Everyone knows that sprawl is not natural, but few understand the ways that sprawl has devastated civil rights efforts during the past half century and continues to do so now. Examples abound. While African Americans were building a fight against racist housing covenants during the 1940s and trying to open homeownership, the federal government was paying for Whites to move into new homes in the suburbs and sign racially restrictive covenants.

One year after Rosa Parks made her stand against racial segregation in public transportation, the federal government elected to be the primary funder of a 41,000-mile interstate highway system, a system that would promote suburban expansion and contribute to the divestment of central cities. And when metropolitan school desegregation plans like the one in the Charlotte region had just begun to prove themselves, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the power of local governments in metropolitan regions to be more sacred and important than racial justice in education. The blows to civil rights efforts of these and other governmental interventions – in shaping what today are racially and economically imbalanced and inequitable metropolitan regions – cannot be overstated.

To be clear, it isn’t just sprawl that is the problem, and the problem is not just a matter for historical study. Sprawl on its own continues to play a significant part in the economic and political isolation of the central city and inner-ring suburbs, surely, but when sprawl and jurisdictional fragmentation combine the impact is one of systems-wide, metropolitan-scale racial and economic sorting. Fragmentation is the proliferation of local governments within metropolitan regions. We now know that the more fragmented a metropolitan region becomes, the more racially segregated that region is going to be, residentially and in public educational systems. And economic segregation tends to arise with racial segregation in our metropolitan regions. How does this impact the lives of people of color and low-income families, and the vitality of metropolitan areas?

Affordable housing is cloistered in the central city and inner-ring, far from new jobs. Homes that see their values boom tend to be in affluent, exclusive, predominantly White suburbs. Another result of a lack of regional coordination is that gentrification is pushing low-income residents, many of color, from reinvestment in city neighborhoods. In the employment arena, job growth is happening in the suburbs, far from the service and entry-level labor pool, while unemployment in the city remains a problem, hitting people of color hardest. And public transit is not making the connections between the labor pool and job growth, again a problem with a clear racial component. These disconnections translate into depressed life chances for far too many families of color and low-income individuals.

This chain of racial and economic subordination is the most substantial obstacle to civil rights work today. Those concerned with civil rights in this nation, and stakeholders in metropolitan regional vitality more generally, must push for metropolitan policies that place racial justice issues at the fore: policies that open housing throughout the metropolitan region, and tie that housing to jobs, educational opportunities, and transportation; policies that bring greater equality to tax bases among municipalities within regions; policies that direct investment to economically isolated areas but protect against the displacement of residents living in those areas; and policies that reverse trends of residential segregation and concentration of poverty. Some of these policies are working right now – and we can build on these successes.

By adopting this framework for analysis and by enacting equity-based policies to match, not only will the mission of the civil rights movement come closer to being met, but our regions will thrive. Understanding sprawl as a civil rights issue is crucial to the future of our metropolitan regions.