New book helps Americans make plan about readdressing segregation

Jim Crow laws are often thought of (especially by white people) as a thing of the past. Something that the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s worked to undo. We think of lunch counter sit-ins, Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington.

We do not look in the faces of the people of our community who endured the fight in their daily lives. The people who fought for the right to buy a house in the neighborhood they chose and the people who rallied to buy up property just to keep Black community members out. And we certainly do not look at the way these systematic and government-endorsed struggles built the foundation of inequities that exist in cities across the nation today. We're not talking about 200 years ago, people. We're talking about our grandparents.

Deeds on white-owned property included restrictive covenants. Even if a white person agreed to sell a house to a Black buyer, loan companies would not lend money without title insurance and title companies would not insure a title when the sale to a Black person violated a deed restriction.

Meanwhile, the post-WWII GI Bill, which guaranteed low-interest mortgages and other loans with low or zero down payments to veterans, secured footing for America's middle class. By 1952, 2.4 million veterans had received government-backed loans. But the 1.2 million Black military men who served were excluded because the Bill was left to be administered by the states, which put up varying roadblocks to homeownership and access to education for Black Americans — hurdle after hurdle after hurdle.

White residents also worked to keep Black Americans from integrating. In Louisville, Kentucky, where I live, a neighborhood group formed in 1950 to try to prevent Black homeownership in the West End. All it took was a rumor that a Black person planned to buy a house and white property owners rallied. After seeing a Black worker onsite, neighbors made assumptions and 100 families pitched in and bought the house to ensure the neighborhood would stay a white one.

Other white families simply wanted to move, but deed restrictions worked against them, too. These homeowners had to also go to court to kill deed restrictions so they could sell their property to Black people.

What does this mean for America now?

Though Jim Crow laws are no longer on the books or tolerated, our government has not purposefully sought to rectify the inequities that racist laws established. Segregation was intentional and cannot be undone without the same intentionality.

The bestselling book "The Color of Law" written by Richard Rothstein showed how segregation could not have been sustained without policies at every level of government to back it up. Rothstein showed his readers how segregation created and sustained a dangerous Black-white wealth gap. In a new book co-written with his daughter Leah Rothstein titled "Just Action", they aim to answer the question, "So, what do we do about it?"

"Just Action" describes dozens of strategies to redress segregation. We cannot simply say every neighborhood is open to every race now without also addressing the wealth gap that was created due to segregation.

We have to educate ourselves and implement strategies that work. Reading the history and considering the remedies in these books are good ways to start.

Segregation was intentional. Policies to close the wealth gap it created must be equally deliberate.