An Evening with Deborah Archer, ACLU President and Author of Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality

A special evening with Deborah Archer, current ACLU president and author of Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality. Deborah Archer will be in conversation with Eboni S. Nelson, dean and professor of law at the University of Connecticut School of Law.

Our nation’s transportation system is crumbling: highways are collapsing, roads are pockmarked, and commuter trains are unreliable. But as acclaimed scholar 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 20th century to 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. The status quo would not be so easily dismantled. With state-sanctioned racism no longer legal, officials across the country―not just in the South―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. A new suburb could not be for "whites only," but planners could refuse to extend sidewalks from Black communities into white ones.

Book sale and signing presented by Elm Street Books.

Registration required.

Deborah 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.

Eboni S. Nelson became dean of the University of Connecticut School of Law on July 31, 2020. She came to UConn from the University of South Carolina School of Law, where she taught for 13 years and since 2018, served as the associate dean for academic affairs. At South Carolina Law, she received the Best Classroom Teacher and Outstanding Faculty Service awards. She has been recognized as one of the 100 Most Influential Blacks in Connecticut by the state conference of the NAACP.

Presented in partnership with The Links, Incorporated, Fairfield County Chapter.