The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. Richard is a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Poliy Institute, Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Senior Fellow at the Haas Institute at Berkeley.
This book is simply a must read in order to understand our historical application of de jure segregation. This is certainly almost never discussed, certainly not in public as a history of American segregation since the 1900s. Above all, this book will (and should) shock you to understand, perhaps for the first time a well hidden history of America.
The Color of Law documents de jure segregation actually promoted several discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. As a result, readers can fully understand, how legacy Federal, State, and Local laws empowered segregation. This is never an easy subject to study.
In fact, through extremely well documented research, Richard addresses that de facto segregation is myth. We should fully understand this in the context of de jure segregation:
myth | miTH | noun
A traditional story that focus on an early history of a people or explaining social phenomenon.
A widely held but false belief.
De jure segregation actually created government-segregated public housing, schools and neighborhoods. At the same time, this resulted in the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods.