The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Name: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Author: Richard Rothstein
ISBN: 9781631492860

Richard Rothstein

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Richard Rothstein

awards won

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#3292 of 3,809 books · #1034 in History

Shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History (2017).

The Color of Law won the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction and the California Book Award (Nonfiction), was a New York Times Bestseller, and was named a Notable Book of the Year, an Editors' Choice Selection, one of Bill Gates' "Amazing Books" of the Year, one of Publishers Weekly's 10 Best Books of the Year, and an NPR Best Book of the Year; it was also longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) and the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize. This "powerful and disturbing history" exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide. Widely heralded as a "masterful" and "essential" history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law offers "the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation." Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history, The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.

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