The Lines Between Us

Mark Lange, a white suburbanite, and Nicole Smith, a Black woman from a poor city neighborhood, have never met. Both are weighing a move that would cross the lines Baltimore has maintained for a century: Mark to West Baltimore, Nicole to a prosperous suburb. Though the Baltimore region is one place, the two sides live in separate worlds, and that separation was deliberately engineered.

Journalist Lawrence Lanahan, a duPont Award winner, traces how the region became so highly segregated and why its divisions persist. Mark and Nicole show the wide gaps in access to safe housing, good schools, and decent jobs. As they prepare to trade places, advocates in the courts and on the streets debate hard questions: should money go into poor, segregated neighborhoods, and how can families be helped to move toward areas with more opportunity?

The account moves from church sermons and community meetings to public hearings, protests, the Supreme Court, and the death of Freddie Gray. Through residents who live with, shape, and push back against the city's divisions day after day, it details how Baltimore came to hold its black and white places and its rich and poor spaces. Lanahan argues that these problems can be solved, but they endure by design until people divided by geography recognize they share a stake in the outcome.