 I'm going to give Richard enough time to talk. So my name is Juan Feima, PhD student here at GSAP-Roman Planning. And today, I'm pleased to welcome Richard Rothstein to give our third talk in the lectures and planning series here at Columbia at GSAP. He will be talking about his book, The Color of Law, in which he tells the important history of the US government's deep roots in sanctioning residential segregation and practicing home ownership discrimination against African-Americans at every level of government. Making the strong argument that if we are to address the contemporary racial wealth gap, the school achievement gap, the health gap, the opportunity gap, we must first look at our historical failings and understand their enduring effects. Richard Rothstein is a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and of the Haas Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to The Color of Law, a forgotten history of how our government segregated America, he is also the author of Grading Education, Gaining Accountability Rate. Class in schools using a social, economic, and educational reform to close the black-white achievement gap, and the way we were, myths and realities of America's student achievement. So with that, please join me in warmly welcoming Richard Rothstein. Thank you very much, my plea. And thanks to all of you for coming here this afternoon to engage with me in this conversation. As I think all of you know, even though you're not old enough to remember it, we had a civil rights movement in the 20th century. It began, actually, before I even remember it, in the 1930s, civil rights lawyers challenged segregation in law schools because they figured that judges couldn't understand anything else. They might be able to understand an argument that you couldn't get a good legal education in the segregated law school. And then they used that precedent to challenge segregation in colleges and universities. And that, in turn, led, as I know you all know, to the Brown versus Board of Education decision. There are lots of seats in here if you want to come in and sit down. The Brown versus Board of Education decision in 1954 that abolished legal segregation in elementary and secondary schools. And the Brown decision then inspired, stimulated a national civil rights movement of activism. Marches, demonstrations, civil disobedience, people lost their lives in that fight. And by the end of the 1960s, we'd abolish segregation and lunch counters and water fountains and buses. You know many of these stories. But then the civil rights movement, holding up its tent, went home. It left untouched. The biggest segregation of all, which is in every metropolitan area in this country is residentially segregated. The civil rights movement activists, the country really, had come to an understanding that segregation was wrong. It was immoral. It was harmful both to African-Americans and to whites. It was incompatible with our self-conception as a constitutional democracy. How could it be, with that understanding, that we left untouched the biggest segregation of all? I lived in many metropolitan areas in the course of my life. And everyone that I've lived in, and some of you have lived in more than this one, everyone that I've lived in clearly defined areas that were either all white or mostly white. Clearly defined areas that were either all black or mostly black, how could that be? Having come to this understanding of that segregation, that we left untouched, it's not that we tried to redress segregation that failed. We never even tried. Partly probably because abolishing residential segregation is a little bit harder than abolishing segregation in water fountains. If you abolish segregation in water fountains, the next day you drink from any water fountain. Or sit anywhere on a bus, or eat in any restaurant. But if we abolish segregation in neighborhoods, the next day things wouldn't look much different. And so what we've done, all of us, and I mean all of us, myself included, liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, Northerners, Southerners, we've adopted a rationalization, a myth that excuses ourselves from addressing this most significant form of segregation. And that rationalization, that myth goes something like this. Segregation of buses or water fountains or lunch counters, we tell ourselves, that was unconstitutional. It's a civil rights violation. It was done by ordinance, by law, by public policy. If it was the federal government that was doing it, it was violating the Fifth Amendment. If it was state or local governments doing it, it was violating the Fourteenth Amendment. Once we understood it was a civil rights violation, we had obligations as a country, as American citizens, to remit it, to abolish that segregation. But residential segregation, we tell ourselves, that's entirely different. That wasn't done by government, that wasn't done by law, by regulation, by ordinance. That just sort of happened by accident. It happened because all private homeowners or landlords refused to rent to African-Americans in white neighborhoods or maybe actors in the private economy, banks, real estate agents, discriminated in how they carried out their purely private economic activities, or maybe we tell ourselves, that's because blacks and whites just like to live with each other. The same race, they're more comfortable that way. Or maybe it's because of income differences. On average, not everyone, but on average, black families have lower incomes than white families, and so they can't easily afford to live in more middle-class neighborhoods, creating segregation. All of these individual, maybe bigoted, private sector activities is what's created residential segregation. And we tell ourselves what happened by accident can only happen by accident. We give a name to this myth. We call it de facto segregation, a term we all use. And if it's de facto segregation, it's not a constitutional violation. It wasn't done by government, and therefore we have no obligation as a country or as American citizens to rent be it. We think it's too bad, but we don't feel an obligation to rent be it. Well, as you heard in the introduction, actually before I wrote this book about the history of residential segregation, I was writing mostly about education policy. I was the education columnist of the New York Times. I wrote for Policy Institute in Washington. And in the 1990s and 2000s, I spent most of my time trying to criticize the dominant educational theory in the country at the time. And that theory was that the reason that we have an achievement gap between black children and white children, with black children on average, have lower achievement than white children, is because teachers have low expectations of black children. They have try-hard. And if only teachers could have higher expectations in work order, the achievement gap would disappear. And that may seem to you to be a very naive notion. It turned out to be a widely recognized as utterly fallacious, but at the time it was widespread. It was across the political spectrum. In 2001, we passed a law, which perhaps some of you may have heard of, called the No Child Left Behind Law, which required schools merely by testing children more and holding teachers accountable for their test scores to abolish the achievement gap between black and white children. And I thought this was kind of not of the law, but the whole theory was absurd because in my view, the