David Krugler: 1919 Year of White Terrorism

David Krugler is a historian and novelist. A professor of history at the University of Wisconsin--Platteville, he has published, in addition to two novels, nonfiction books on propaganda, Cold War civil defense, and black resistance to white mob violence after World War I. Professor Krugler discusses his book, 1919: the Year of Racial Violence and How African Americans Fought Back. We specifically focus on Chicago and Knoxville riots with an eye on how Black World War I veterans factored into…

Steve Luxenberg: Plessy V. Ferguson

Steve Luxenberg is an associate editor at The Washington Post and an award-winning author. Steve Luxenberg discusses his nonfiction book, "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation," which was published in 2019 to critical acclaim. He discussed the people most influential in arguing and deciding the Supreme Court case - civil rights author Albion W. Tourgée, the Great Dissenter John Marshall Harlan, and Henry Billings Brown who wrote…

Richard Rothstein: Color Of Law

Richard Rothstein is a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, which recovers a forgotten history of how federal, state, and local policy explicitly segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate the Constitution and require…

Sheryll Cashin: Housing Segregation

Cheryll Cashin is an author and the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown University. Currently she teaches Constitutional Law, Race and American Law, and a writing seminar about American segregation, education and opportunity. Her new book — White Space, Black ‘Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality — is about the role of residential segregation in producing racial inequality.

Kelsey Klotz: Dave Brubeck's Civil Rights Advocacy

Kelsey Klotz discusses her research on the intersection of race and sound in 1950s and 1960s American music, with a focus on jazz. She published her first book "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness," which uses Brubeck’s mid-century performance of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand mid-century whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy, more fully.

Todd Michney: Redlining and Home Owners Loan Company

In this inaugural session of the Heights Library Unpacking Our History interviews, we talk to Todd M. Michney, who shares insights from his book "Surrogate Suburbs: Black Upward Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Cleveland, 1900–1980," about redlining and the HOLC's role in housing discrimination.