Resident Book Review of “The Lines Between Us: Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore’s Racial Divide”

Resident Ted Churn will review The Lines Between Us: Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore’s Racial Divide by Lawrence Lanahan [New York: New Press, 2019] on Tuesday, October 21, 2025 at 7 PM in the Auditorium. This is his review for the October issue of The Sunburst.

This award-winning book tells a story of two people on opposite sides of Baltimore’s racial divide. Protagonists Mark and Nicole personify the enormous regional disparities in access to safe housing, educational opportunities, and decent jobs. Mark is a white suburbanite contemplating a move into West Baltimore; Nicole, a black resident of a poor city neighborhood, hoping to move to a prosperous suburb. Both are defying over a century of racial programming in Baltimore: one region, two separate worlds. And designed that way.

We witness Mark and Nicole’s struggles to figure out how best to confront Baltimore’s persistent legacy of segregation. Invest in poor, segregated neighborhoods? Or enable city dwellers to “move to opportunity”? In short, “The Lines Between Us” compels us to reflect on America’s entrenched inequality, and where the rubber meets the road in our own backyards.

 Author Lawrence Lanahan has worked in radio and print journalism for two decades, including five years producing for WYPR, Baltimore’s NPR station. He won a duPont Award for “The Lines Between Us,” a year-long WYPR series about inequality. The resulting book earned him the New Press Studs and Ida Terkel award for best debut work of nonfiction.

Presenter Ted Churn has been a Charlestown resident since 2021. He and his wife, Moffett, are retired Presbyterian ministers. Ted hails from Baltimore, living in the Liberty Heights area as a young child and later in Randallstown. His involvement at Charlestown includes Little Theatre, the Charlestown-Sandtown Connection, Tapestry, and pickleball.