Richard Rothstein To Give Stone Lecture on Government’s Role in Racial Segregation

Author Richard Rothstein will address how federal, state and local government imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas in a Feb. 25 speech co-sponsored by the University of Virginia School of Law.

He will deliver this year’s annual Lillian K. Stone Distinguished Lecture in Environmental Policy, titled “Race and Place,” at 5:30 p.m.

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. His lecture draws lessons from his book “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 remediation.

He is also author of “Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap” and “Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right.”

The lecture, made possible through a gift from University of Virginia alumni Thatcher Stone ’82 (College ’78) and Frank Kittredge (Architecture ’78), is hosted jointly by the Schools of Architecture and Law. The lectureship is intended to fulfill the intellectual and educational commitments of the two schools by creating an opportunity for students to be educated in environmental policy and the National Environmental Policy Act.

The lecture is named in honor of Stone’s mother, Lillian K. Stone, who was chief of environmental project review at the U.S. Department of the Interior for 25 years.

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