Description:
A USA TODAY BESTSELLER
From an eminent legal scholar and the president of the ACLU, an essential account of how transportation infrastructure--from highways and roads to sidewalks and buses--became a means of protecting segregation and inequality after the fall of Jim Crow.
Brief description: Deborah N. Archer is president of the ACLU, where she serves as chair of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee. She is a tenured professor and associate dean at New York University School of Law and the faculty director of the Community Equity Initiative at NYU Law. She lives in New York with her husband and two children.
Review Quotes: Deborah Archer's Dividing Lines demonstrates with great clarity that decisions about infrastructure in the United States have been anything but neutral. The placement of roads, bridges, and highways has often been in service of maintaining white supremacy--keeping Black people in their 'place' at the lower end of a yawning wealth gap, with fewer educational opportunities and less access to health care, and without the amenities that White communities take for granted. This is a brilliant and persuasive call to action for all who are concerned about creating a more just society.--Annette Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of On Juneteenth and The Hemingses of Monticello