reason we have an achievement gap between black and white children is because so many black children, not a lot of them, but so many black children, come to school with such serious social and economic disadvantages that predict lower achievement that would not occur if they weren't coming to school with these disadvantages. So I remember writing one column about asthma. I'm not gonna go into all of them. I'm not giving this as an example. A column about asthma. As you may know, in New York City, for example, and in many, many urban areas like New York, African-American children living in low-income neighborhoods have asthma at four times the rate of middle-class children, four times the rate. They have asthma at four times the rate because they live in more polluted neighborhoods, more deteriorated buildings, more vermin in the environment. And when a child has asthma, a child is perhaps, not always, but perhaps up at night wheezing. Comes to school a bit drowsy the next day, sleepless sometimes. And I try to explain, if you have two groups of children who are equal in every respect, that two identical groups of children. Same racial makeup, same social economic background, same family structure. But one group has a higher rate of asthma than the other. That group is gonna have lower average achievement. Inevitably, no matter how much you test a child, no matter how high teacher expectations are, you can't make a child wide awake simply by having higher expectations of a sleepy child. And you can add up all of the many conditions that predict lower achievement in the same way, with the same kind of logical comparison, whether it's lead poisoning or homelessness or economic insecurity because of family unemployment. In each of those conditions, situations, not every child, because there's a distribution of outcomes for every human characteristic but each of those situations, those conditions predict lower average achievement. And when you add them all up, you've explained the achievement gap pretty much. And then, so I was thinking about this and writing about it and I began to realize it took me a while because I'm a slow learner, that it's one thing for a child to have lower achievement because that child is coming to school sleepy from asthma or poisoned with lead or homelessness and no place to study. But what happens when you have a school where every child is coming to school with either asthma or lead poisoning or homelessness or economic insecurity? How can you have a ball which says that that school is going to have the same kind of achievement as a middle-class school where children come to school well rested and not poisoned by lead and in secure homes simply by more testing? Well, we call those schools where we concentrate children with those disadvantages segregated schools. And schools are segregated more today than they have been at any time in the last 50 years. More segregated. And the reason they're more segregated, this took me a while to realize this as well, as I say, it takes me a while because the neighborhoods in which they're okay to be segregated. That's why we have so many segregated schools. So that's why I began thinking about, we're talking maybe 10, 12 years ago and then in 2007, I read the Supreme Court decision that evaluated a very token, trivial program that the school districts of Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington had implemented to try to minimize the segregation of their schools. There's a very trivial program, both school districts, Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington. Both school districts gave parents the choice of which school the child would attend. But if the child's choice was going to further exacerbate the racial homogeneity of that school, the child's choice wouldn't be honored in favor of the choice of a child who wouldn't do that. So if you had a school that was all white, mostly white and there was one place left and you had to choose between a black and a white applicant for that one place, the black child would be given some preference to help to desegregate the school in a tiny, tiny way. I mean, it's trivial. As I say, how often do you have one place left in the school and you have to choose between a black and a white applicant? But the Supreme Court evaluated this program in these two school districts and denounced it, repudiated it, said they couldn't do it, it was unconstitutional for the school districts to try to desegregate in this way. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion and in this opinion he explained that the school districts in rural, the schools in rural Venice, Seattle, were indeed segregated. They were segregated, he said, because the neighborhoods in which they're located are segregated. I thought that was a pretty wise observation on this part that is indeed why the schools and those cities are segregated and he said that they are segregated, the neighborhoods are segregated, de facto, just by accident, because of private bigotry or actions in the private economy or people's choices to live with each other in the same race or economic differences. And he said, if you have de facto segregation, not only can you not do anything about it, you're prohibited from doing something about it under our Constitution, only if you have legally required segregation is there a civil rights violation that requires a remedy. So, I read this decision and I recalled reading about a case in Louisville, Kentucky, one of the two districts that was involved in this case where a white homeowner in a single family home in an all white suburb in Louisville called Shively had an African-American friend living in the central city of Louisville renting an apartment. He had a wife, a daughter, decorated a Navy veteran. He wanted to buy a single family home but no real estate agent would sell him one. So, the white homeowner in the suburb of Shively bought a second home in his suburb and resold it to his African-American friend. And when the African-American family moved in, an angry mob surrounded the home, protected by the police. They threw rocks through the windows. They eventually fire bombed and dynamized the home. The police couldn't somehow prevent any of this violence even though they were there in presence. But when the riot was all over, the state of Kentucky arrested, tried, convicted and jailed with a 15-year sentence, the white homeowner for sedition. And I said to myself, this doesn't sound to me much like de facto segregation. If the police, the prosecutors, the entire criminal justice system is mobilized to enforce racial boundaries. And I began to look into it further. I discovered what I hadn't known before, that there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cases throughout the country of mob violence, police-protected mob violence in the mid-20th century to drive African-Americans out of homes they legitimately purchased in white neighborhoods that surrounded the black low-income communities that they were fleeing, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cases in every New York, in Boston, in Chicago, in Detroit, not only in Louisville, every one of them to the extent that the police were involved and the police were involved in many of them was a civil rights violation, a violation of the 14th Amendment and had never been remedied. And I began to look into this a bit further yet and that's what the origin of this book was. And I discovered that it wasn't