When a government keeps legal responsibility for vulnerable people but hands their daily care to private charities, those charities can pick whom they serve. Religious agencies paid with public money took children of their own faith, who were mostly white, and turned away the rest. Black Protestant children were left in reformatories and prison-like group homes.
Bias that no one states openly shows up when you compare who is accepted with who is in need. More than half the city's foster children were black, yet only about a quarter of the children in the Jewish and Catholic agencies were black. That gap made the pattern undeniable.
A public body that hands large sums to providers and asks little in return loses any way to know what it is buying. The city paid charities heavily but set so few conditions that no one could say with authority whether a child in care was getting even minimal care.
If a whole system discriminates, then everyone who takes part in it is aiding that discrimination, even those who are well-meaning or respected. On that reasoning the lawyer sued nuns, rabbis and even her own former boss, not just the officials at the top.
Lawsuits, court settlements and even court takeovers of a failing care system cannot fix what poverty does to children. Decades of legal victories still left children moving through foster homes, psychiatric hospitals, jails, shelters and the streets. Until poverty is tackled, reforms will not produce much better endings.