The East Side Freedom Library and the St. Paul Recovery Act Reading Group invite you to a conversation with Rashad Williams, DeJure and DeFacto: How the Public & Private Sectors Have Collaborated to Perpetuate Institutionalized Racism.

Register here to join the event on Zoom.

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, activist scholars delineated between DeJure segregation (by law, as in the South) and DeFacto segregation (by practice, as in the urban North). Recent scholarship, which has focused on such concepts as racial capitalism and capitalist planning, has called into question these earlier categories and has drawn critical attention to the ways that public sector institutions, policies, and practices have intersected with and reinforced private sector practices, such as redlining, restrictive covenants, and extralegal violence. This month, in a conversation led by Rashad Williams, our Reparations Reading Group will explore these issues.

Rashad Akeem Williams is a PhD candidate studying black political thought and urban planning at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. His research and teaching explore the moral bases for corrective racial justice at the municipal level and the range of policies that might constitute reparations in the planning context. Rashad holds BS in Communications Studies from the State University of New York at Cortland and Master’s Degrees in Student Affairs Administration and in Public Administration from Binghamton University.

Last month, we focused on the impact of I-94 on St. Paul’s Rondo community. If you did not get a chance to read this article, we suggest you start with it. Then, in preparation for this conversation, we invite you to read this article about the planning and creation of the interstate highway system.

We also invite you to read this article about the construction of I-35W and its impact on African Americans.

When you register for this conversation, we will send you a pdf of an article Rashad recently wrote about “restorative planning” as part of a reparations vision.

Free and open to all