just the criminal justice system and the police that were violated in the 14th Amendment by using violence to enforce racial boundaries. But there were many, many federal, state, and local policies that combined to create racially explicit policies, I would say, that combined to create the racial segregation of every metropolitan area that we know. If that's the case, and I can say confidently that it is the case because in my book, the color was now for two and a half years now and not a single fact in it has been challenged by any historian. If that's the case, then we've got an unconstitutional system of residential segregation. As unconstitutional as the segregation of water fountains or buses. And we have as much of a obligation to remedy that as we did to address, I'm not minimizing them, but the much less serious forms of segregation that we addressed in the 20th century. Well, let me describe in the little time I have this afternoon, some of the major policies that the federal government followed, racially explicit policies to ensure that we would be a segregated nation. One I'll talk about is public housing, which I think all of us, at least I did, maybe you're more sophisticated here at this school than most people, but misunderstand. We think of public housing as a place where poor people live, a place with lots of single mothers with children. Lots of young men without hope, without jobs in the formal economy, engaged in confrontations with the police. That's not how public housing began in this country. As I say many of you may know this history. Public housing began in this country, civilian public housing began in a new deal during the Depression, during the Roosevelt administration. It was not for poor people at all. It wasn't subsidized. People had to pay the full cost of the housing in their rent. It was a depression era program because very little housing was being built. It was a big housing shortage. The Public Works Administration, one of the first new deal agencies, built the first public housing in this country for working class families. Everywhere it built it, it segregated it. Building separate projects for African-Americans and whites. Frequently, frequently creating segregation where it hadn't previously existed. And I'm not talking about the South. I'm talking about the North. I'm talking about this metropolitan area. Chicago, Detroit, Boston. Everywhere building segregated projects frequently segregating neighborhoods that hadn't previously been segregated. That may surprise you, but in fact in the mid 20th century there were many, many more integrated neighborhoods than there are today. If you think about it, you realize it had to be that way because we were manufacturing economy and factories had to be located in the central district where they had access to either deep water ports or railroad terminals to get their parts and ship their final products. So if you had a factory district that was employing both African-American and white workers, they all had to live in broadly the same neighborhoods so they could walk to work. Or maybe take short streetcar rides. So no automobiles to commute to the suburbs for working class families at that time. So we had many more integrated neighborhoods. We'd be stunned if we were transported back to that period of American history to see the extent of urban integration that existed for working class families. The first public works administration, public housing program was built in Atlanta. Atlanta had an integrated housing even though it had segregated water fountains and schools and buses and everything else. So the simple reason that it had to for the economic reason I just described, people had to be able to walk to work from roughly the same neighborhoods. So the first public works administration projects were built in an area called the Flats outside downtown Atlanta. The public works administration demolished integrated housing there. The Flats was about half white and half black and built a project for whites only forcing the African-Americans who were displaced to find less adequate housing elsewhere. This happened frequently throughout the country. Most projects were built for whites only but there was some built for African-Americans as well. The great African-American poet, novelist playwright, who I hope many of you are familiar with, Langston Hughes wrote his autobiography. And he grew up in an integrated downtown Cleveland neighborhood. It's called the Central Area of Cleveland. He said in high school this best friend was Polish. He dated a Jewish girl. This was not unique to that period of American history. That's what happens when you have integrated schools and integrated neighborhoods. But the public works administration demolished housing in that neighborhood and built two separate projects. One for whites, one for African-Americans creating a pattern of segregation there. That otherwise would not have existed. In my book I like to pick on self-satisfied smoke places. I suppose this might be one but there are some examples from here as well but one is Cambridge, Massachusetts. Maybe you've heard of that one. The area between Harvard and MIT, the central square neighborhood, was about half white and half black in the 1930s. Until the public works administration demolished housing there to build two separate projects. One for whites, one for African-Americans creating segregation there that hadn't previously existed and with other projects elsewhere in the Boston area creating a pattern that persists to this day. During World War II, the federal government's action to create segregation intensified. Hundreds of thousands of workers flocked to centers of war production to take jobs in the war industries that hadn't previously existed. They overwhelmed the communities where these war plants were located. And if the federal government wanted the jeeps and the tanks and the aircraft carriers and the ships to be produced, it had to create housing for these workers. There's no place for them to live. And the federal government did so. Always creating segregated housing. Frequently where there wasn't even an informal pattern of segregation previously. And the best example of that is the West Coast. Those of you know the history of African-American migration out of the slaveholding states in the South, former slaveholding states in the South, no historians have I looked into two periods, the first great migration and the second great migration. The first great migration is when African-Americans left the South to take jobs in the World War I industries primarily in this community in Detroit and Chicago and Pittsburgh, very few left the South to go to the West Coast through the first great migration. It was the second great migration that first brought African-Americans through the West Coast in large numbers. So there was no previous informal pattern of segregation in West Coast cities prior to World War II. But there was a massive amount of work material being produced in the West Coast. Shipbuilding in particular aircraft and the government had to create housing for these workers. So it did, it created segregated projects in areas that hadn't previously had much of an African-American population, much less a pattern of segregation. Creating segregation that we know to this day. In San Francisco, for example, the federal government built five public housing projects for war workers, four of them were for whites only, one was for