Blueprint for Apartheid: How the U.S. Government Engineered American Segregation

Most of us were taught that segregation in America happened by accident - that it was simply the result of personal prejudice or private choice. It wasn't. It was the law.

In this episode of Rethinking Freedom, part of our summer series The Other Side of Freedom: USA at 250, host Aya Fubara Eneli sits down with Richard Rothstein, author of the landmark book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

Rothstein pulls back the curtain on how federal, state, and local governments deliberately used zoning laws, public housing policy, FHA lending practices, restrictive covenants, and tax policy to build the segregated neighborhoods we still live in today — and what that means for the racial wealth gap, education, and health disparities we continue to grapple with.

We're also joined by Taneika Driver-Moultrie, President of the Killeen Chapter of the NAACP, for a conversation on what this history means for our community today — and what it will take to move from awareness to action.

Take action: Join us for the John Lewis Day of Action. Register here: https://www.mobilize.us/john-lewis-actions/event/966047/

Get the book: https://a.co/d/0iY53nnH

New episodes of Rethinking Freedom air every Monday at 7:00 a.m. CT on KRGN 98.5 FM and KVBM 104.7 FM, and stream on all major podcast platforms.

If this conversation moved you, like, comment, and subscribe — and share it with someone who needs to hear this history.

#RethinkingFreedom #TheColorOfLaw #RichardRothstein #NAACP #JohnLewisDayOfAction #USAat250 #HousingSegregation #RedliningHistory

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:09

Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome back to Rethinking Freedom. For most of the 20th century, the federal government of the United States, through the Federal Housing Administration, the Homeowners Loan Corporation, the Department of Veteran Affairs, and I know there are a lot of veterans who listen to us, and thank you so much for your support. And the local zoning boards across the country deliberately, systematically, and by written policy, built the segregated neighborhoods we live in today. And some of you may be asking, could this possibly be true? We're not learning this in our schools. It was not de facto, and some may argue, it was the jury. And we're going to explain what that means in a second. It means it was the law. And what's important about the segregation is that the wealth gap, the school funding gaps here in our community, we see schools that are slated to be closed, the policing disparities, and the health outcomes that we are still arguing about, traced directly back to maps, drawn, loans denied, and covenants enforced by our own government on purpose. Today we are joined by the historian who documented it, chapter and verse, and forced this country to reckon with it, or at least he did his best to try to get this country to reckon with it. So I would like to introduce our guest, our very esteemed guest, Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, a fellow at the Thorgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He is the author of the landmark book, The Color of Law, A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. And when I first got my hands on this book in 2018, even though I had gone to law school, I still could not believe everything that I was reading. Like I'm going back and I'm going, oh my goodness, so much of this was intentional. What this work has done is fundamentally changed how historians, policymakers, and the public understand the origins of residential segregation in the United States. Drawing on federal, state, and local government records, he demonstrates that residential segregation was not accidental. And it was not just a result of private prejudice or economic circumstances. Or, you know, those people just don't want to work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But direct and intentional product of government policy at every single level. And we're going to talk about that today as we continue our summer series on the other side of freedom, the United States of America at 250. I want to welcome you, sir, to Rethinking Freedom. Thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

So I'm going to start at the very beginning. Thank you for all the work that you have done, not just on this book, but people need to go. You guys, he has blogs out there. He has a lot of work that he has written, just helping us to parse through, break down some of the things that may still confuse us in terms of how the country runs. But how did you come about writing this book in the first place?

SPEAKER_00 3:54

Well, um, my specialty was education policy. I actually knew nothing about housing until I began this process. And because I was an education specialist, uh I was the uh education columnist, a weekly columnist at the New York Times for a while. I wrote about education policy for a think tank in Washington called the Economic Policy Institute. Uh I came to read a Supreme Court decision in 2007, in which the Supreme Court evaluated uh the uh programs of two school districts, Seattle, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky, that had tried to do a tiny trivial effort to desegregate their schools. Their schools are very segregated, uh, but what they did was they gave parents a choice of which school in the entire district their child uh might attend. And if the choice was going to help to non-segregate, to desegregate the school, that choice would give them preference over the choice of a parent that would further segregate the school. So I read this decision. The the opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, it was 2007. Uh Roberts said that uh the school districts could not do this, they could not have a uh uh program to desegregate the schools. He said the reason was that the segregation of schools in Louisville and Seattle was all accidental, and you said it as well as uh I could. The reason that schools in Louisville and Seattle were segregated, he said, was because of private bigotry, you know, homeowners and landlords not willing to sell or rent to African Americans and white neighborhoods, other businesses like banks and real estate agents, private sector businesses discriminating, as you said, uh people like just liking to live with each other of the same race. He said government had nothing to do with this. And he said, if government had nothing to do with this, then government can't fix it. It's got to be done as accidentally as it happened.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 6:06

Well, I read this decision, and uh you know, as I said, I was a specialist in education policy. I didn't know much about housing, but I did, you know, as you can see, I'm an old man and I've read a lot and learned a lot over the overall.

SPEAKER_02 6:18

You look really great, by the way. I won't tell I wouldn't tell your age, but you look amazing.

SPEAKER_00 6:24

Well, let's just say I'm in my 80s, so I have I go back always, and I remembered reading a book about Louisville, Kentucky, uh, in which it described the case of an African-American homeowner, an African-American resident. He wasn't a homeowner, he wanted to own a home, in the center city of Louisville. He was a middle-class guy, had a wife and child, had a middle-class job, he could afford to move to a single-family home, but nobody would sell him one, no real estate agent would show him one. Uh, African Americans weren't allowed to move out of these ghettos uh that we had created. And so what he did, and this was the only way that the 1950s African Americans could begin to desegregate the community, was he had now a white friend who lived in the suburb of Louisville. And that white friend bought a second home in his suburb and resold it to the African American friend. And when the African-American family moved in, an angry mob surrounded the home, protected by the police. They threw rocks at it, they dynamited the home, firebombed it. Police did very little to try to interfere with this. Uh, 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 for having provoked a riot by selling a home in a white neighborhood to a black family. Now, the police, the prosecutors, the courts, the entire criminal justice system, these are state actors.

