In the United states, late in the twentieth century, racial separation prevails in family life, playgrounds, churches, and local community activities. Segregation of housing is a key mechanism for maintaining the subordinate status of blacks. Housing policies and practices have been a leading cause of the nation's decaying central cities and fractured metropolitan communities. This essay discusses the development of racially segregated housing patterns and the nation's limited efforts to achieve open access to quality housing. Starting from the beginnings of black immigration in 1619, the paper sketches housing patterns during the slave years, and reviews the slow pace of change during the first half-century after Emancipation. Black migration accelerated in the years surrounding World War I, and Jim Crow came north in the form of tactics to create and sustain racial residential segregation. During the civil rights era, here identified as 1941-88, efforts to change the segregated character of housing have been few and weak. Opportunity exists for public programs to increase the availability of integrated residential life for all Americans in the future, and thus to transform the race and residence patterns that will prevail in the twenty-first century. Footnotes are included. (Author/BJV)