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Dividing Lines, a new book by , Margaret B. Hoppin Professor of Law, offers an important look into how the nation’s infrastructure reinforces racial segregation. Examining a period spanning the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s to the present day, Dividing Lines explores how highways, roads, bridges, and public transportation across the country have historically served to isolate and disenfranchise Black and brown communities. On April 23, Archer sat down with Distinguished Scholar in Residence ’01 for a public conversation about the book and how it has been informed by her work as a civil rights advocate.

Archer was motivated to write Dividing Lines in part by her experiences growing up in the Connecticut suburb of Windsor, she said. “[My parents] wanted us to have all the things that they came to this country [from Jamaica] to give their family—a safer home and better educational opportunities,” she said. “We were one of three Black families in our community. And our neighbors wanted to make sure that we knew we weren’t wanted and took every opportunity to do that.” As a 10-year-old, Archer was terrified after her family’s home was vandalized with the words “KKK” scrawled on its exterior.

In time, Archer discovered other ways in which her physical environment had been shaped along racial lines. This included the lack of any bus route between her suburban neighborhood and Hartford, Connecticut, where the Black population constituted the largest racial demographic in the city.

Decades later, Archer—who is also president of the American Civil Liberties Union and faculty director of the Community Equity Initiative at ������ Law—found a similar dynamic at play while advocating on behalf of working-class Black neighborhoods nationwide. Among them is an historic Black enclave in Sandridge, South Carolina, that is now threatened by a proposed road expansion project that would ease travel to a nearby beach. They also include Black neighborhoods in Syracuse, New York, that underwent significant disruption and displacement due to the extension of Interstate 81 in the mid-1960’s. “I had an opportunity to work with the community there [and] with amazing advocates who were doing work to try to repair the harms of the past,” Archer said of the ongoing efforts to revitalize the neighborhood and replace the elevated highway. “In the work that we’re doing, we’re always focused on the invisible tools—the law and public policies that drive segregation, inequality, and oppression. And we lose sight of the fact that there are physical barriers within our communities, physical tools that we have used to lock in racial inequality.”

Archer also emphasized that racism encoded in the nation’s infrastructure has contributed to aggressive policing and criminal court proceedings. “I remind folks in the book that Michael Brown, who was killed [by former police officer Darren Wilson] in Ferguson, [Missouri]—that that [incident] started because he was walking in the street in a community that was known for having unwalkable sidewalks, and advocates had been working for decades to try to get those sidewalks repaired,” she said. “And I tell stories about people whose encounters with the police ended in their deaths or violence to them—their arrest started because they were walking in the street with communities with broken sidewalks—or [about] people who...navigate the sidewalks and were stopped, ticketed and harassed.”

Ultimately, Archer sees Dividing Lines as a call to action. “I think it is a story of resilience,” she said. “I spent some time in Indiana with this group called the Rethink Coalition in Indianapolis. And they are working on a project where I-65 and I-70 intersect in downtown Indianapolis...They were able to get urban planners to do more graphic models, to help them develop alternative plans, to help them re-envision what their community could look like.... I take hope from the way that these communities have been fighting back. And I hope that more people will join them and give them the tools that they need to be more powerful advocates on behalf of themselves and their families.”