The Lines Between Us: Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore's Racial Divide

by Lawrence Lanahan

Overview

A masterful narrative—with echoes of Evicted and The Color of Law—that brings to life the structures, policies, and beliefs that divide us

Deeply reported and deftly told, The Lines Between Us, a riveting story from DuPont Award–winning journalist Lawrence Lanahan, compels reflection on America's entrenched inequality—and on where the rubber meets the road not in the abstract, but in our own backyards.

The criss-crossing stories of Mark, a white devout Christian who sells his suburban home to move to Baltimore's inner city, and Nicole, a black mother determined to leave West Baltimore for the suburbs, chronicle how the region became so deeply segregated and why these fault lines persist today. Mark and Nicole personify the enormous disparities in access to safe housing, educational opportunities, and decent jobs. As these characters pack up their lives and change places, Lanahan examines what it will take to save our cities and communities: Do we put money into poor, segregated neighborhoods? Move families out into areas with more opportunity?

This eye-opening account of how a city creates its black, white, rich, and poor spaces suggests these problems are not intractable, but they are destined to persist until each of us—despite living in separate worlds—understands we have something at stake.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620973455
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	05/21/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Lawrence Lanahan has written for Al-Jazeera America, Columbia Journalism Review, NPR's Morning Edition, and Colorlines, among other outlets. A recipient of the Carey Institute's Logan Nonfiction Fellowship, Lanahan's The Lines Between Us, a fifty-episode radio series for Baltimore's WYPR, won Columbia University's duPont Award. He lives in Baltimore.
Lawrence Lanahan has written for Al-Jazeera America, Columbia Journalism Review, NPR's Morning Edition, and Colorlines, among other outlets. A recipient of the Carey Institute's Logan Nonfiction Fellowship, Lanahan's The Lines Between Us, a fifty-episode radio series for Baltimore's WYPR, won Columbia University's duPont Award. The author of the forthcoming The Lines Between Us: Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore's Racial Divide (The New Press), he lives in Baltimore.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Prologue 1

1 One Region, Two Worlds 11

2 In Search of Home 71

3 Crossing the Lines 101

4 One Region, New Worlds 139

5 Spring 2015 203

6 If Not Now, When? 229

Epilogue 281

Afterword 287

Acknowledgments 291

Notes 297

Selected Bibliography 383

Index 385

Editorial Reviews

08/05/2019

In this insightful investigation of housing segregation in Baltimore, reporter Lanahan weaves the stories of two people’s moves into a five-decade history of Baltimore housing policy and reform efforts. Drawing on copious firsthand interviews and archival materials, Lanahan sets out “to expose some of the pathologies that maintain segregation and inequality” in the city and its suburbs. He follows two people making opposite moves in the early 2000s: Mark Lange—a white man who moved from an affluent suburb to the poor, majority-black community of Sandtown after joining a community- and social justice–oriented church in the area—and Nicole Smith, a young African-American mother who moved her young son away from west Baltimore to the suburb of Columbia, where he thrived in his new school and she found success in her career in child care. Surrounding their narratives is a larger-scale history of segregation in Baltimore, which has included insufficient low-income housing to meet the need; housing that isn’t accessible to jobs, schools, and transit (while residents in more affluent, whiter areas successfully oppose low-income housing in their neighborhoods); and buildings in bad condition. Although dense with information, Lanahan’s prose is clear and engaging. This compassionate study will appeal to anyone interested in urban history and how social forces influence individuals’ decisions. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Lines Between Us:
"His reporting is evenhanded, his writing clear-eyed and dispassionate. . . . Lanahan reveals an anger that edges on despair, and makes a clear call for something better from America."
—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

"Lanahan has written a meticulous and affecting study, a precious resource for readers interested in urban politics, race, and city life."
—Booklist

"Many authors have answered the call, made sixty years ago by the eminent sociologist C. Wright Mills, to understand the social world by imagining the intersection of biography and history. But few have done so with the skill of Lanahan, an incisive journalist and marvelous storyteller."
—Patrick Sharkey, author of Uneasy Peace and Stuck in Place

"How does a journalist render the monster of structural racism? A historical force in motion? And in Baltimore, where its consequences remain terribly alive? The Lines Between Us begins with ordinary lives crossing between homes, schools, churches, neighborhoods. Lanahan tells a story that stretches far beyond the boundaries of (t)his city, that further awakens to our times and ourselves."
—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family

"The Lines Between Us brings humanity and heart to a guided tour of our fraught racial past and its enduring consequences. . . . Endearing, searing, unflinching."
—Davarian Baldwin, author of Chicago's New Negroes

"A brilliant account about race and class [that] captures the promise and challenges that test people and communities throughout America."
—Antero Pietila, author of Not in My Neighborhood and The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins

From the Publisher