'The Color of the Law:' Richard Rothstein Discusses Systemic Racial Segregation in America Nov. 16
release date: November 8, 2017
Learn how racial segregation has been enacted at local, state and federal levels as Richard Rothstein discusses his new book "The Color of the Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America" from 7 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 16 at the Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Level 1, Microsoft Auditorium, 206-386-4636.
Library events are free and open to the public. Tickets and registration are not required. Parking in the Central Library garage will be available for $6 after 5 p.m.
Rothstein will appear in conversation with Quintard Taylor, the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington. With research that Ta-Nehisi Coates calls "brilliant," Rothstein will show how past laws and policy decisions promote racial inequity today.
Jane Jacobs established in her classic "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" that the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s created many of today's impoverished neighborhoods. In "The Color of the Law," Rothstein expands our understanding of this history. He shows how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. He also shows how police and prosecutors supported violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.
Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a Fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He lives in California, where he is a Fellow of the Haas Institute at the University of California-Berkeley.
Taylor is the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington. Taylor has more than forty years of teaching experience in African American history and specifically African Americans in the American West. He is the author of numerous books, including "The Forging of A Black Community: Seattle's Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era."
This event is supported by The Seattle Public Library Foundation, author series sponsor Gary Kunis, and media sponsor The Seattle Times and presented in partnership with Third Place Books.Books will be available for purchase and signing.