African-Americans in a neighborhood called the Fillmore district. They picked that as a neighborhood for African-Americans because there were lots of vacancies in existing apartments there after the Japanese community had been displaced to internment camps. And so a few African-Americans had started to move into that neighborhood so the federal government decided that that would be the African-American neighborhood of San Francisco. And that's where it built a project for African-Americans only. In Seattle, as well as the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, Portland, this is how the segregation that we know today was created. It was created during World War II by projects for war workers on a strictly segregated basis. After World War II, there was an enormous housing shortage still. The no housing had been built except for those public works projects that I mentioned before during the Depression, a little economic activity. During the war it was actually illegal to use construction materials for civilian purposes unless it was for housing war workers and your war plants. And then after World War II, millions of returning war veterans were coming home needing housing. And no housing, there's enormous backlog, enormous housing shortage. We had a homelessness crisis like we have today. Families living out in open fields in Ponce huts double tripled up with relatives. Working class families mostly didn't have cars to sleep in at that time so they had other alternatives but there was an enormous housing crisis. President Truman proposed a vast expansion of the National Public Housing Program to solve the crisis of homelessness for returning war veterans. These were not poor people, remember, these were people who had jobs in the post-war boom but there was no housing they could occupy. They could pay rent and did pay rent but there was nobody that paid rent too. There was no housing. Conservatives in Congress wanted to defeat Truman's expansion of the public housing program. It wasn't for racial reasons, it was always segregated. They were comfortable with that not because they didn't like poor people. It wasn't really for poor people. There were very few poor people permitted into public housing. They wanted to defeat it because they thought that public housing was socialistic. The private sector should be taken care of the housing needs of the returning war veterans. Not that the private sector was taken care of those needs. So they came up with a device in Congress that we call a poison pill strategy to defeat a bill that they oppose. A poison pill strategy, you heard that term? Poison pill strategy is one where opponents of a bill put forward an amendment that they think can get a majority. But then when the amendment is attached to the bill having passed, a different majority finds the entire bill objectionable and causes another amendment. So conservatives in Congress, led by the leading conservative in the time, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, proposed an amendment to the 1949 Housing Act. From now on, the amendment said, they can't be any more racial discrimination in public housing. No more segregated public housing. It was of course a cynical proposal. They didn't want public housing at all. But they planned to vote for this amendment. They thought they could entice some Northern liberals to vote for the amendment as well. That would create a majority and the amendment would pass and then when the full bill came up before the Senate and the House, prohibiting ongoing segregation of public housing, they would flip the conservative's plan to flip and vote against the final bill. They would be joined by Southern Democrats who would have supported the bill if segregation had continued and the entire bill would have been down to defeat. So liberals in Congress had to decide what to do. Were they going to support the integration amendment and ensure that they would not address the housing crisis because the entire bill would go down to defeat or they're going to oppose the integration amendment in order to preserve the expansion of public housing. I am not minimizing the difficulty of the choice they had to make. It was a difficult choice. It's a choice that we face today, that the affordable housing community faces today is it going to build affordable housing where it's easy to build and low income segregated neighborhoods, reinforcing its segregation or is it going to build or try to build affordable housing in less segregated higher opportunity communities. That's the choice we face today. That's the choice that liberals face then. The leading liberal in the Senate at the time was a fellow of the name of Paul Douglas. He was a senator from Illinois. He got up on the floor of the Senate and made a speech along the following lines. He said, I want to say to my Negro friends that you'll be better off if the integration amendment is defeated and you get the housing that you need than you will be if the integration amendment is passed and you get no housing at all. Douglas and his close colleague, Mr. Civil Rights in the Senate, a fellow named Hubert Humphrey, a senator from Minnesota, succeeded in persuading their fellow liberals to vote against the integration amendment. The integration amendment was defeated. The full housing bill was then passed as an ongoing segregated program. This is 1949. I know you don't remember it, I do. Not so long ago. The integration amendment was defeated. The federal government used that vote in Congress to justify its continued segregation of all federal housing programs, not just public housing, for the next 15 years. And under that vote, under that housing bill, the vast expansion of public housing that we know today, all the giant towers around the country became vertical slums were created, the places like, and you probably know many of these, the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, Pruitt-Igo in St. Louis, these were created under the 1949 Housing Act of Segregated Projects. Pruitt-Igo was not one project, there was two projects. Pruitt was for African-Americans. Igo was for whites. It's not that people like to live with each other and African-Americans happen to apply to Pruitt. Whites happen to apply to Igo. These were two separate, rationally designated projects created by the federal government in cooperation with the St. Louis Housing Authority. Well, very soon after this vast expansion of public housing was created. Remember, we were talking about for working class families, not for poor people. A development occurred that surprised most policy experts, housing experts. Vast vacancies developed in the white projects, long waiting lists in the black projects. Soon, it became so conspicuous, unsustainable that even the most bigoted public housing official had to open up all the projects that African-Americans were, it was long waiting lists, they couldn't justify having virtually empty projects and long waiting lists in other projects in the same city. And so the projects became increasing and eventually virtually all African-Americans at about the same time. The industry that I was talking about before left the cities. No longer needed to be working near deep water ports or railroad terminals because the highways were being built and they could get their parts and ship their file products by truck. So jobs disappeared. The African-Americans living in public housing became poorer and poorer. No longer employed in