SPEAKER_02 7:52

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

This was a blatant 14th Amendment violation. And I said to myself, well, maybe there's something that the Chief Justice Roberts doesn't know or doesn't want to know about how the schools in Louisville came to be segregated. Well, I also had another experience back in the 1960s. Uh I was a uh uh a research assistant at the Chicago Urban League. I had forgotten all about this, you know, you don't remember what you did 60 years ago. I was a research assistant at the Chicago Urban League, and I was involved uh in helping in a modest way though with a lawsuit that uh civil rights groups had filed in in Chicago against the Chicago Housing Authority and City Council, which was building public housing. At that time, public housing was as much for whites as for blacks. Uh they were building projects for African Americans and black neighborhoods and for whites in white neighborhoods. And the lawsuit was designed to um uh force the city and city count and housing authority to stop segregating the public housing system. So that I recalled that as I was uh reading the Chief Justice John Roberts' decision. This is another example of a blatant constitutional violation. Fourteenth Amendment violation, the Fifth Amendment violation, because these public housing uh uh projects that were segregated were financed in large part by the federal government.

SPEAKER_02 9:16

Can you could you go into more detail on that?

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Well, sure. Uh the any uh the the constitution, the federal constitution, uh uh the 14th amendment to the constitution uh says that uh in effect that it's uh a violation of the constitution to discriminate on the basis of race. Yes, and there were a number of uh laws passed after the 14th Amendment um was adopted to enforce that provision. There were civil rights laws in the 19 um uh in the 18, I'm sorry, in the 1860s and 70s, uh four of them actually that uh prohibited discrimination in housing, discrimination of any kind, really, uh violence against African Americans. The Supreme Court annihilated all of them, uh, but they're still on the books and they're still part of our law, regardless of what the Supreme Court says. So if if um if the city of Chicago, the city council and the um uh uh uh housing authority, which are both government local government agencies, are discriminating in the way they carry out their functions. That's a 14th amendment violation. It's also a violation of the laws that were in the civil rights laws, which by the way now have been recognized as legitimate by the Supreme Court. Um but uh violating uh civil rights laws, that was a civil rights, that was a 14th Amendment violation and a violation of these civil rights laws, uh unlawful and unconstitutional. And um uh the federal government had the the federal government is constrained by its in its actions by the Fifth Amendment, which uh requires nobody uh that nobody be denied their rights without due process of law. And uh the 14th Amendment adds to that equal protection of the laws, and uh it's now uh generally understood that due process requires equal protection. So it was both the Fifth Amendment violation and a 14th Amendment violation for uh uh the Chicago Housing Authority and uh Chicago um uh city council to be segregating housing in this way. So these two things that popped into my memory as I was reading this decision, the Supreme Court decision in 2007, the actions of the criminal justice system in Louisville, unconstitutional and uh unlawful, the uh actions of the city council in Chicago uh back in the 1960s. Uh both of those made me wonder whether there was more to this story than John Roberts recounted. So I began to do a bit of research. And uh 10 years later, I no longer was working on education policy. I uh produced a book summarizing the research I'd done over the last 10 years to uh show that it wasn't just these two policies. There were many, many policies that the federal, state, and local governments followed to ensure that we be a segregated society. And as you uh said in your introduction, that also underlies almost all of the inequalities that we have by race in this country today.

SPEAKER_02 12:22

So let's talk about at least two that you mention in the book. You bring up the Federal Housing Authority, FHA, and the veteran affairs loans. Um, today, my my very first home that my husband and I were able to purchase, we were able to purchase through an FHA loan because otherwise we just did not have 20% down. Um we were just, you know, starting in our careers. So some people may think that it's always been that way that most people, you know, could go and get an FHA loan, or if you were a veteran, you could get a veteran affairs loan. But tell us how these loans initially worked.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

Yeah. Well, it began in the 1930s, but then really ramped up after World War II. Uh after World War II, we had millions of returning war veterans coming back to this country, needing housing, both black and white, uh, needing housing. We had a housing shortage, an enormous housing shortage. Uh African Americans uh and whites both lived in urban areas because we were a manufacturing economy, and factories needed to be located near deep water ports and railroad terminals to get their parts and ship their final products. We had no long-distance trucking at that time. And uh so these were broadly non-segregated neighborhoods, back blacks and whites uh both living in these in these neighborhoods. The great African-American poet Langston Hughes uh described in his autobiography, The Big Sea, how he grew up in an integrated downtown Cleveland neighborhood. That's not how we think of downtown Cleveland.

