Arnold R. Hirsch (1949–2018) was the Ethel and Herman L. Midlo Endowed Chair for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans and coeditor of Urban Policy in Twentieth-Century America and Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. N. D. B. Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and the author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida, published by the University of Chicago Press.
Arnold Hirsch's deeply transformational book lays out how a perfect storm of racism, redlining, and public policies formed Chicago and other American cities. If you want to understand what came after the 1960s, you have to understand what came before them. And today we're still dealing with the same issues Hirsch wrote about. Every sector of the city-its business interests, its government, its people, and sometimes even its churches-have employed particular weaponry to effect a single goal: the subjugation of black people. It hasn't changed. * Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of We Were Eight Years In Power and Between the World and Me *