Explain why this one government agency has so much influence over where people live and what the FHA did to prevent black people from buying and owning homes. SHAPIRO: The book gives so many different examples of how this played out, and one of the worst offenders is the FHA, the Federal Housing Administration. These two policies worked together to segregate metropolitan areas in ways that they otherwise would never have been segregated. The second program that the federal government pursued was to subsidize the development of suburbs on a condition that they be only sold to white families and that the homes in those suburbs had deeds that prohibited resale to African-Americans. One was the first civilian public housing program which frequently demolished integrated neighborhoods in order to create segregated public housing. The federal government pursued two important policies in the mid-20th century that segregated metropolitan areas. ROTHSTEIN: It takes many people by surprise.

And I have to admit that reading this book, the geographic scope, the longevity, the sheer creativity of these policies really took me by surprise. SHAPIRO: So the basic argument of your book is that while racist individuals might have contributed to housing segregation in specific cases, there was an overwhelming amount of government policy at the state, local and federal level that explicitly forced black people to live in different places from white people. Rothstein's new book is called 'The Color Of Law: A Forgotten History Of How Our Government Segregated America.' Welcome to the program. Even today, black and white people generally don't live in the same neighborhoods. Today, schools remain largely segregated, and the author Richard Rothstein argues that's because housing is segregated. This is the day in 1954 that the Supreme Court issued its famous ruling desegregating schools, Brown versus Board of Education.

The color of law richard