SPEAKER_02 13:57

Not anymore.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

No, uh he grew up in an integrated downtown Cleveland neighborhood. He said his best friend in high school was Polish. He dated a Jewish girl in high school. It was an integrated high school and integrated neighborhood. The um federal government, in its first uh housing program, there was no the federal government was never involved in housing before the New Deal. So in 1933, in its first housing program, it demolished housing in that integrated neighborhood and built a project uh for whites and a separate project for blacks, creating segregation where it hadn't previously existed. Well, come World War II, we have uh millions of returning war veterans uh coming home. Uh, we had a housing shortage because in the depression, uh, there was very little housing built aside from uh the limited amount of public housing that was done. Uh in during World War II, it was illegal to uh use construction materials for civilian purposes. So there was a big backlog of housing needs. Uh all these veterans were returning, they needed a place to live. So the federal government ramped up a program that existed in small ways prior to World War II, uh, ramped up a program to move the entire white working and middle class populations out of these urban areas into single-family homes and newly created suburbs. It was a racially explicit program. The Fed the Veterans Administration uh piggybacked onto it and worked in collaboration with the Federal Housing Administration. The it was a racially explicit program. These suburbs could never have been built if uh it were not for the these federal subsidies. Uh banks wouldn't lend to the developers of these suburbs because we weren't a suburban country at that time, and they didn't think this was a viable um uh economic activity. Uh, the biggest one I describe in in um uh the The Color of Law was Levitown, east of New York City. They exist in in Chicago and uh everywhere in every metropolitan area of this country. Uh William Levit, the developer of this uh first giant development, 17,000 homes, was a bigot. If left to his own devices, he would never have sold a home, one of his homes, to an African American. But he wasn't left to his own devices. He went to bank after bank, nobody would lend him the money to buy the land and build this giant development. The only way he could do it was by going to the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administrations, asking for a guarantee or insurance on his bank loans that would enable him to go ahead with the project. And they gave it to him. Uh, but they made a couple of conditions. One is that they can he could never sell a home to an African American, and two this this is written into the policy. Yes, yes. There was a manual that the Federal Housing Administration distributed to appraisers all over the country whose job it was to evaluate the application of builders who wanted to create these suburban developments. The manual said explicitly you could not recommend a loan to a developer, the federal guarantee of a loan to a developer who is going to sell to African Americans in a white community. You couldn't even recommend a loan to a developer of an all-white project. It would be located near where African Americans were living, because uh that would run the risk of infiltration by inharmonious racial groups. And in my book, The Color of Ly, I have a photograph of a six-foot-high, half-mile-long concrete wall uh that was built by a uh Detroit area developer to separate his white proposed community from a nearby African-American neighborhood as a condition of getting a federal loan. So the fairman gave uh uh loans, uh guarantees of loans, guarantees in the case of loans of in the case of the federal housing administration, insurance on the loans in the case of uh the veterans administration to enable these suburbs to be built all over the country. Well, that's how we came to be suburbanized. The white families were moved out of these uh uh urban areas into these suburbs. Well, these they did not expect, the white families did not expect to get rich by moving to these suburbs. Their motivation was they needed housing. As I said, we had a terrible housing shortage. The homes were modest homes, uh, Levitown, the one east of New York City, and the same thing was true in the California or Chicago or anywhere else. They sold for about uh eight, nine thousand dollars a piece in the post-World War II period. And today's money that's probably about $125,000. Well, there were two bedroom, one-bath homes, very, very modest homes. Uh, those homes, uh I don't know if you've noticed, but those homes no longer sell for $125,000.

SPEAKER_02 18:56

No, they don't.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

No, they don't. Uh some places two million dollars, so million dollars uh in in other places at at the least $300,000, $400,000, $500,000. The white families who bought those homes, not expecting to get rich, but did so as a result of the appreciation in the value of these homes.

unknown 19:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 19:16

So they became wealthy by their gain in equity. They used that wealth to send their children to college, they use it to uh maybe take care of temporary unemployment. Uh, these were factory workers of temporary unemployment. They use it maybe to take care of a medical emergency, they use it to subsidize their retirements, and they use it to bequeath their wealth to their children and grandchildren, who then get down payments for their own homes. So that's how uh we created the wealth gap uh that underlies so much else of the inequality in this country. And it was all through this Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration that moved the white working class and lower middle class out of urban areas into single-family homes and explicitly all white projects.

SPEAKER_02 20:07

It's interesting as you were, you know, giving that example of the wall that was built. I'm thinking of apathy South Africa. We don't necessarily think about the United States of America as being an apathy state, but this idea of building walls and separating people, because to use the term inharmonious groups, which is mind-boggling. But what was really interesting in reading your book, well, there's so much that was interesting, but how hard members of various administrations, and we're talking multiple administrations, fought to keep this country segregated. And I wonder, I'm moving a little bit away from the book, but I'm gonna come back to it. I wonder what you make of what we're seeing today with the policies coming out of the current White House.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

Well, the current White House is um something we've never before experienced in this country. Uh, we no longer have a democracy in this country. We have a dictatorship. The current White House uh ignores willy-nilly its obligation to obey the law. Just recently, there was an article in the New York Times about how the administration has issued orders not to enforce anti-discrimination laws uh in housing and in other areas, and employment and other areas as well. Uh so uh, you know, the our first task has got to be to overthrow this dictatorship in some way, uh, before we can begin to go back to the uh issue of uh redressing the segregation that uh the unconstitutional, unlawful segregation uh that the government has uh uh created. Um, I don't know how we do that, um, but uh that's got to be the the first task, and it's gonna take a long time. You know what what uh the Trump administration has destroyed in in uh less than two years will take decades to rebuild. So uh I think we and and uh I think the challenge we're going to face is that people are gonna be impatient. Uh it takes much less time to destroy something than to build it. And they're going to want to see immediate results. If they're not going to get immediate results, it's going to take a long time to get out of this mess. And um I won't be alive long enough to see it. I hope you will be. And uh I hope we do eventually emerge uh from uh this um undemocratic uh dictatorship that we have at this point.

SPEAKER_02 22:43

Yeah, and again, looking at presidents and administrations through history, there's so much that is happening with this administration, not quite to the same degree, but that reminds me of the Woodrow Wilson um administration, just in terms of um race relations, if you will, and segregation and policies around that.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

Um let me just say the Woodrow what Woodrow Wilson was trivial compared to what's going on.

SPEAKER_02 23:11

It was trivial. That's amazing to say that.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

Yeah. As I said, the the federal government was not involved in housing until the New Deal. There was no federal money in housing. So the Wilson administration had no impact. It created it it created a discrimination in the federal workforce. Yes, that was an important uh impact of it that didn't previously exist. Uh we had a more integrated workforce before the Wilson administration took office in 1913. Uh, but uh aside from that, it didn't have much impact aside from its promotion of the idea of uh white supremacy, but the real impact of the federal government on housing came during the New Deal.

SPEAKER_02 23:58

And with all the the people in various levels of government going along with this notion of white supremacy. So now here's something that people may not be as aware of. I'm sure some of our guests might be. Um, I happen to live in an area that has a homeowners association. They're fairly common now, but they weren't so common initially, and there was a racial reason behind these covenants and these homeowners' associations that were created. Could you tell us a little bit more about that history?

