Planning White Supremacy

"Planning White Supremacy: Civil Rights and City Planning in Montgomery, Alabama, 1920-1970 is an attempt to explain how African Americans were targeted by white supremacist public officials who sought to traumatize African Americans, punish civil rights activists, and curb their potential political power with the overall goal of maintaining and expressing white supremacist power and control. To do this, the book puts the dramatic direct-action campaigns and violent reactions from white supremacists that consumed national headlines with Montgomery's emergence as the center of civil rights activity in 1955 within the context of local city planning. Author Becki Retzlaff analyzes the work of city planners, engineers, and other bureaucrats who sought to punish African Americans for their civil rights activism, keep them poor, assure that they remained politically disenfranchised, and inflict multi-generational trauma. She also explains how African Americans fought back against racist city planning"--

Rebecca Coleen Retzlaff is professor of political science and director of the Academic Sustainability Program at Auburn University. She is coeditor of Justice and the Interstates: The Racist Truth about Urban Highways and coauthor of Ohio Planning and Zoning Law and Regional Approaches to Affordable Housing.