Richard Rothstein (left) lectured a large audience about different ways the federal government has promoted segregation last Tuesday night at the MATC Cooley Auditorium.
I’m sure you’ve heard this statement before: “Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in America.” For the most part, this claim is true. A statistic called the index of dissimilarity—one of the best ways to measure segregation across the country—finds that Milwaukee has the highest level of segregation in the United States, according to 2010 census data.
However, Milwaukee is not alone. This statistic places cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and St. Louis right behind Milwaukee. But how did it get to be this way? Dr. Richard Rothstein attempted to answer that question with his 2017 book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. In his book Rothstein explores the idea that “de jure segregation”—or laws and policy decisions made by federal and local governments—promoted patterns of discrimination that still impact the nation to this day.
Rothstein, a distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a senior fellow emeritus at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP, has been speaking at cities across the U.S. recently. He made his way to Milwaukee last week Tuesday to speak to a crowd of interested citizens at the MATC Cooley Auditorium. The event was organized by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation Milwaukee (LISC) and the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council—both of which organized a community book reading of The Color of Law last summer.
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“The racial boundaries in every metropolitan area in this country are a civil rights violation, just as much as separating the water fountain is… and it is an outrage,” said Rothstein during his lecture.
Rothstein is the author of the 2017 book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
The Color of Law explores specific measures every level of government took to enforce segregation. Much of Rothstein’s lecture focused on the 1949 Housing Act, which Rothstein explains made segregation commonplace. A result of the act was large housing projects that were created across the country, such as the Pruitt–Igoe housing project in St. Louis. However, not many people know that when these projects were built, the Pruitt towers were strictly for African Americans, while the Igoe towers were for strictly for white people. Following the creation of these projects, there were vacancies in the Igoe towers, while the Pruitt towers had long lines and waits.
Rothstein explains that during this time, the Federal Housing Administration subsidized builders to create subdivisions that were for white people only. After many manufacturing industries left inner-city St. Louis and went to the suburbs, many African Americans were left to live in the projects, and many white people were given incentives to move to the suburbs, according to Rothstein. Something very similar happened here in Milwaukee, as during the 1960’s, many large manufacturers moved to surrounding suburbs—taking jobs and income with them. “Private prejudice could not have segregated these communities,” said Rothstein. “It was the federal government.”
One way that the local government pushed segregation in Milwaukee that was only recently discovered is a term called redlining. Redlining refers to maps that the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation drew in the late 1930’s that essentially made it impossible for homeowners to get loans and insurance in the red areas of Milwaukee, or areas of the town that were “hazardous.” These areas were labeled as such because of pollution, lack of sewage or old housing. However, these areas were soon to be occupied almost 100% by African Americans because the federal government essentially gave guidelines to bankers and mortgage lenders that said that they could only let a certain race live in a certain zone of the city.
Although Rothstein didn’t discuss redlining specifically, he did say that the reason he believes the country is so segregated now is because many of these policies have been forgotten, with no remedy in site.
“Largely because African Americans and whites live so vastly different from each other, they cannot identify a common national identity,” he said. “This is a crime, because if the next generation doesn’t learn this history, they’re going to be in a poor position to remedy it, as we have.”