the big post war boom. They can no longer afford to pay the rent for those apartments. Public housing came to be subsidized for poor people. Once it came to be subsidized, the government and public housing authority stopped investing in it, stopped maintaining it. They deteriorated and they became the kind of urban slumps that were associated with public housing today. The question is why did all those vacancies occur in the white projects and not in the black ones? These were all returning war veterans, many of them who had jobs in the post war economy. The reason is that the federal government had another program even more powerful than public housing that was designed to segregate the country. And that was a program of the Federal Housing Administration, a racially explicit program. There was designed to move all white working class families out of urban areas into single family homes and all white suburbs. This was a racially explicit program. And this is how the country came to be suburbanized for the most part. We weren't a suburban country before that. When someone like Levitt wanted to build Levittown east of here, a place I imagine you're mostly familiar with, 17,000 homes in one place, no bank would lend them the money to buy the land and build such a crazy idea. Who's gonna wanna live out in the suburbs and they could live in the city? No bank thought it was a reasonable proposition. The only way, the only way to build Levittown or any of these other developers in every metropolitan area in this country, the only way they could build these was by going to the Federal Housing Administration. Submitting their plans for the development, those plans had to include an explicit commitment never to sell a home to an African American. The Federal Housing Administration even required Levitt and the other suburban developers in the mid 20th century to place a clause in the deed of every home, prohibiting resale to African Americans or rental to African Americans. That's how the country came to be suburbanized. That's how we got to develop this white noose around every metropolitan area in this country. The notion of de facto segregation is other nonsense. We're doing it properly. It's not based in any way on reality. Well, the white families who bought those homes with this Federal Housing Administration subsidy or Veterans Administration followed the same policy bought them inexpensively. Levittown, for example, was 750 square foot homes, very modest homes. They sold at the time in the mid, about 1950, 1949, 150 for about $9,000, $8,000 at the time. In today's money, that's about $100,000. The $100,000 homes in Levittown or in any of these other developments now don't sell for $100,000 anymore, as you all know. They sell depending on the region of the country for $300, $400, $500,000 in some places much, much more. The white families who moved into those developments gained over the next couple of generations wealth from the appreciation and the value of their homes, $200, $300, $400,000 and more in wealth. They used that wealth to send their children to college. They used it to finance maybe temporary unemployment emergencies or medical emergencies. They used it to subsidize their retirement incomes and they used it to bequeath wealth to their children who then had down payments for their own homes. African-Americans who were prohibited by explicit federal policy from purchasing those homes gained no such wealth. And I say it was explicit federal policy. This was not the action of rogue bureaucrats. It was written in the Federal Housing Administration's manual. There were now two appraisers all over the country whose job it was to evaluate the application of developers to build suburban developments. The manual said explicitly that you could not guarantee a bank loan to a developer who would build an integrated development. The manual even said you couldn't build a development that was all white. It was gonna be located near where African-Americans were living because in the words of the manual that would run the risk of infiltration by inharmonious racial groups, that's what the federal policy manual said. In my book, I have a photo of, and it's become a little bit iconic. Maybe you've seen it, of a wall the developer had to build in Detroit to separate his project from a nearby African-American neighborhood because unless he built that wall, a concrete wall going half mile long, six foot high, unless he built that wall, the Federal Housing Administration wouldn't guarantee his bank loans. Well, as a result of this policy, an explicit racial policy, we have an enormous wealth gap in this country. African-American incomes are about 60%, 60% of white incomes. There's a different story behind that gap. I don't have time to go into it now. Maybe I'll come back sometime and tell you about the income gap. But take it from me, it's 60% income gap. African-American wealth is 10% of white wealth. And that enormous disparity between a 60% income ratio and a 10% wealth ratio is entirely attributable to unconstitutional federal housing policy that was practiced in the mid-20th century and that has never been remedied and that we've never attempted to remedy. The wealth gap underlies much of the social inequality that we have between the races today but there are other consequences of these policies as well. I said before that Paul Douglas, the senator from Illinois, had a difficult choice to make. He told his audience that African-Americans would be better off if they accepted segregated housing rather than those housing at all. I'm not so sure he was correct because the segregation that we reinforced enormously with the expansion of public housing on a segregated basis and with the vote against non-discrimination that led to other federal policies like the one I just described had enormous consequences. The achievement gap that I began by talking about is one of them. When we concentrate children with serious social and economic disadvantages in single neighborhoods, the achievement gap is inevitable. Health disparities between African-Americans and whites are a consequence of these policies. African-Americans lived, many of them, not all, many of them, lived in more polluted neighborhoods, more stressful neighborhoods which results in higher rates of cardiovascular disease, shorter life expectancies. The segregation that we've created is predictive of the mass incarceration that's received so much attention justifiably so in the last few years. If we weren't concentrating, the most disadvantaged young men in single neighborhoods without access to jobs in the formal economy, the kinds of police and criminal justice practices that lead to mass incarceration could not be sustained. And I think it also results in a very, very dangerous and frightening political polarization in this country today. I mean, how can we ever expect to have a common national identity that's essential to the preservation of this democracy? It's under such great threat today. If so many African-Americans and whites live so far from each other that they have no ability to understand each other or to empathize with each other or to identify with each other's life experiences. So the consequences of the choice that we made are enormous. We have an obligation, as I say, to remedy it. We're not going to, we know what the policies are to remedy it. They're well-known. It's not a secret of housing experts. Many of you know what those policies are. What's