, but it's the same thing. And the housing for low income families was demolished. It was replaced by middle class housing, by highway interchanges, by half a McDonald sign that they put up on the river to introduce you to the western United States. Well, the families living those neighborhoods had no place to go except to Ferguson and one or two other small communities near it that where housing was available to them. They were excluded from everywhere else. So we developed a new segregated community. So we need to do both. We need to preserve a share of housing in the gentrifying neighborhoods for people who used to live there. And we need to open up the suburbs so that people who are displaced have decent places to go. Okay. Hi, my name's Vanessa and I'm a professor. Well, you're gonna have to speak louder. I'm sorry. I'm in professor Malcoff's class. And I have two questions for you. So one is about the conversation you just had. Sorry. One is about the conversation you just had. It's about mass incarceration. So what do you feel like? What do you feel like we can be doing for these young men in these minority neighborhoods? Because I know everybody has their own opinions and we try to put in programs, but nothing really ends up helping. So is there an alternative that we can do for them? Give them access to good jobs. That's the first thing. Give them access to good jobs, which we haven't done. And I think the only way, you know, New York is unusual because so many people are concentrated in such a, we have a subway system and so forth. But in most parts of the country, the young men that you're talking about don't have access to transportation. They don't have access to good jobs. And they have no alternative, reasonable alternative. We can, I think the only way to change that, well, we could change it by building good transportation infrastructure, which we're not doing. You know, in Baltimore, a new governor was elected a few years ago and he canceled the one rail project that was designed to bring African-Americans in West Baltimore to high opportunity areas so that they could get jobs. And he put the money that had been dedicated to that project into highways to bring suburbanites to the city. So we could do that, but fundamentally, we need to desegregate those neighborhoods so that those men aren't concentrated in places without access to jobs. Good afternoon. I do have two questions. Why is the Supreme Court unable to tell the government that what the government did is unconstitutional? Well, yeah, there was a famous cartoonist at the turn of the 20th century, 100 years ago, who, he drew cartoons that were published all over the country of an Irishman in a bar spouting wisdom. And the Irishman's favorite, or the most well-known of his aphorisms was the Supreme Court follows the election returns. And we can see that today, actually. The Supreme Court is not going to be a leader in this. It never has been, never will be. The Supreme Court will respond only when you've built the kind of civil rights movement that will force it to do so. And it will change the way people think about these issues. As I said, the Supreme Court has embraced the notion of de facto segregation. I got into this because I examined a, as I told you before, I used to study education policy. I got into this because the Supreme Court in 2007 prohibited two school districts from enacting very, very token integration plans because it said the schools that this was in Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington, and said the schools were segregated because the neighborhoods in which they were located were segregated de facto. Hello. Thank you so much for your talk today. I actually lived through an era. I was a teenager when that section known as the South Bronx was being burned down. And it was part of the organized crime scene. Many of these families couldn't see bringing in not only African-Americans, but anybody of ethnicity to move into that neighborhood and they would burn the houses down and collect the insurance and go and buy their houses along with the government subsidies that were given to them. Now we're dealing with a situation. I'm in the same neighborhood of, again, going back to the question of gentrification which has become a very high issue. And the sad thing is that they are once again threatening to burn parts of the neighborhood down in order to so-called collect the insurance. But the government had to know that this was going on and allowed it to go on. And it became like a widespread disease. It wasn't only African-Americans. I remember when the Jews couldn't live in that area either and that's why they moved over to the area known as the Grand Concourse. And it's still going on today. So I'm wondering, is there really a way to put a stop to this? Thank you. All I can do is repeat what I said. It requires a political movement, a new civil rights movement that's going to force this kind of change. It can't be done, I don't have a gimmick for you to stop it. You've got to stop it and you've got to stop it by organizing and by participating in such a political movement. Can we take two more questions? This may be a very short answer. Sorry, I'm over here. I'm not capable of that. I was wondering if there was any examples of cities in the U.S. that are not as segregated and if that was because they were never segregated or that we actually have desegregated them? There's a wide variety of degrees of segregation but the underlying reality is their commonality. So certainly some are more segregated than others. New York is a New York state, not necessarily a city, New York state is among the most segregated but I prefer to look at what they have in common which is much more important than the small differences between them relative to what they have in common. Hello, can you tell us what you think the incentive to continue with these practices is? Do you think it's just economic purely or do you think that it's associated with bias, explicit and implicit? Well, there are some practices that are continuing that are the result of those biases. For example, we know that banks targeted African-American homeowners for subprime loans that were exploitative during the lead-up to the housing crisis but mostly it's because we have established a structure of residential segregation and you don't have to do anything on purpose to perpetuate it. The programs I talked about before, for example, the tax credit that the Treasury Department gives. Well, why are those tax credits used primarily to reinforce segregation? They're used because it's easier to build low-income housing in existing low-income neighborhoods. The land is cheaper, you don't have to hold 50 community meetings explaining to people why you're bringing black people into their neighborhood. You can put up a for rent sign in a window and somebody walking by will see it who's eligible. So it's easier. And they're facing the same dilemma that Paul Douglas faced in 1949. Do we provide the housing for low-income families in the easiest way or do we take on the fight to do it as it should be done in a desegregated way? And for understandable reasons, we choose to do it in the easiest way but it's not explicitly racial. It's not that the low-income tax credit program is explicitly racist. It's because we have a racially segregated structure on which it's built and it's easier to build housing for low-income families in low-income neighborhoods. So we just exacerbate the problem. Well, I wanna thank you all very much for your attention and questions and good luck to all of you.