Grist, March 24, 2021, Zoned out: One woman’s half-century fight to desegregate Berkeley
When Dorothy Walker was looking for a place to live in Berkeley, California, it didn’t take her very long to learn that half the city was off-limits to her family. It was 1950, and the rules were clear: “Because my husband was Japanese, we couldn’t live east of Grove Street, because no one not white was allowed to live there.”
The Supreme Court outlawed explicitly racist real estate covenants in 1968, and around a decade later, Berkeley changed the name of Grove Street, which divides the wealthier eastern half of the city from the west, to Martin Luther King Jr. Way. But some 70 years after she first went house hunting with her husband, Walker argues that, though the rules that kept the city divided by race and class have evolved, their effects remain.
If you want to know how century-old land-use laws could possibly be relevant today, you can find that lesson in Walker’s story.
