• segregation
• redlining
• restrictive covenants
• exclusionary zoning
• urban renewal
• school desegregation
• busing
• suburbanization
• Veterans Administration
• Federal Housing Authority
• social determinants of health
• structural racism
• implicit bias
• interstate highway system
• slums
• blight

The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson provided the legal foundation for an elaborate system of subordination and exclusion.1 The case was the culmination of a series of post-Reconstruction actions that reestablished white supremacy in the South. This article explains how Plessy’s “separate but equal” principle facilitated segregation in the nation’s housing markets. Plessy did not directly cause residential segregation, but it did legitimize the laws, customs, and practices that established the Jim Crow regime.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, responding to a severe labor shortage, thousands of European immigrants poured into the United States. Ethnic enclaves were established in rapidly growing cities. African Americans, unlike European immigrants, were confined in separate neighborhoods to the least desirable areas in urban communities. Other barriers were also erected. In the 1930s, a federal agency created a system of rating neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods were redlined. Lenders did not make loans in these areas. The American suburbs were developed in the 1940s and 1950s, communities that could not have been established without Veterans Administration (VA) and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured mortgages. Those agencies required lenders to include racially restrictive covenants on all properties with federally insured mortgages.

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In the 1950 and 1960s, the federal government subsidized the construction of the interstate highway system. Highways were frequently built through black neighborhoods, many of which were physically destroyed in the process. Some local officials used highways to separate black and white neighborhoods, reinforcing residential segregation.

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Under the authority of the Housing Act of 1949, the federal government subsidized slum clearance and urban renewal programs. In the years that followed, many black neighborhoods were declared blighted, seized by local governments exercising eminent domain powers, and demolished. In the 1960s, many local governments enacted zoning codes that disproportionately excluded black families from suburban communities.

For more than half of the twentieth century, policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels pursued development strategies that had a devastating effect on African American families. These policies included redlining, restrictive covenants, the interstate highway system, urban renewal, and exclusionary zoning. Federal housing policies barred black families from the largest wealth-producing program in the nation’s history—single-family homes in suburban communities. In 2016, the median black family wealth was $13,460, less than 10 percent of the counterpart $142,180 white family wealth. Slightly more than 25 percent of blacks had no or negative wealth, relative to only a little more than 10 percent of whites (Hanks, Solomon, and Weller 2018). These wealth disparities are largely the product of post-World War II government policies that facilitated home ownership and wealth-building for the white families that became America’s middle class (Ware 2018).

• © 2021 Russell Sage Foundation. Ware, Leland. 2021. “Plessy’s Legacy: The Government’s Role in the Development and Perpetuation of Segregated Neighborhoods.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 7(1): 92-109. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2021.7.1.06. Direct correspondence to: Leland Ware at lware{at}udel.edu, University of Delaware, 180 Graham Hall, 111 Academy St., Newark, DE 19716, United States.

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