missing is a new civil rights movement that's going to demand enactment of those reforms. And until we have that new civil rights movement, I'm afraid we're going to continue on the very, very dangerous path that we're on today. But I'm hopeful that we will have a new civil rights movement. We have the beginnings of it, murmurings of it. Despite the white supremacy that's being promoted by leading politicians in this country today. But we also have the beginnings of new civil rights movement that are hopeful it will grow, hopeful it will include you. And if it does, we can remedy this enormous stain on our constitutional democracy. So thank you for your attention. I'd be glad to, it doesn't take. Yes. Or should I call, do you want to call me? No? Okay, go ahead. I'm sorry, you had to do well in there. I've seen that segregation within schools are separated by neighborhoods, they're separated by it. I was wondering, now that there are all these different new patterns happening in cities like New York in terms of immigration and also sort of groups of people moving into the neighborhood, how do we begin to untangle that sort of level of complexity that happens in the school segregation? Well, did you all hear the question? No, okay, briefly. The question was that even though there are increasingly numbers of integrated neighborhoods in New York, the schools remain segregated. Partly it's because of charter schools and regular public schools being located together. The segregated, is that happening around the country? So, your question. New York is really unique in that respect. Throughout the country, neighborhoods are not becoming more integrated. They're becoming temporarily integrated for during a period of gentrification, but it's not sustained because the gentrification winds up over a not too long a term, just replacing a low income segregated minority neighborhood with a high income white neighborhood. And many of the people who move into those neighborhoods are not either either childless or sending their children to segregated private schools. So it's not, New York is unusual in that respect. New York, of course, is much more diverse than most cities in the country, and it's not happening around the country. Gentrification, let me just say, is a terrible problem that we're facing, that in particular African Americans are facing. And again, as I said before, we know what to do about it. The policies to prevent displacement are well-known. Gentrification could be a very positive development if it created economically diverse communities, but without the policies to create that, it's not happening anywhere. So the policies are, we should be freezing property taxes for existing homeowners in those neighborhoods. That would be an easy thing to implement, and it could be done without, I won't go into detail, but you could easily do it without depriving schools of the funds that they need as a result of the property tax freeze. We should have rent control. You just passed the rent control law in New York. I don't know enough details to try to know if it's sufficient to prevent displacement. We should have limits on condominium conversions. We should have inclusionary zoning that requires all developments to have a share of housing for families of different income levels. So the policies are well-known. As I said, we won't enact any of them without pressure to do so, and that pressure is presently not in existence. Yes. In other cases that may be active right now, and that could become active, that could challenge the fact that it's your case that could in fact go to the Supreme Court and be exempted. Well, you know, the Supreme Court follows the election returns. The Supreme Court is not, this Supreme Court is not, litigation is not the way to do this, because if you got a ruling that said that we had a jury segregation, what could next say? As I said, things wouldn't look much different. It's not like desegregating lunch counters. But it could be exposed. Well, yes, it could be exposed, but it has been exposed that we had a 2015 Supreme Court decision, as you may know, in which a civil rights group in Dallas sued the State of Texas for placing almost all, not all, but almost all of its low-income housing tax credit developments in existing low-income neighborhoods, perpetuating segregation. The Supreme Court said that that kind of policy could, could violate the Fair Housing Act. Didn't say that Texas one did, and went back down to the lower court. The lower court said it didn't, but the Supreme Court said it could violate the Fair Housing Act. The Trump administration has now proposed a rule that is open to public comment right now that would make it virtually impossible to win such cases in the future under the Fair Housing Act. It's a, they've defined, as you know, the conservatives think that the only kind of discrimination that could be prohibited is intent, explicit intent. The policies that reinforce existing segregation cannot be challenged unless the proponents of the policy say the reason we're doing this is to segregate African Americans. So the Trump administration has proposed a rule that virtually narrows it down to intent and that will make it virtually impossible to win those kinds of cases. But I'm not, I don't think that's the big problem because until, as I said, we have a movement that's making it uncomfortable for this country to maintain segregation in a way a civilized movement did in the 20th century. We're not going to change those kinds of policies. The Supreme Court has flipped back and forth as you know on racial issues dozens of times in the course of this country's history depending on which way the wind blew and when there are marches and demonstrations and civil disobedience or whatever the new forms of activism will be to demand and end the segregation of neighborhoods. Then the Supreme Court and the other courts will react but I don't expect them to before then. Yes. I'm sorry, let's move so many people and I'm wondering, I'd love to hear more about how you chose what parts of the strands would tell and how to focus it. In particular, I guess when to start. You start by saying you made a choice in this past century versus say, this is the classification of racism that has multiple centuries, that would be a longer or a different course. And then focusing on the de jure, de facto as a hinge when you just mentioned how really the mechanisms of exclusion and segregation go through all types of ways, right? Discourses and informal practices. And so from my own work I'm especially interested in these things that are written in manuals or that are formalized just a little bit such that they can be counted as de jure but they still are part of the larger societal ways of doing things that aren't necessarily the law but still perpetuate patterns of racism and exclusion in the US. So I really just would love to hear as you as a writer figured out the way to tell this story. You know I'm a very simple minded fellow. Constitution says that you can't, in fact you can't discriminate a count of race. And so if the federal government and state governments are discriminating on the basis of race, we have a constitutional violation. Now, of course, there's no doubt that I should say it even stronger. It's obvious that we wouldn't have these constitutional violations that weren't for the legacies of slavery that we've never dealt with in this country. We created a caste system after at