The Black Butterfly - The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America

The best-selling look at how American cities can promote racial equity, end redlining, and reverse the damaging health- and wealth-related effects of segregation.

Winner of the IPPY Book Award Current Events II by the Independent Publisher

The world gasped in April 2015 as Baltimore erupted and Black Lives Matter activists, incensed by Freddie Gray''s brutal death in police custody, shut down highways and marched on city streets. In The Black Butterfly-a reference to the fact that Baltimore''s majority-Black population spreads out like a butterfly''s wings on both sides of the coveted strip of real estate running down the center of the city-Lawrence T. Brown reveals that ongoing historical trauma caused by a combination of policies, practices, systems, and budgets is at the root of uprisings and crises in hypersegregated cities around the country.

Putting Baltimore under a microscope, Brown looks closely at the causes of segregation, many of which ex