Automobile intensive suburban sprawl is the defining characteristic of the American metropolis. Single-family home communities ooze across the landscape, and in most suburbs it is very difficult to get anywhere without a car. This style of city-building is also a major source of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. How did it get to be this way? Most people argue it is because Americans love their cars, cities have more wide-open space than in Europe or Asia, or there is a preference for the privacy of the individual home. But the stubborn persistence of sprawl is not driven by cultural or geographic determinism. This talk will explore how the continued sprawl of American suburbia has its roots in social and racial conflicts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In response to the waves of civil rights protests over equal access to segregated communities, the U.S. Congress passed comprehensive legislation to try and finally dismantle housing segregation in 1968. The response to these new laws by white communities, however, reinforced spatial inequalities, exacerbated environmental justice, and further entrenched American sprawl. All of which contributed to the mounting climate crisis.