SPEAKER_00 24:31

Well, there's not much to say beyond what I've already said. Many of these homeowner associations had what are called covenants, they're they're clauses attached to deeds. I don't know. Uh they vary the the technical way it's done, it varies from state to state.

SPEAKER_02 24:47

I don't know much about Illinois, which I guess you are, but um the the actual I'm in actually in Texas now, but yes, I used to live in Illinois, yes.

SPEAKER_00 24:55

All right, Texas, okay. Um uh yeah, they they vary from state to state, but it's a clause either in the deed or the uh uh an attachment to the deed um that uh typically says that um the home cannot be sold or rented to a black person, to a Jewish person, to a Hispanic person, and this binds all the families in that homeowner association, homeowners association to discriminate. Now, the in 1948, uh the Supreme Court prohibited the enforcement uh of these agreements. In other words, before then, African Americans who moved into white neighborhoods could frequently, and many, many, I'm not saying a rare thing, it was a frequent thing, could be evicted by court order for having moved to a white neighborhood in violation of one of these deeds and in the clauses. The um Supreme Court in 1948 uh prohibited uh those kinds of evictions.

SPEAKER_02 26:03

Um that was Shelly T. Kramer.

SPEAKER_00 26:06

Yes, that was the yes. Well, uh, okay. If you've got lawyers in the audience, you can look at that case. But uh the name of the case isn't important. That the Supreme Court prohibited that kind of eviction, but the clauses remained on the deeds. Indeed, people continue to put them on the deeds, even though they weren't enforceable as a way of intimidation. Uh, so um that was an important uh cause of the homeowners' associations. They had did other things too, you know. They told you what color house you could paint your house, what color you could paint your house. They had all kinds of restrictions. But uh and but one of the ways that many people around the country, uh in recent years, and especially since my book was published, have learned about the history of segregation in their communities, they've looked up their own deeds and seen these these this language in the deeds. And I'll tell you something. Uh, I uh in many cases, in many places, there have been these movements to remove these clauses from the deeds. I'm opposed to that. I think you know, whitewashing our history is not going to help uh remedy it. If people don't see it on their deeds, they won't be educated about how their communities came to be segregated. They can attach something to the deeds saying that we're ashamed that this is on our deed. Uh, we're ashamed that our community enforced this kind of thing in the past, we repudiate it, but don't remove it because removing it eliminates our ability to learn from our history. And it's one way, it's really the only way that individuals can read a particular instance in their own home of how it came to be a segregated place. There aren't many ways you can do that in your own personal experience. I'm talking about white people.

SPEAKER_02 27:49

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

But of course, now many of those homes are in many of those neighborhoods are are have African Americans living in them as well, and they can also learn uh from that history.

SPEAKER_02 28:01

You know, as I drive down the street leading up to where I live, when we moved here 17 years ago, it was pretty much just grass and cattle raising, grazing, and now there are all kinds of establishments popping up. But what I also know about this area is that prior to the 70s, and actually even later than that, African Americans could not buy land, could not buy homes in this area. So as I see these developments, what I also know is that that most likely the realization of those gains from you know how much um these properties have appreciated is not going into African-American homes. It's going into white homes because we were precluded um not so long ago from being able to purchase any of these um places. So the looking that you also cover in this book, first of all, this book is just so expensive. And the notes at the end of the book, I'm going through it three times now, and every time I'm like, how did I miss that the first time? Or maybe as I get older and I'm experiencing some of these things firsthand, they they resonate a little bit more. But you talk quite a bit about the role of the IRS in segregating or supporting the segregation of the United States of America and even how our current policies that on their face may be race neutral continue to reinforce the wealth gap that we're seeing. Can you go into more detail on that?

SPEAKER_00 29:28

Well, let me give you a financial example. Uh, it's not the IRS uh so much as uh local property tax assessments.

SPEAKER_02 29:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

Um, you know, this is a we have a discriminatory system of property taxes in this country. Uh people who live in predominantly black neighborhoods pay higher property taxes relative to the value of their homes than people who live in predominantly white neighborhoods. It's uh true across the country, it's not particular to any one place, but the causes are similar. The way in which our property taxes are are created is through an assessment project process. Uh there's a, I don't know how it is in Texas, uh, in some places it's county wide, in some places citywide, but an assessor, either the county assessor or the city assessor, yes, uh, places a value on each home in the community. And that value is used to apply a um a tax rate to um calculate the amount of taxes that a homeowner owns. Well, the tax rate is the same across the entire community. There's nothing discriminatory about the tax rate, but the assessors do not uh assess the properties every year, they assess them every 10, 20, 15, sometimes 30 years. And in the meantime, what they do is they apply a common inflation factor, as though that's going to maintain an accurate assessment system. Well, typically, not in every case, but in almost every case, neighborhoods in which white families predominate appreciate in value, the homes in those neighborhoods appreciate in value faster than the homes appreciate in value in neighborhoods where black families um predominate. The result is that the assessed values in white neighborhoods tend to be lower relative to the um uh I'm sorry, tend to tend to be lower, yeah, relative to the market value of the home than the assessed values in black neighborhoods, uh, which um uh are uh higher relative to the market value of the home. The result is that African Americans are paying property taxes at a higher, even with the same tax rate, at a higher rate relative to the value of their homes than the rate uh uh being paid in white neighborhoods. It's a discriminatory system. County assessors across the country admitted it's a discriminatory system, but nobody is changing it. And the reason nobody is changing it is not because of the federal government, it's because of state and local governments. The federal government has nothing to do with assessments. The federal government, through the policies we described earlier, created the segregation, but now it's maintained and reinforced and exacerbated by local policies. And the color, let me jump ahead a little bit, if if I may. Please. People read this book, The Color of Law. They had two reactions, uh, two main reactions. One is why didn't I learn this in high school?

