Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality

Summary

Our nation's transportation system is crumbling. But as acclaimed scholar and ACLU president Deborah Archer warns in Dividing Lines, before we can think about rebuilding and repairing, we must consider the role race has played in transportation infrastructure, from the early twentieth century and into the present day.

As Archer demonstrates, the success of the Civil Rights movement and the fall of Jim Crow in the 1960s did not mean the end of segregation. With state-sanctioned racism no longer legal, officials across the country turned to transportation infrastructure to keep Americans divided. A wealthy white neighborhood could no longer be "protected" by racial covenants and segregated shops, but a multilane road, with no pedestrian crossings, could be built along its border to make it difficult for people from a lower-income community to visit. Highways could not be routed through Black neighborhoods based on the race of their residents, but those neighborhoods' lower property values—a legacy of racial exclusion—could justify their destruction.

Drawing on a wealth of sources, including interviews with people who now live in the shadow of highways and other major infrastructure projects, Archer presents a sweeping, national account—from Atlanta and Houston to Indianapolis and New York City—of our persistent divisions.