Last year, Richard Rothstien released a book entitled The Color Of Law: A Forgotten History Of How Our Government Segregated America.

The details behind what happened are simple with long-lasting effects that are present even today. It’s simply the president of the United States passed legislation to ensure the black population of the country couldn’t purchase homes.

Rothstien told NPR’s Terry Gross, “The Public Works Administration program and housing was primarily designed to provide housing to white middle-class/lower-middle class families.”

This was less than a decade after the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression of the late 1920s, but sadly very close to the Tulsa Race Riot. The nation was only a generation removed from a war about the economic disparity created when you don’t have to pay your workforce.

So Franklin Roosevelt ensured his voting contingent would get out of the slums and get into homes. Meanwhile, the first generation of ‘free’ black people were forced to move into apartments commonly knows as projects. The banks didn’t approve home loans for them and the few loans that were approved were for homes in specific neighborhoods.

Those neighborhoods were segregated, as were the public services offered in those communities. So the schools were all one color and public funding would follow the whims of the voting public…in a time when it was easy to persuade people not to vote, especially when you turned fire hoses on them.

Once the foundation was set, things continued the way it was intended. And by that, I mean the white famines that made it thought the Great Depression were rewarded with homes, providing them with equity as the economy grew.

That equity was then available to be used in a variety of ways. Investing in your children’s future by taking out college loans. Investing in a potential business opportunity. Investing in the same stock market that caused their parents to go broke.

But if you didn’t have a home, if you were only able to rent, if you had to save up money for a down payment for anything, then you lived differently. But when you did finally get a chance to own a home, you truly loved it and would want to take care of it.

These are the homes that are the first to disappear with the influx of gentrification, since the phrase itself means (at least to me) the influx of young upper-middle class people turning historically black communities just outside big cities into their own.

I picked up a Lyft passenger earlier today from a neighborhood that was obviously filled with black residents, with well-painted graffiti otherwise known as murals on the walls and large homes on larger plots of land that have stood the test of time.

It was an area that was initially abandoned when ‘white flight’ sent families outside the city and now they want back in. Especially in cities where a lack of infrastructure allows for residents to leave their cars at home.

But as I plot my next ride-share adventure, I’m thankful for the lack of a rail line while hoping these same infiltrators vote for change for more than just thier side of the block and that’s the truth.