CBH Talk | Deborah Archer and James Forman Discuss “Dividing Lines”
In her new book, Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality, acclaimed scholar and ACLU President Deborah Archer shows how seemingly innocuous transit planning functions – the development of roads, sidewalks, dividers, and other infrastructures – were used to keep Americans separated once the fall of Jim Crow made state-sanctioned segregation illegal.
Although a wealthy white neighborhood was no longer "protected" by racial laws and segregated storefronts, there were no laws against building multilane roads without pedestrian crossings, or neglecting to extend sidewalks from Black to white communities. These transit planning tactics neatly took the place of codified segregation. They were perfectly legal workarounds that served to keep Blacks on the ‘other side of the tracks.’
Join Archer and Pulitzer Prize winner James Forman Jr. for a conversation that unpacks the structural inequality built into the transit system, and how even today the resulting segregation often remains intractable.
Participants
Deborah Archer is the President of the ACLU where she serves as Chair of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee, and a nationally recognized expert on civil liberties, civil rights, and racial justice. She is also the Margaret B. Hoppin Professor of Clinical Law and Faculty Director of the Community Equity Initiative at New York University School of Law.
Archer is an award-winning teacher and legal scholar whose articles have appeared in leading law reviews and national publications, and she has offered commentary for national and international media. Prior to full time teaching, she worked as an attorney with the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., where she litigated in the areas of voting rights, employment discrimination, educational equity, and school desegregation. She previously served as Chair of the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, the nation’s oldest and largest police oversight agency.
Archer currently serves as a Trustee of Smith College and received the Smith College Medal the highest honor the college awards to an alum. She is also an elected member of the American Law Institute. She is a graduate of Yale Law School and Smith College. Photo by Quinn Russell Brown
James Forman Jr. is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale University. He attended public schools in Detroit and New York City before graduating from the Atlanta Public Schools. After attending Brown University and Yale Law School, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented both juveniles and adults charged with crimes.
In 1997, along with David Domenici, Forman started the Maya Angelou School, an alternative school for school dropouts and youth who had been arrested. In the decades since its founding, Maya Angelou School has expanded to run multiple schools inside D.C.’s youth and adult prisons.
His first book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. He also co-edited Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change, an anthology focusing on how to undo the damage and depredations of the carceral state.
In 2020, Forman created a law-student run pipeline program helping people from under-represented groups achieve their dreams of becoming lawyers. To date, over 18 program participants have been admitted to law school, including to UConn, Quinnipiac, Yale, Villanova, American University, and Berkeley. In 2022, Forman helped launch the Yale Law and Racial Justice Center.
Forman is a Trustee of the Council on Criminal Justice and a member of the American Law Institute. In 2023, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