SPEAKER_02 32:32

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 32:33

Yeah, I I wondered that myself. Why didn't I learn this in high school? But the second second reaction was, what can we do about it now? Yes, and I got this question so often that I finally uh recruited my daughter, one of my daughters, who's a housing specialist, to co-author a sequel book called Just Action How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law. And that book goes through example after example of local policies that can be addressed in local communities, the Trump administration, notwithstanding, to uh redress uh segregation that um uh uh we was may have been created by the federal government, but is made maintained by so many of these policies. And let me give you another one, if I may. Uh please do. The the um the real estate industry has primarily been responsible for much of the segregation that we know. Now you might say, well, that that proves that it was private. Real estate agents are private actors, they're not government actors. That's not true. Every real estate agent in this country is licensed by his or her state government, and so when real estate agents are discriminating and state governments know about it, and they don't lift the licenses of real estate agents who discriminate, they're again committing a 14th Amendment violation and a civil rights violation, civil rights act violation. Well, in 2019, you know, it's now seven years ago, uh, a newspaper on Long Island, New York, the uh the same newspaper, the same area where Levitt built the first one of these suburban developments that I described, a newspaper in Long Island did something called a paired testing study. They sent um applicants to real estate agents looking for homes, black and white, a few days apart, uh, with identical uh characteristics. They had documents showing they had the same educational background, the same uh uh family structure, uh, the same income levels. Uh the newspaper went so far as to buy identical handbags from Nordstroms for the black and white uh um actors who were uh or volunteers who were doing this. And it's perfectly legal to do this. Uh in fact, the the Supreme Court once actually had to hear a challenge to paired testing and they upheld it. They upheld the paired testing system. Perfectly legal way to discriminate to identify discrimination. Well, what they found in New York City or east of New York City, in Long Island, east of New York City, thought to be a very liberal part of the country, much more liberal than Texas. Uh, 50% of the cases African Americans were discriminated against in their search for homes. They were shown houses in different neighborhoods, they were shown different homes than whites were shown. They were given different characterizations of the neighborhood. That's not a safe place, but it is a safe place than whites were. 50% of the cases. Now, if it existed in 50% of the cases, I'll bet you it happens in Texas also.

SPEAKER_02 35:42

Oh, I've personally experienced it in Texas. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

Well, um, yeah, so this is a another example of something that's typically thought of as being private, but uh it's not private, it's a government-sponsored activity. Real estate agents have to be licensed. Uh, the the newspaper on island even sent up uh reporters to observe the annual training sessions that real estate agents are required to um attend uh in order to keep their licenses. And the um uh the uh training sessions uh are required to include information about fair housing. What they found was uh the training sessions typically dismissed fair housing laws. They said one of the one of the trainers who was actually the president or a former president of the real estate association told all the real estate agents that well, fair housing laws are a little bit like speeding laws. You have to decide whether you want to obey them. Now, every real estate agent who got his certification from attending that training session ought to have had his license lifted unless he attended a different session that gave him an accurate uh instruction about obeying fair housing laws. And the fact that those licenses weren't lifted, and I don't know of any that have anywhere in the country for practicing discrimination, is a 14th Amendment violation. Now, again, this is local, this is not a federal policy, it's one of the things in just action that we write about. This could be done anywhere, uh, this kind of pair testing. You don't need a newspaper to do it. Uh there used to be, uh, well, there are fair housing centers around the country that do some of it, even though the Trump administration has ended all funding for paired testing of these fair housing centers. But groups of people can support this kind of activity, they can conduct these kinds of uh investigations of real estate agents, and they can force their state um, not federal, their state licensing agencies to enforce uh uh anti-discrimination laws. So there are so many things that we can be done at a local level to uh redress the segregation whose history I describe in the color of law, but these actions at a local level are described in a sequel book called Just Action.

SPEAKER_02 37:59

And thank you so much for giving that giving us that as a resource as well, which I definitely will be sharing with you, our audience. Um, but encourage all of you to go and get it. Thank you for your support. We are now at over 20,000 subscribers, and it looks like you guys have really been into this summer series that we're doing on examining the history that we are not getting in our schools. And here in Texas, of course, they passed the anti-CRT bill. So we are very much committed in Texas to not teaching the whole history. We want to erase anything that does not make us feel comfortable. And we see um the Trump regime putting the screen, at least attempting to put the screws into the Smithsonian museums um to have them retell history, according to him. So we know that. Well, we should know, I hope we know, that beyond wealth, there are lasting consequences of this engineered segregation. Can you speak to that?

SPEAKER_00 38:54

Sure. Well, uh I think you did in the introduction, you said it. Um African Americans typically have shorter life expectancies, um uh more ill health than whites with similar incomes have. And the reason is that uh African Americans are still concentrated in more poorly resourced neighborhoods with more pollution, more dangerous air, less access to markets that sell fresh and healthy food, more fast food options than in white, uh predominantly white neighborhoods. Um and the result is that the and and also this has nothing to do with housing, but uh until fairly recently, African Americans were excluded from medical schools. So there are fewer physicians in black neighborhoods uh per pop per uh population than there are in in white neighborhoods. That's all a result of uh of this uh segregation of concentrating people in neighborhoods based on race. It's as you said, and and I'm gonna elaborate a little bit on something you said, it's not simply the funding of schools that is uh inadequate in um lower, poorly resourced, mostly predominantly black and and sometimes Hispanic neighborhoods. It's that when you concentrate children with uh serious social and economic disadvantages in single schools, the schools spend more time trying to deal with those social and economic challenges than they can uh in schools where children come well-rested, well-nourished, uh, and um in good overall health. Uh, I used to write, I think I mentioned to you earlier, I used to specialize in education before I understood any of this, but I I had a little inkling about some of it. Um, and uh I remember writing a column once about asthma. Uh African-American children living in concentrated, segregated neighborhoods have asthma at a much higher rate than white children living in suburban neighborhoods. Uh the result is it's it's clearly the result of several things. They live in more polluted neighborhoods, uh, more vermin in the environment, more dilapidated homes, even if they live in a good home, the neighborhood uh has a less um uh has more and more vermin in the environment and and um more pollution. Well, if a child comes to school with asthma, that child is more likely than a child who doesn't to be up at night wheezing. Yes. And comes to school the next day drowsy. Now, you know, not every black child comes to school drowsy, and every not not every white child comes to school well rested, but on average, African-American children come to school a bit drowsier uh than white children. It makes a tiny, tiny difference for the child who's drowsy is not going to perform as well academically uh when a lesson is taught as a child who's not drowsy. Well, it makes a tiny, tiny difference. It is the result of segregation, but it makes a tiny difference. But when you begin to add up all of the other similar social and economic conditions that can affect learning, I wrote another column that people made fun of. It was the dental theory of segregation. But African American children who don't have access to primary care dentists are more likely to have toothaches than white children and distracted when a lesson is taught. A tiny difference it makes, but you begin to add up. I can't go through all of them, but you begin to add up all of these.

