Housing policy enacted by federal, state, and local governments in the 20th century ensured that African American and white citizens could not live near one another in metropolitan areas across the United States, according to a father-daughter team who authored a book examining housing and segregation.
Legal experts Richard and Leah Rothstein spoke on their book “Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law” at The University of Tulsa’s College of Law this month. The event was a joint venture between the college and Greenwood Rising museum, located on Tulsa’s historic Black Wall Street, to commemorate the anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that decimated the Greenwood neighborhood.
“In the immediate post-World War II period, the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration decided to move the entire white, working, and middle-class populations out of the urban areas into single family homes in all-white suburbs from which African Americans would be excluded. This was a racially explicit federal policy,” said Richard Rothstein, who attended the event virtually while his daughter appeared in person.
After WWII, white families bought homes for the equivalent of $100,000 in today’s dollars. They would later sell the houses for hundreds of thousands of dollars more, creating generational wealth for their children and grandchildren, Richard Rothstein said.
“African Americans were prohibited from accumulating wealth in this way,” he said, adding that because of that, African Americans’ incomes on average are about 60% of whites’ incomes, while African Americans’ wealth is about 5% of whites’ wealth. “That enormous wealth gap is entirely attributable to unconstitutional federal housing policy.”
Rothstein’s 2017 book, “The Color of Law,” is considered a groundbreaking history of residential segregation in America. Clinical Professor of Law Mimi Marton said that book is a cornerstone of UTulsa’s clinical law program, teaching students to look for context, not just facts, and engaging them in critical thinking.
Rothstein explained that after reading “The Color of Law” and learning about the history of segregation under the law, people often ask, “Now how do we fix it?” The follow-up book “Just Action” addresses that, providing examples of successful programs that drove change.
“Once you have a segregated system, it’s local programs, practices, and policies that sustain it and reinforce it – even exacerbate it,” Rothstein said. “So, there’s enormous opportunity in our local communities to actually do something about it.”
Some of those strategies include protections from rent hikes, protections against unjust evictions, and programs that offer right to counsel, among other remedies. Other obstacles for equity include credit scoring, bias in appraisals, and African Americans overpaying for property taxes.
During the discussion, Leah Rothstein said there’s an appetite for racial justice activities, particularly in Tulsa. In fact, “Just Action” opens with a photo of a 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstration in Tulsa that shows a diverse group of people marching together. “We can use that energy to build a newly invigorated civil rights movement,” she said.
Rothstein discussed the importance of building relationships across races, addressing the wealth gap, and increasing resources in low-income, predominantly African American areas.
“The same policies that created segregation ensured that the areas where whites were subsidized to live were areas of high opportunity, access to jobs and clean air and open space and grocery stores and transportation,” she explained. “And the areas where African Americans were limited to living were deprived of those resources.”
Rothstein added that it’s important to couple those place-based strategies with anti-displacement strategies to prevent people from getting priced out of neighborhoods.
“Now, we also understand that when that happens, when resources increase in a lower-income community, often things change,” she said, “People with higher incomes suddenly become interested in living there. They move in, they drive up the cost of housing there, cause gentrification, and the longtime residents of those areas are displaced just when the resources start to increase.”
Marton explained that at the college’s B.C. Franklin Legal Clinic, law students are working with city councilors on a special project clearing title and assisting with preventing tax foreclosures.
B.C. Franklin was a Black attorney who opened a law office in Greenwood shortly before the Tulsa Race Massacre broke out on May 31, 1921. The neighborhood was destroyed in the attack. In the immediate aftermath, Franklin and his partner began practicing law in a Red Cross tent and represented survivors in their lawsuits against insurance companies, the government, and other entities.