"Patchwork Apartheid is a landmark study of racial capitalism and social inequality in the United States. By putting newly available data into dialogue with detailed local histories, Colin Gordon takes readers beyond the storylines and summary facts that typically guide discussions of residential segregation in America. More than any other work I know, this book brings residential segregation into focus as a social, economic, and political process in motion—and as a process in which private actors and market agreements played preeminent roles in constructing the nation’s racial and spatial boundaries. Beautifully written and powerfully argued, Patchwork Apartheid should appeal to public and academic audiences alike. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the origins, operations, and consequences of residential segregation in America."
—JOE SOSS, Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service, University of Minnesota

"Colin Gordon is a singular historian, and this is a singular book. Patchwork Apartheid itemizes the schemes and evasions by which white homeowners continued to insist on their right to assert and convey their right to all-white neighborhoods (and an all-white sector of the housing market) long after the United States Supreme Court had ruled those rights to be legally unenforceable. Gordon is a master of summoning historical particulars into a dramatic refiguration of our understanding of the time and space of American history."
—WALTER JOHNSON, Winthrop Professor of History and professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

"Patchwork Apartheid is a remarkable contribution to the rapidly evolving scholarship on the origins of segregation in America. Gordon marshals an unprecedented amount of data to document how private restrictions established racial barriers dividing neighborhoods, suburban subdivisions, and society as a whole. These individual agreements made in the first half of the twentieth century could not be more relevant today, as we collectively grapple with the legacy of our explicitly segregationist past."
—JACOB FABER, associate professor of sociology and public service, Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, New York University

"Colin Gordon’s prodigious research results in a groundbreaking comparative study of the history, structure, and lasting impact of racially restrictive covenants in an important swath of Midwestern cities. In describing the experience of these central locations, Patchwork Apartheid illustrates important reasons for our national patterns of metropolitan-wide residential segregation."
—CAROL M. ROSE, Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor Emeritus of Law and Organization and professorial lecturer in law, Yale Law School

For the first half of the twentieth century, private agreements to impose racial restrictions on who could occupy property decisively shaped the development of American cities and the distribution of people within them. Racial restrictions on the right to buy, sell, or occupy property also effectively truncated the political, social, and economic citizenship of those targeted for exclusion. In Patchwork Apartheid, historian Colin Gordon examines the history of such restrictions and how their consequences reverberate today. Drawing on a unique record of property restrictions excavated from local property records in five Midwestern counties, Gordon documents the prevalence of private property restriction in the era before zoning and building codes were widely employed and before federal redlining sanctioned the segregation of American cities and suburbs. This record of private restriction—documented and mapped to the parcel level in Greater Minneapolis, Greater St. Louis, and two Iowa counties—reveals the racial segregation process both on the ground, in the strategic deployment of restrictions throughout transitional central city neighborhoods and suburbs, and in the broader social and legal construction of racial categories and racial boundaries.

Gordon also explores the role of other policies and practices in sustaining segregation. Enforcement of private racial restrictions was held unconstitutional in 1948, and such agreements were prohibited outright in 1968. But their premises and assumptions, and the segregation they had accomplished, were carried forward by an array of private and public policies. Explicit racial restrictions were accompanied and sustained  by the discriminatory  business practices of real estate agents and developers, who characterized certain neighborhoods as white and desirable and others as black and undesirable, thereby hiding segregation behind the promotion of sound property investments, safe neighborhoods, and good schools. These practices were accompanied and sustained by local zoning, which systematically protected white neighborhoods while targeting “blighted” black neighborhoods for commercial and industrial redevelopment, and by a tangle of federal policies that reliably deferred to local and private interests with deep investments in local segregation. Private race restriction was thus a key element in the original segregation of American cities and a source of durable inequalities in housing wealth, housing opportunity, and economic mobility.

Patchwork Apartheid exhaustively documents the history of private restriction in urban settings and demonstrates its crucial role in the ideas and assumptions that have sustained racial segregation in the United States into the twenty-first century.

COLIN GORDON is a professor of history at the University of Iowa

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Interactive maps, datasets, and codebooks

The datasets linked below show the spatial location of racial restrictions on property in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County in Missouri, and in Black Hawk and Johnson Counties in Iowa. Each zipped file contains a Geographic Information System (GIS) shapefile, and a codebook (describing the shapefile attributes) in CSV format. The data for Hennepin County, Minnesota was collected by the Mapping Prejudice project.
 

A Volume in the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology

"With the latest surge in critics questioning the value of college degrees, Overcoming the Odds couldn’t come at a better time. Jennie E. Brand’s book considers the transformative effects of college from a holistic perspective—not just the earnings premium but all the nonpecuniary benefits of earning a degree. Her research is an important contribution to the conversation: yes, a college degree is ‘worth it,’ both for the individual and society at large."
—ANTHONY P. CARNEVALE, research professor and director, Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW), McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University

"In Overcoming the Odds Jennie E. Brand solves one of the great social science puzzles of our time: Would young people who are unlikely to graduate from college get anything out of it if they were lucky enough to get a degree? Brand applied advances in modern statistical inference to arrive at the answer, and it is YES! She illustrates her conclusions with real case studies that reveal the lived experiences behind the statistics."
—MICHAEL HOUT, professor of sociology, New York University

Each year, millions of high school students consider whether to continue their schooling and attend and complete college. Despite strong evidence that a college degree yields far-reaching benefits, some critics of higher education increasingly argue that college “does not pay off” and that some students—namely, disadvantaged prospective college students—would be better served by forgoing higher education to immediately enter the workforce or pursue vocational training instead. But debates about the value of college often fail to consider what each individual’s life would look like had they not completed college, or what is known as a person’s college counterfactual. In Overcoming the Odds sociologist Jennie E. Brand reveals the benefits of completing college by comparing life outcomes of college graduates with their college counterfactuals.

Drawing on two cohorts of nationally representative data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Longitudinal Surveys program, Brand uses matching and machine learning methods to estimate the effects of college completion across students with varying likelihoods of completing four-year degrees. To illustrate her findings, Brand describes outcomes using matched vignettes of college and noncollege graduates. Brand shows that four-year college completion enables graduates to increase wages and household income, while also circumventing unemployment, low-wage work, job instability, poverty, and social assistance. Completing college also increases civic engagement. Most of these benefits are larger for disadvantaged than for more advantaged students, rendering arguments that college has limited benefits for unlikely graduates as flawed. Brand concludes that greater long-term earnings, and less job instability and unemployment, and thus more tax revenue, less reliance on public assistance, and high levels of volunteering indicate that public investment in higher education for students from disadvantaged backgrounds yields far-reaching collective benefits.

Overcoming the Odds is an innovative and enlightening exploration of how college can transform lives. Brand’s novel research convincingly demonstrates that it is better for our society when more people complete college.

JENNIE E. BRAND is professor of sociology and statistics, University of California, Los Angeles.