SPEAKER_02 42:30

You never get your eyes checked and you don't know that you can't. Yes, it goes on and on, yes.

SPEAKER_00 42:35

It goes on and on. So uh the educational disparities, the educational outcome disparities that we have, the fact that on average African-American children achieve at lower levels than white children, even those with similar incomes, is the result, uh largely the result of segregation. Uh it affects, as you mentioned before, the criminal justice system. When you concentrate the most disadvantaged young men in single neighborhoods, where they haven't had access to the schools that are better resourced and which aren't overwhelmed with social and economic problems of their fellow children, and have no uh good transportation to get to where the jobs are, it's inevitable that those young men are going to engage in confrontations with the police.

SPEAKER_02 43:22

Where they're also over policed comparative to white neighborhoods. So on the on the education part and in and segregation and living in certain neighborhoods and how that affects the educational outcome. I think that to the point you're making, there are a lot of issues that are at play. I would say that if we look at the educational accomplishments of African American youth when schools were segregated, I mean they're segregated now, but before Brown the Board of Education, you did see quite a number of those young people excelling.

unknown 43:59

Um

SPEAKER_02 44:00

There are other issues at play as well, in terms of even the expectations of teachers, what gets communicated to kids, how that affects them. But I think all of those things come into play. I just wanted to point that out because I've certainly through my research seen where we have had young people who were in segregated African Americans who were in segregated communities, but because of the quality of education they were getting, that what those teachers were imparting to them, many of whom could not get other jobs, by the way. They may have had PhDs and had to teach. And of course, once schools were desegregated, many of those teachers lost their jobs as well. But the point is to understand how so many things interconnect. But since you also brought up, and I wanted to get to this anyway, the action. So if we have we've we've talked about the problem, and of course, this has been around for over a hundred years, really, if we if we really look at the history of this country, what do we do now? How do people not despair? How do they find hope and take some action? We we we started that conversation earlier, but in the few minutes that we have left, what advice would you give to people?

SPEAKER_00 45:12

Well, the first advice I give to people, and is as I mentioned, uh, we wrote a sequel book about this. Now you've asked you've asked both questions. Why am I doing this in high school and what can we do about it now? So it's just like for many people I I write it to. But I think the first step is to create local groups that get together and plan action. And there's so many different ways, places to start. I I don't recommend any one. I don't recommend starting with the real estate agents or starting with the assessors or any of the other things we talk about, but local groups that get together, and we place a great deal of emphasis in this sequel book on the importance of having biracial groups, both whites and blacks in in because African Americans do not have the political power by themselves to solve this problem. Uh and there are many, many whites who want to do something to help. And in our book, we we uh The Just Action we describe examples of of how these groups get because they're they are they do exist around the country. Uh one of them we talk about is in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Uh Winston-Salem, North Carolina had six Presbyterian churches. Three were white, three were African American, they knew nothing about each other. Uh back in 19, I forget the year in the 1990s, after the Rodney King uh assault by police uh and that resulted in riots in Los Angeles and around the country. The um the the black and white Presbyterian ministers decided it might be a good idea to get to know each other. Uh so they had lunch and began a program called the Presbyterian Interracial Dialogue. They created a committee of 40 people. 20 had to be white, 20 had to be black. They um uh if somebody you know couldn't participate any longer, they had to be replaced by someone of the same race to maintain the racial balance. They met for a couple of years, getting to know each other, reading and studying about these things, and they eventually succeeded in getting a civilian review board created in in Winston-Salem, in reforming the curriculum of the schools, as you mentioned uh before, that began to teach a more accurate history of how uh this country came to be so uh unequal. And uh that never could have happened without an organized group that was both uh black and white pressing for that change. We talk about another uh uh a young uh black photographer in Chicago, uh who uh now Chicago, uh some of your your uh listeners uh may know this. Chicago is organized more than any other city that I know of on a grid. Uh it's rectangles, the whole city is rectangles. Uh the it's like a uh like a geographic uh uh map, and it's uh like a graph. And uh at the intersection of uh two of the streets downtown uh the it's the coordinates are zero zero and every street in the city has the same number. This is in Chicago, the same number, north and south. The only difference being that uh the north address is North Ashland Avenue and the other the south address is South Ashland Avenue. So this photographer and and of course the white side of Chicago is uh the north side of Chicago is almost all white, right? The black side of Chicago is almost all black. So this photographer decided to uh uh photograph these identical homes.

SPEAKER_02 48:56

That was until gentrification, but yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 48:59

Yeah, well, yeah. Um uh but she decided to to to photograph these identical homes. She called them map twins. So that the house that, you know, I guess I'm just picking a name out of a path, but uh the house at 6150 North Ashland, which was home by a white person, was identical to the house of 6150 South Ashland. Uh and if you folded the map in half, they lie on top of each other. She's photographed these and she called them map twins, and then after a while she said, Well, what happens if I try to introduce these people to their map twins? And she did. And uh, you know, she her name is uh Tanika Johnson. Uh you can Google Map Twins and you'll find uh uh the the story of this. They started to meet with each other, they created uh some some biracial groups. Uh unfortunately, then COVID hit. And um you know, I I wrote the book. I didn't follow um follow them any further, but uh they created the potential for an action group that could have addressed some of these problems. So the first step is to create local groups, uh to take your noses out of your phones and start meeting with your neighbors and people from other neighborhoods. Uh there are other examples of my daughter writes a Substack column uh that exit that continues to give examples of this. Um there's an example in Marin, California, where the Marin City is all black, Marin County is all white. They created us uh a program called Come to the Table, where uh blacks and whites, again, a racial controlled, racially mixed group, come together for dinner. I forget if it's every month or every couple of weeks, and they've engaged in a number of actions to um help to redress the inequalities of uh Marin County in California. So there are many ways of starting these groups, and um that's the first step. And then uh we have a menu of uh, and I've given you a few examples, I can give you more, but uh uh uh menu of many, many things, local actions that can be taken to redress segregation. As I said before, the segregation was created primarily by the federal government, but its maintenance, its sustenance, and its exacerbation, even, is all local. And uh it needs to be addressed locally, or it can be addressed locally without worrying about what the federal government is doing.

SPEAKER_02 51:19

Well, I want to thank you for taking so much time um with me and with our audience. I know that there will be many more people going out to get a copy. Uh for those of you who watch us on YouTube, I'm holding up a copy of the book, The Color of Law, A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Those who do not know their history are they say bound to repeat it. Important that we understand this history and we understand the role that we can play, the power that we have to address these issues and not just to think they just all wear happenstance, because there's very little in the United States of America that is happenstance. So again, I want to thank you so much for coming. I think our next conversation, if you will come back, needs to be on what to do to stay healthy physically and so mentally sharp, even in your 80s, because you are phenomenal. And I need all the tips I can get.

SPEAKER_00 52:13

Well, it's a pleasure meeting you. I want to congratulate you on your podcast and on the success it's had. And it's an honor for me to be part of it. So thank you very much.

SPEAKER_02 52:23

Thank you very much, sir. We will be in touch. Go out and get the book. Can you give us the name of your daughter so people can go to her Substack as well?

SPEAKER_00 52:29

Yes, Leah L E A H Rothstein.

SPEAKER_02 52:33

All right, well, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 52:36

I think the Substack is called Justaction Substack.org or something like that. You know, I don't I don't I don't know a bunch about internet stuff.

SPEAKER_02 52:44

Well, we appreciate you. We appreciate your time. And for our audience, keep liking, keep the comments coming, talk about what you're doing in your communities because that may just get someone else to realize what they can do as well. Um, keep sharing the information and stay tuned for more. Thank you so much, sir.

SPEAKER_00 53:02

Thank you. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 53:04

Well, as promised, we have another guest that I want to introduce you to, and we have a really important event coming up in our community. Those of you who are in Central Texas, I know we have a wide audience, but I want to introduce you to Tanika Driver Moultrie, who is the president of our killing chapter of the NAACP, who has been at the helm of this organization for years doing the very necessary work that we need to continue to fight for our liberation. So tell us, you have a day of action coming up. Tell us a little bit more about this, and welcome to Rethinking Freedom as well.

SPEAKER_01 53:44

Well, thank you, Dr. Anelli. I appreciate you having me on this platform, this wonderful platform that you have created for us to be able to speak our truth and to amplify our voices. The Colleen Brand NAACP, along with other stakeholders, um, we are having a nonpartisan event and it called it's called Good Trouble Lives On. And so John Lewis, who we know was a wonderful uh congressman, activist, and leader, not just in the state of Georgia, but throughout this nation, um, he marched with Dr. King. And so this is his sixth-year anniversary that is going to, sixth year anniversary of his death, of his passing, that is going to be taking place on July 17th. And so we are coming together for this day of action called John Lewis Day of Action. And so we are very excited about bringing the Central Texas community together to encourage, empower, and uplift each other for these upcoming elections, not just now, but here on. And so John Lewis taught us about having courage and getting into good trouble. And so we are very excited that we are able to have this event for the second year in a row here in Central Texas. And so we will start at 6 p.m. gathering at the courthouse in Belton off of Main Street. At 6:30, we will begin to march on to Mount Zion United Methodist Church, where we will take place in a rally that starts at 7 o'clock. We have a panel or platform of wonderful speakers to include yours truly, Dr. Nelly, to give us our call to action as we leave this place on Friday night at 8 p.m. And so we are very excited about this. Um, again, like I said, this is our second year in a row, and we are ready to just get into some good trouble, like uh Congressman Lewis uh taught us so many years ago, as his legacy continues to live on throughout the many, many cities and states that this actual event will be occurring.

SPEAKER_02 55:40

Now, do people have to register? Is there somewhere they can go or someone they can contact? What do they need to do to be a part of this?

SPEAKER_01 55:48

So they don't have to register. So if they don't let someone know that they're coming, no need to fret. Just show up. We are uh, yes, we are a community. We are looking at, you know, the NACP has been carrying on this theme of Dr. King, you know, building our beloved community. And so this is helping us and allowing us to carry on that message of building our beloved community. And so if you have not talked to someone to let someone know you're coming, just show up at 6 p.m. We want the masses to come out. It doesn't matter what color you are, what background you're from, we are coming together on a unified front. And so we want this event to be bigger and better than it was last year, and so we are very excited. We've got young people. We we want these young people coming because they have something to say, and we want to hear what it is. Yes, we want to hear what it is that we uh they have to say to us to encourage us to act and to get to them polls that we should be already doing. But you know, some of us have just gotten complacent, and so we are depending and leaning on our young people to push that message forward, all right.