the end of reconstruction in this country and that caste system was assumed to be natural even though it was unconstitutional by the full democratic party. There's a myth that's been created that wasn't intentional but you know Myra Katz Nelson wrote a terrific book about how policies like the Social Security Law and the Minimum Wage Law and the Fair Labor Standards Act that these were all excluded, African-American occupations in which African-Americans were dominant in order to compromise with Southern Democrats because otherwise the laws wouldn't be passed and that's all true. But that doesn't explain any of the things I've been talking about because Southerners, those all require a common national policy. You can't have a social security system which is different in different states. We have a national labor market but you can have, you know, Southerners who maintain segregated schools until legally segregated schools until 1954 never objected to Northern schools not being segregated. As long as they can maintain segregated schools in their own communities, they had no objection. And so if the Public Works Administration, even if it had segregated public housing in the South, there's no reason why they had, they didn't have to compromise with Southerners to get it segregated at Cleveland. They ended up to compromise with Southerners to get it segregated in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was because of the caste system, as I said, that we inherited from slavery that became the ethos of the Democratic Party nationally. It wasn't just Southerners. We thought Franklin Roosevelt. You know, we tend to think of Franklin Roosevelt as being a liberal and progressive and he was on economic issues for white people. But the New Deal wasn't racially progressive, not just because of compromises with Southerners. One of Roosevelt's closest advisors was a fellow by the name of James F. Burns. He was such a close advisor that the press referred to him as Mr. Assistant President. He was a senator from South Carolina. The only civil rights legislation that came up before Congress during the New Deal was a bill to prohibit lynching. And Senator Burns, Roosevelt's closest confidant and advisor, led the campaign in the Senate against the anti-lynching bill. He made a speech on the floor of the Senate saying that we need lynching in order to prevent blacks, that's not really called them in this speech, from raping white women in the South. Somebody sent this speech before the Senate. Three years after he made that speech, Roosevelt appointed them to the Supreme Court. This was not a consideration of Roosevelt's mind. He was such a close confidant that when World War II broke out, Roosevelt removed him, well, got him to resign from the Supreme Court so he could run the domestic economy during World War II. But if Burns had remained on the Supreme Court, we never would have had Brown for support of education. Roosevelt's press secretary, Steve Early, maybe you know that name, was a militant segregationist who made sure that no sentiment of desegregation never passed the White House. He tried mightily to prevent Eleanor Roosevelt, the president's wife, from admitting black reporters to her press conferences. They weren't admitted to Roosevelt's press conferences, but Eleanor wanted them to, and he tried to prevent it. She was too tough a character for even Steve Early. But this was an entire administration that was not just a press conference, but an entire administration that had these racial assumptions. Roosevelt, I'll tell you another story about Roosevelt. Roosevelt, during a, well, I gave it away, but in 1912, Woodrow Wilson was elected president, Democratic president. The first president elected from the South, Democratic president elected from the South since the Civil War. He was a militant segregationist, Wilson was. Prior to Wilson's term, first term in office, we had an integrated federal civil service. It had become gradually integrated as more African-Americans were hired within the federal civil service during the previous Republican administrations and McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt and TAF. And Wilson embarked on a policy to segregate the federal civil service in the first time. And curtains were put up in federal office buildings in Washington to separate black and white clerical workers. African-Americans were fired if they supervised white workers because that was no longer permitted. And separate Washington facilities were built in the basements of federal office buildings for African-Americans. Well, one of the biggest federal departments of that time was the department of the Navy. And the official responsible for administering this policy was the assistant secretary of the Navy. Who was? Who was the assistant secretary of the Navy in 1913? Everybody knows that. Franklin Roosevelt. Now I'm not suggesting in any way that this was Roosevelt's idea, but it was part of the ethos of the Democratic Party which he was quite comfortable in which he went along. So you're right, this was part of the national culture. But so was segregated water fountains in the South before we abolished them. So, you know, the whites in the South typically favored segregated water fountains and lunch counters and buses. But when it had to be changed, they had to accommodate to it. So my simple-minded view is that, of course, I acknowledge I said at the very beginning, housing is more difficult. But if we came to a national resolution that the segregation of our neighborhoods was not only wrong and immoral and harmful to both black and whites and unconstitutional, but it was doing enormous damage to the future of this country. Both to our inequality and to our preservation of democracy, people will have to accommodate to it. And they will, not without resistance, not happily. But that's the way social change happens. I'm not saying it would be easy, yeah. I have a broad question, but talking about this new civil rights movement, are there pieces of the First Civil Rights Movement that you see a way that we can translate and take those same effective strategies that apply to this particular residential housing, things that would be efficacious? Well, you know, history doesn't repeat itself. I'm an old man. I know how the First Civil Rights Movement worked. It's up to you to create a new one. All I can say is that there are stirrings. You know, I was saying to somebody earlier we talked, Mike, this book has had a stunning reception. Just stunning, I had no expectation that I'd be spending my eighth decade running around the country giving talks like this. This is not what I had planned for myself. But it's not just my book. Michelle Alexander's book, the new Jim Crow, Brian Stevenson's work, Just Mercy, the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the movement of white elected southern politicians removing statues that commemorate the Defenders of Slavery, something that was unheard of ten years ago, inconceivable ten years ago, the Black Lives Matter movement. So I think, you know, I'm encouraged by that. As I said before, you know, I'll say explicitly that the expression of white supremacy that's been empowered and blessed by the President of the United States is frightening. But there's also the southern development on the other side of, we're having, you know, you're also probably too young to remember Bill Clinton, he was President of the United States at one time. And he was