Segregation in the US
From WikiDemocracy
Racial Segregation in the United States
Facilities and services such as housing, healthcare, education, employment, and transportation have been systematically separated in the United States based on racial categorizations. Notably, racial segregation in the United States was the legally and/or socially enforced separation of African Americans from whites, as well as the separation of other ethnic minorities from majority communities. While mainly referring to the physical separation and provision of separate facilities, it can also refer to other manifestations such as prohibitions against interracial marriage (enforced with anti-miscegenation laws), and the separation of roles within an institution. The U.S. Armed Forces were formally segregated until 1948, as black units were separated from white units but were still typically led by white officers.
In the 1857 Dred Scott case (Dred Scott v. Sandford), the U.S. Supreme Court found that Black people were not and could never be U.S. citizens and that the U.S. Constitution and civil rights did not apply to them. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, but it was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883 in the Civil Rights Cases. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), so long as "separate but equal" facilities were provided, a requirement that was rarely met. The doctrine's applicability to public schools was unanimously overturned in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In the following years, the court further ruled against racial segregation in several landmark cases including Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964), which helped bring an end to the Jim Crow laws.
FROM SLAVERY TO SEGREGATION
Today, the story of the American Civil Rights Movement is familiar: courageous activists waged an epic struggle, faced great risks, and suffered tragic losses to achieve victories that forever changed the nation. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the murder of Emmett Till; the Selma to Montgomery March; and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 are well-known milestones in the movement.
The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated the United States
by Richard Rothstein 14/11/17 ZINN EDUCATION PROJECT
Racial segregation characterizes every metropolitan area in the United States and bears responsibility for our most serious social and economic problems — it corrupts our criminal justice system, exacerbates economic inequality, and produces large academic gaps between white and African American schoolchildren.
Racial Segregation in the Church
by Equal Justice Initiative 01/01/16
The Transatlantic Slave Trade and slavery often were justified by religious leaders who argued that slave owners were performing a noble Christian duty by converting and enslaving Africans, who were inferior to whites in the eyes of the church. After the Civil War, white churches supported racial hierarchy and segregation, forcing Black people to form their own churches.
Jim Crow Laws
The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as "Jim Crow" represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. The laws affected almost every aspect of daily life, mandating segregation of schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains, restrooms, buses, trains, and restaurants. "Whites Only" and "Colored" signs were constant reminders of the enforced racial order.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
On a hilltop overlooking Montgomery is the nation’s first comprehensive memorial dedicated to the legacy of Black Americans who were enslaved, terrorized by lynching, humiliated by racial segregation, and presumed guilty and dangerous.
The long history of racism against Asian Americans in the U.S.
[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/the-long-history-of-racism-against-asian-americans-in-the-u-s by Adrian De Leon PBS NEWS]
In the face of rising anti-Asian racist actions – now at about 100 reported cases per day – Yang implores Asian Americans to “wear red, white, and blue” in their efforts to combat the virus.
The Widespread Failure to Preserve African American History
Only 2% of the 95,000 entries on the National Register of Historic Places—“the list of sites deemed worthy of preservation by the federal government”—focus on the experiences of African Americans, reporting in the latest issue of The New Yorker reveals. This widespread failure to preserve African American history is itself rooted in America’s history of racial injustice.
Lynching in America Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror
EJI researchers documented 4075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950—at least 800 more lynchings of Black people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date.
INTRODUCTION
In the 1950s and 1960s, heroic civil rights activists staged a valiant revolt against racial inequality that compelled our nation to change some of its most racially offensive practices and policies. The Civil Rights Movement profoundly changed the character of American society and opened doors for people of color that had too long been barred by bigotry and ignorance. There has been substantial progress on a range of issues as a result of increased participation by non-white people in the political process. Diversity has become a demand that has strengthened the political, social, cultural, and economic landscape in significant and visible ways.
Community Remembrance Project
As a law office, the Equal Justice Initiative has been dedicated to representing clients sentenced to death and condemned to die in prison, challenging inhumane conditions of confinement, and working to expose racial bias in the criminal justice system for more than 30 years. This work has provided a first-hand view of the many ways our nation’s current era of mass incarceration is deeply rooted in America’s history of racial injustice, and has inspired us to launch a project documenting and memorializing the eras of enslavement, racial terror lynching, and segregation.
60 years after Brown v. Board, school segregation isn’t yet American history
Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the question of how far we’ve come in eliminating segregated education is not a simple one. Gwen Ifill leads a discussion with Cheryl Brown Henderson of the Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research, Sheryll Cashin of Georgetown University, Catherine Lhamon of the Department of Education and Ron Brownstein of Atlantic Media.
