I was born in the segregated South, and I grew up with race as a fact of life. I was a first-year law student when I first encountered the notion that race was a social construction. Fascinated by this idea, I abandoned law school and enrolled in graduate school in history. A chance encounter with a state historic site, the early nineteenth-century house of a Cherokee planter in Georgia, revealed...

I was born in Washington, D.C. in 1947, the elder daughter of Rosa T. and D. James Pinderhughes, Jr. My mother and her mother were also born in Washington, while my father was born in East Providence, RI. My father, the first born Pinderhughes, fought in WWII and worked in the Post Office. My mother was first a housewife and later a teacher's aide in the Washington, D.C. schools. In Washington, D....

As a graduate student in history at Columbia University, my primary focus was 20th century U.S. urban history. I came into that field partly out of a love for cities, but also because I wanted to understand how Americans have made decisions about building social infrastructure—both in terms of design and levels of funding. In essence, I wondered why in the U.S. it was so hard to do coherent...