Leah Rothstein

Magic City Books and the University of Oklahoma MPA program are proud to welcome Leah Rothstein for a free, in-person program to celebrate her new book, Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law, on Wednesday July 19. This event will be presented in the Algonquin Room at Magic City Books at 7:00 pm.

Leah Rothstein has more than two decades of experience as a consultant to affordable housing developers and local governments. Her new book Just Action (co-written with her father, Richard Rothstein), shows how community groups can press firms that imposed segregation to finally take responsibility for reversing the harm, creating victories that might finally challenge residential segregation and help remedy America’s profoundly unconstitutional past.

Leah Rothstein will present on the book, answer audience questions and conclude with a book signing.

Just Action is on sale now and will be for sale at the event. You can order a copy at: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/just-action/1354.

About Just Action

In his best-selling book The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein demolished the de facto segregation myth that black and white Americans live separately by choice, providing “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to the reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). This landmark work–through its nearly one million copies sold–has helped to define the fractious age in which we live.

The Color of Law‘s unrefuted account has become conventional wisdom. But how can we begin to undo segregation’s damage? “It’s rare for a writer to feel obligated to be so clear on solutions to the problems outlined in a previous book,” writes E. J. Dionne, yet Richard Rothstein–aware that twenty-first-century segregation continues to promote entrenched inequality–has done just that, teaming with housing policy expert Leah Rothstein to write Just Action, a blueprint for concerned citizens and community leaders.

As recent headlines informed us, twenty million Americans participated in racial justice demonstrations in 2020. Although many displayed “Black Lives Matter” window and lawn signs, few considered what could be done to redress inequality in their own communities. Page by page, Just Action offers programs that activists and their supporters can undertake in their own communities to address historical inequities, providing bona fide answers, based on decades of study and experience, in a nation awash with memes and internet theories.

Often forced to respond to social and political outrage, banks, real estate agencies, and developers, among other institutions, have apologized for past actions. But their pledges–some of them real, others thoroughly hollow–to improve cannot compensate for existing damage. Just Action shows how community groups can press firms that imposed segregation to finally take responsibility for reversing the harm, creating victories that might finally challenge residential segregation and help remedy America’s profoundly unconstitutional past.

Leah Rothstein has worked on public policy and community change, from the grassroots to the halls of government. She led the Alameda County and San Francisco probation departments’ research on reforming community corrections policy and practice to be focused on rehabilitation, not punishment. She has been a consultant to nonprofit housing developers, cities and counties, redevelopment agencies, and private firms on community development and affordable housing policy, practice, and finance. Her policy work is informed by her years as a community organizer with PUEBLO and Californians for Justice, working on housing, public safety, environmental justice, and youth leadership, and as a labor organizer with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE).

Leah received a Bachelor’s Degree with honors in American Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.