Introduction
In the years following World War I, America was gripped by the fear that the Communist Revolution that had taken place in Russia would spread to the United States. As is often the case when fear outweighs rational debate, civil liberties paid the price. In November 1919 and January 1920, in what notoriously became known as the “Palmer Raids,” Attorney General Mitchell Palmer began rounding up and deporting so-called radicals. Thousands of people were arrested without warrants and without regard to constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure. Those arrested were brutally treated and held in horrible conditions.
In Southern schools, segregation and inequality aren’t just history — they’re reality
The Justice Department recently hailed a federal court ruling affirming plans to desegregate schools in Cleveland, Mississippi. Desegregation, the court ruled, allows students to learn, play and thrive together.
School choice, history of segregation collide as Florida county consolidates rural schools
by Kate Payne 22/8/24 PBS NEWS
In the Florida panhandle, one tiny district plans to consolidate its last three stand-alone elementary schools into one campus because there aren’t enough students to cover the costs of keeping the doors open. But the Madison County School District’s decision to do so has exposed tensions around race in a community where for years some white families have resisted integrating public schools.
Supreme Court Decision Sparks Massive White Resistance to School Integration
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregation in public education was unconstitutional, overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine in place since 1896 and sparking massive resistance among white Americans committed to racial inequality.
Racial Justice
American history begins with the creation of a myth to absolve white settlers of the genocide of Native Americans: the false belief that nonwhite people are less human than white people. This belief in racial hierarchy survived slavery’s abolition, fueled racial terror lynchings, demanded legally codified segregation, and spawned our mass incarceration crisis.
When Privatization Means Segregation: Setting the Record Straight on School Vouchers
In recent weeks, the issue of private school vouchers has taken center stage in debates over the future of American education. Policy proposals to use public funds for private school tuition vouchers have a long history, dating back to a seminal 1955 essay by Milton Friedman. Over the last twenty-five years, small voucher programs have been established in several states, including Indiana, Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin, as well as in Washington, D.C.
American Apartheid
by Jacqueline Jones 2017 DISSENT
The United States today is less a nation of citizens equal under the law than a nation of citizens living in unequal zip codes. Where we live is both a cause and effect of individuals’ and households’ wealth, health, and wellbeing—the kinds of jobs we have; the quality of our housing, education, medical insurance, and police and fire protection; crime rates and whether or not our neighbors are incarcerated; and bonds of family and community. An understanding of U.S. housing patterns, then—how they came to be so segregated, and why they remain so—is critical to the way we think about this country’s ideal of democracy and reality of unequal citizenship.
Investigation Shows Inequality in School Funding Is a Legacy of Racial Injustice
In Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case striking down racial segregation in schools, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that the opportunity of an education “where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” Less than two decades later, in 1973, the Court abandoned this commitment to equal education when it held in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez that there is no constitutional right to equal funding in education.
Our House Divided: What U.S. Schools Don’t Teach About U.S.-Style Apartheid
by Richard Rothstein 15/12/13 ZINN EDUCATION PROJECT
We have paid great attention to Nelson Mandela’s call for forgiveness and reconciliation between South Africa’s former white rulers and its exploited Black majority. But we have paid less attention to the condition that Mandela insisted must underlie reconciliation — truth. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Mandela established, and that Archbishop Desmond Tutu chaired, was designed to contribute to cleansing wounds of the country’s racist history by exposing it to a disinfecting bright light.
School Segregation in Alabama
Fifty-five years after Governor George Wallace declared his commitment to preserving white supremacy and maintaining “segregation forever,” Alabama’s state constitution still mandates racially segregated schools. Adopted in 1901, the Alabama constitution was designed to disenfranchise African Americans and maintain the Jim Crow system of the South. The constitution instituted discriminatory voting laws, including literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and poll taxes. It also required that public education be racially segregated. Section 256 of the Alabama constitution states that “separate schools shall be provided for white and colored children.”
Jan. 5, 1931: Lemon Grove Incident
by Robert R. Alvarez Jr. ZINN EDUCATION PROJECT
[Some of] the earliest court cases concerning school desegregation occurred in the Southwest and California in the 1930s. In these cases Mexican immigrants and their communities were the targeted groups of segregation by school officials. A case of particular importance occurred in San Diego County during the 1930s, in the then rural community of Lemon Grove.
Racial segregation of Latino students continues with English-only laws
For decades, states have used English-language skills as an excuse to segregate Latino students. In the past few years, California and Massachusetts have repealed their English-only education laws.