SPEAKER_02 56:58

So, for those of you who stayed on, or you always watch us on YouTube or on any podcast platform, we're really grateful for your support. We have been amazed at the growth that has taken place in the first six months of this year. So please keep liking and subscribing and leave us a comment because it makes all the difference with the algorithm. But let's get into why we need to be getting into good trouble at this time. I know that you with you with the organization that you lead, you are at the forefront of a lot of the battles that we're facing right now. In your lifetime, I've read about us being in these kind of places. In your lifetime, have you experienced what we're experiencing politically in this country?

SPEAKER_01 57:48

Dr. Nelly, I think we are at a crossroads that none of us thought we would ever be. The climate and just the tension of what is going on and what is taking place in this nation, you know, I I never thought that we we would be here, you know, and as a a black woman, you know, um, just an African-American, I I would have, you couldn't have told me this, you know, five years ago that we would be where we are today. However, it is up to us to make sure that we are standing in our truth, that we are amplifying our voices, we are allowing our voices to be heard, that we are not getting complacent. And I see in spaces and places where we have gotten complacent. You know, the the word tells us, you know, words of wisdom tell us if they don't make a place for you at the table, you bring your own chair. And it's time for us to start doing that because we know what's going on in this nation. They are not making places and spaces for us at the table.

SPEAKER_02 58:54

Yes, yes, putting us on the menu. Yeah, the the speaker that I um interviewed, well, the author that I interviewed right before um talking with you, when I asked him, what is what are what are some of the things that we need to be doing? He said, We need to be coming together. We need to be building groups, join a local group, he said. And I attended the first event last year. Um, and what I saw were people from different walks of life, it was intergenerational. I saw voter registration booths, I saw different organizations, nonpartisan, that were there, just saying if you care about yourself, if you care about the future of these young people, if you care about us still having a country that is not a total dictatorship, correct? Where you have your basic rights, where you can get health care, you can get education, you can get housing. Imagine that Congress has passed a housing bill that the president has said is not a priority, he's not signing it. Meanwhile, people are suffering out here. And so this is not about oh, I'm an R or I'm a D or I'm an I or I'm an atheist or I'm a whatever label you want to put on yourself. What I saw last year was this is about if you want to be part of making a positive difference in your community. Yes, you can't do it by yourself. Right. You have to come together with other people. What what what else would you like the people to know about this event?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:42

So it's definitely about all of us coming together, and that's what I was saying, you know, saying it doesn't matter what race, religion, you know, shade of color you are, we want everyone to come together who, you know, pretty much are like-minded, wanting to push this nation towards positive change. And so that is what we saw last year, and we want to carry that message on, you know, to this year as well. So we want the people to come out. Um, I I I you know, I tell you what worries me a lot is that people just have gotten so complacent. And so they're like, they don't listen to me, they don't care, you know, so they don't want to vote. And we saw those numbers decline tremendously from March primaries to May local elections. It was just saddening how we took a huge plunge in the gutter, pretty much, you know, and so I would encourage and tell the people, you know, come out to this day of action. If you need to be inspired and you need to be uplifted, come out to this day of action and you will see people who feel the same way you feel. They are sick of going to the grocery store and seeing prices rise, they are sick of going to the gas station and seeing gas prices rise. You know, we have senior citizens who are on a set income. Um, just last week, I Dr. Anelli, we gave away fans at my job. We gave away fans at my job to the community and to hear the stories of people sitting in their houses in the heat, in the sweltering heat, because they don't want to turn on their air conditioning because they can't afford to pay the bill. Also, with people with broken um air conditioning units, you know, they can't afford to get them fixed, they can't afford to drive from point A to point P B, point A to point B. People are sick and tired. So if you're sick and tired of being sick and tired, you need to come on out to this rally and join us and have those conversations with us. This is nothing formal, this is us just coming together, having that communication, just being on one accord again, you know, just because we are frustrated. And John Lewis pushed us and told us we need to get out there and vote. And so we don't need to be letting his and our other forefathers who came before us legacies die. We don't need to let them sit by and be idle. We owe it to our future generations. And if you aren't doing something about it and you just sitting on your laurels, I'm gonna tell you, shame on you, shame on you. Yes, get up, get up and do something, do something. I don't care what it is you do, get up and find out what it is you can do. So come on down and join us at uh this John Lewis Day of Action. Um, we look forward to hearing what you have to tell us as we walk away. We want to hear the charge, and each and every one of us needs to take that charge to heart and make sure that we put it into action, put it into action.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:51

Well, I tell you, you know, I'm I'm fired up. I want to say to my um elders who are saying, Well, you know, baby, I want to be there, but I can't march. Just go to Mount Zion.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:02

Yes, yes, bring your lawn chairs, bring your lawn chair, we'll march for you because you already marched for us in the place.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:10

That's right. That's right. There will be water available for but for the young people, this is about your future. Yes, put a draft in place. They've started a war that was completely unnecessary. You have to also show up to fight for the future that you want. So I want to thank you for your leadership, for your steadfastness. Um, you know, there's a saying on easy lies ahead that wears the crown. So I know that there are highs, but there are a lot of lows when people don't show up when things, you know, when it looks like we're taking two, three, four steps backwards. Yes. Thank you for always fighting. Um, for the entire time I've known you, almost 20 years now. Appreciate your leadership. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so very much, and we look forward to seeing you on Friday. I'll be there. I will be there. And for all of our viewers, listen, if you're not in central Texas, find out what is going on in your own community. You have to get involved. Organizations are begging for people to get involved, and let me tell you, just call up the NAACP. They have a massive um recruitment event going on and a massive get out the vote initiative. Millions of dollars that they're going to be putting towards that. So even if you're saying, oh, I live in a community where there are not a lot of people who you think are progressive or are doing things to really fight for the rest of us, you can call up the NAACP and they can use you. They can you can make phone calls from your home. Put you to work. And if you can't do that, you can send a check because uh we need money to fund this movement as well. So thank you all very much, and we'll see you next week.