The Black Butterfly

This book reminds us that in addition to shaping our laws, our institutions, and our culture, white supremacy has also shaped our nation’s landscape, from housing discrimination and redlining to blockbusting and urban renewal.

Although Brown focuses on racial segregation and Black neighborhoods in Baltimore, his insights speak to communities of color throughout the United States and how decades of hypersegregation in American cities have adversely impacted health, livelihoods, and lives.

What makes Brown’s analysis of the landscape of urban apartheid so compelling, however, is his recipe for dismantling it and replacing it with a new landscape of racial equity. 

I’ve lived in Baltimore ever since I was released from prison. And one thing you can’t escape if you live here is the reality of the deep segregation of this city. If you look at the racial makeup of each neighborhood on a map, the Black neighborhoods make up the shape of a butterfly. This is what I witnessed my friend, Dr. Brown set out to interrogate when he began researching this book.

This book personally helped me contextualize my own experiences within these systems. It gave me a deeper understanding of everything that had been working against me leading… show more.

When Lawrence Brown looks at the map of Baltimore, he sees two images: a white L and a Black butterfly. When the federal government drew red lines around neighborhoods where mainly Black people lived in the 1930s it created a chain reaction of disinvestment that continues to this day. On either side of the gentrified and tourist-focused downtown and inner harbor, beat the wings of a butterfly, or impoverished Black neighborhoods, including Sandtown-Winchester where Freddie Gray was from, that suffer the impacts of hypersegregation.

Brown, an expert in public health, not only shows how race shaped access to healthcare, money,… show more.