just, you know, southern, and there are southern whites who are more sophisticated about race than most other white Americans. And he was. And at the end of, towards the end of his presidency, he said he was gonna start a national conversation about race. And he talked to himself about a week, and that was the end of the national conversation about race. But we're having it now in a very powerful and more accurate way than I think we ever have before in American history. You know, the African American Museum in Washington, if you haven't been to it, it's worth, we're taking a trip down there just to go through it. But there are museums now straddling up all over the country to commemorate the history and to tell the history of slavery and Jim Crow and African American resistance and survival. So the tactics, I don't know, you know, that's up to you. I don't know how to play out now and I'm too old to develop them. Yes. There's this idea of, you know, self-righteous northern cities and this idea of progressives having a real failure of progressing more than progressives, basically. And we see that from FDR to Clinton and even in some ways, the Obama administration and some of the complete lack of policy about cities. And then mentioning now more grassroots movements coming up and pushing the conversation forward. I'm interested to hear your thoughts then about how these things are coming, about the current mainstream progressive movement in this country. So we say the Democratic Party and how the current party has been talking about and dealing with or not talking about a different race and where we see, I guess, a diagnosis of what's going on right now and how the progressive movement is progressing more or not. Well, part of the new consciousness about race is that many, well, several candidates for the Democratic nomination are beginning to advocate policies to redress segregation. I don't think they're gonna go anywhere because even if one of them were elected, there's not a popular movement to demand the enactment of those policies and there would be no political support. And I'm not endorsing anybody by saying this, but for example, Elizabeth Warren has a program that she's proposed for subsidies to African-Americans who, well, she doesn't say it that way because the presidents of Supreme Court prohibits it, but subsidies to people who live in historically red-lined neighborhoods to buy homes where they want, not doesn't have to be in those neighborhoods. So that's inspired by this new conversation that we're having. But until there's a mass movement that's going to make it uncomfortable to maintain the present system, it doesn't matter what the candidates say, they're not gonna enact any of them. They're not gonna be able to enact any of them. So I'm of the view, and you're asked the political questions, I guess I'll answer it. I'm of the view that in the next election, our highest single priority has to be to defeat the white supremacist who's now in office. And I don't care who it is, whoever's best able to do that, whether that person hasn't heard or his platform or program that's not gonna be enacted to me doesn't matter much. We've got to get rid of the president of cancer before we can move forward. And I don't think that's an unusual view. Yes. Localize the segregation initiatives and what your thoughts are on the viability of local discrimination? Oh, there are many. I don't mean to suggest that we're not making any progress at all. There are many communities who do have inclusionary zoning rules. This community has one of them. That's a step in the right direction, small step. It's not very effective. We should be abolishing, prohibiting rather, exclusionary zoning nationwide. The zoning that restricts development to single family homes frequently on large lot sizes. In my view, I'm not a lawyer but I think I don't mean to boast playing a little more about this area of constitutional law than most lawyers. In my view, a zoning ordinance that perpetuates an unconstitutionally created situation is itself subject to challenge. And we have small steps in that direction. As you probably know, the city of Minneapolis recently abolished single family zoning throughout the entire city. It's not going to do anything to address this problem because unless you combine it with inclusionary zoning, the abolition of exclusionary zoning could only lead to the development of townhouses and condominiums for the wealthy in place of single family homes. But it was partly, I need to look into it further actually. I don't understand why it didn't include some kind of inclusionary component because the promoters of the bill claimed that they were doing it for reasons of racial equity but they're not going to get any racial equity simply by abolishing inclusionary zoning without some kind of inclusionary component. And there are other cities that are doing the same thing. I haven't followed it lately. And again, I'm looking into a lot of these things now but when I did this research, Montgomery County outside Washington DC a very, very affluent county had not only an inclusionary zoning ordinance that required 15% of all units in a large development to be set aside for moderate income families but the public housing authority of Montgomery County then purchased one third of that 15% and use it for public housing program for public housing residents. And this is, you know, my information may be out of date but the research that was done on it initially showed that the results for the children of those public housing residents in that area of all of whom were virtual and were African-American outperformed by a lot of children who were also public housing residents but not living in these units. And indeed, the wealthier the community which these units were located depending on the children performed. So that was, well, here in this community in this area, you certainly know about the fair share program in New Jersey for a long time, many, many years. It was virtually ineffective because it permitted communities to buy out of their obligations by simply paying somebody else to take their fair share of low income housing but it's been enforced better in the last few years is my understanding. Again, I'm not up to date with this and I think it's made some progress now. So yes, there are good examples. Oh, I said before that I described the Supreme Court case in 2015 in which the state of Texas was challenged on the location of its low income housing tax credit projects in existing segregated neighborhoods. The Supreme Court said it could violate the Fair Housing Act. It kicked it down to a lower court. The lower court said no, it didn't violate the Fair Housing Act but as a result of the pressure from the suit, the state of Texas changed its policy and more warm, low income housing tax credit units are now being placed in higher opportunity communities. There are some public housing authorities that are implementing what they call mobility programs which provide extra resources to section eight voucher holders who want to locate in higher opportunity neighborhoods as non-segregated neighborhoods and those exist in a number of places. Dallas again being one, Baltimore being another, Chicago dates back for a long time, is another. So yeah, there are lots of examples of progress being made. If I'm still around to publish my next book, I'll describe a lot of them. Yes, it's not a totally bleak picture. Well, thank you very much.