The Eights | 1948 and the Start of the Civil Rights Movement

Richard Rothstein, a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the winner of this year’s Sidney Hillman prize for journalism for The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America  (Liveright, 2017), now in paperback, and Jelani Cobb, a historian, professor of journalism at Columbia University and staff writer for The New Yorker, talk about how the government explicitly sanctioned racial segregation in the post-World War Two era, which we’re still feeling today, plus the status of the civil rights movement — and the backlash to it — in 1948.