Chapter 2 situates the Buchanan v. Warley case and the conflict over Louisville’s racial zoning ordinance in the historical context of African American movements for civil rights and racial justice, often collectively called the Long Black Freedom Movement. It describes the drive to create residential segregation in Louisville as part of white supremacists’ efforts to establish a residential apartheid in the awful depths of post-Emancipation oppression of Blacks. It weaves human stories of racial justice activism into a social and legal history of the Buchanan case and its aftermath. This history gives insight into how racial justice movements emerge and grow despite the persistence of white supremacy, insight that is particularly relevant to a much-needed racial reckoning in the American land-use system.

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s key themes by describing the Buchanan v. Warley case in its historical social-movement context in Louisville and nationally, the legal theory behind the Supreme Court’s invalidation of racial zoning, and the 100+ years in which many subsequent land use policies and practices have segregated American landscapes and perpetuated racial injustice. The chapter provides a multi-dimensional snapshot of racially unjust land-use conditions in the U.S. more than 100 years after the nation’s missed opportunity to embrace an anti-subordination vision of land use. Based on distributive, procedural, and social justice concepts and the insights of the nine core chapters in the book, three major themes are identified: (1) racial inequity is deeply and systemically embedded in American land use in multi-faceted ways; (2) cross-disciplinary scholarly study is essential to understanding race and land use; and (3) American land use is characterized both by the intransigence of systemic racism and by social, legal, and policy changes that advance racial justice.

Chapter 11 revisits the key themes of this book’s chapters in light of questions about what should and could be done to make land use in the United States racially just. Even though the book begins with the intransigence of deeply embedded racial inequities in American land use, this last chapter turns to themes of hope and potential for a racial-justice transformation. First, the history of grassroots anti-racism activism is instructive for how the next generations of activists can work effectively for transformative change in the land use systems. Second, a substantive anti-subordination theory of the law can make a difference if it influences not only legal doctrines adopted by the courts but also the restructuring of land-use institutions, including private-market systems. Third, public policy reforms must be multi-faceted and aimed at systemic change, supported by evidence and advocacy. The chapter concludes with hopeful thoughts about how a Third Reconstruction could change the trajectory of “the monstrous and evil story” of “racism, power, wealth, and land throughout the nation’s history.”