“California was never as overt or horrific as the Jim Crow South. But the Californian way worked tacitly through housing, jobs and education policies. On top of racially restrictive covenants, realtors around the San Francisco Bay Area were engaged in a practice called blockbusting. Hoover remembers it well. “They’d come in and say there’s a black man going to buy a house here. You’re going to have a hard time selling your house, so you better do it now,” he said. Real estate agents would buy the houses at fire-sale prices, then turn around and sell them to African-Americans for a profit.”