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation — that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies.
SEGREGATION FOREVER”: LEADERS OF WHITE SUPREMACY
The influential and widespread rejection of racial equality by individuals, communities, officials, and institutions followed in the tradition of earlier generations of white supremacists who stood determined to thwart civil rights progress. That common cause inspired collective action among white citizens in many parts of the country that vaulted new leaders to national prominence and into powerful political positions where many outlasted the movement itself.
Resistance to School Desegregation
In 1954, the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education struck down racial segregation in public schools. In March 1956, 101 of 128 Southern congressmen signed “The Southern Manifesto,” denouncing the decision. Many Southern communities followed their lead, resisting integration with protest and violence.
How Real Estate Segregated America
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 2018 DISSENT
In a year of many anniversaries, two in particular stand out with respect to the housing crisis facing the United States today. The first is the passage of Title VIII of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, more commonly known as the Fair Housing Act. In some ways, the legislation bitterly acknowledged the role of housing discrimination in keeping African Americans in a subordinate social position. Excluding Black people from white neighborhoods, while simultaneously disinvesting in Black communities, has kept them out of the best-funded schools and highest-paying jobs. Housing discrimination was a linchpin of Black inequality in American society, and the Fair Housing Act held out the promise of undoing it by banning racial discrimination in the renting, financing, and selling of housing.
Desegregating blood: A civil rights struggle to remember
by Thomas A. Guglielmo homas 4/2/18 PBS NEWS
Having heard the “soul-stirring” appeals for blood donors on her radio, she was determined to do her part. But when she arrived at the center, the supervisor turned her away. “Orders from the National Offices,” he explained, “barred Negro blood donors at this time.”
The Consequences of Chicago’s Segregated Housing History
Today, we're focusing on Chicago — the country's third largest (and one of the most diverse) cities, and a city that has been a blueprint for housing segregation. While the discriminatory practice of racial redlining was officially outlawed in 1968, the practice still reverberates throughout the city today. For every dollar loaned by banks in Chicago’s white neighborhoods, they invest just 12 cents in the city’s Black neighborhoods, and 13 cents in Latino areas, according to a 2020 study by WBEZ and City Bureau.
Black Models Cut From Fashion Show After Editors Protest Racial Integration
On July 14, 1959, a New York committee organizing a fashion show for the American National Exhibition in Moscow, Russia, announced it would be removing three scenes that featured Black and white models together after dozens of fashion editors protested the representation of racial integration.
How Red Lines Built White Wealth: A Lesson on Housing Segregation in the 20th Century
An 11th-grade student leaned back in his chair at Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon, and said, “Absurd. That is the only way to describe those numbers. They are absurd.” He and his classmates had just read statistics about the racial wealth gap in their Political Economy class: White households are worth at least 10 times as much as Black households; only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth while a third of Blacks do; Black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. These numbers are absurd, and they are not accidental.
What Was Black America’s Double War?
We read about Robert Smalls, the slave who sailed himself to freedom and then became the first black Navy captain during the American Civil War, five years before the first Memorial Day. Black leaders felt that African Americans could make the strongest case for freedom and citizenship if they demonstrated their heroism and commitment to the country on the battlefield, as they had done since 5,000 black men fought for the Patriot cause in the American Revolution. No one put this more forcefully than Frederick Douglass did in the middle of the Civil War: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”
Nov. 5, 1917: Supreme Court Rules Against Segregated Housing
On November 5, 1917, in the case of Buchanan v. Warley, the Supreme Court declared segregated housing to be unconstitutional. In an unanimous decision, the Court determined that a Louisville, Kentucky city ordinance limiting Black people from living in majority-white areas was in violation of the 14th Amendment and an infringement on individual property rights. Looking back years later, W. E. B. Du Bois declared the decision to have broken “the backbone of segregation.”
HOW SEGREGATION SURVIVED
By the dawn of the 1970s, the Civil Rights Movement had helped push the Supreme Court to declare segregation in public schools unconstitutional and led to the passage of significant laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations and employment; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited discriminatory voting practices; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which barred discrimination in housing sales, rentals, and financing.
10 'Must-Watch' Black History Documentaries
Did Slavery really end with the Civil War? The documentary Slavery by Another Name explores how in the years following the Emancipation Proclamation, systematic approaches were taken to re-enslave newly freed Blacks in the United States. This system included new brutal methods of forced labor in which men were arrested and forced to work without pay, bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters.
The Racist History of Abortion and Midwifery Bans
In 1851, Sojourner Truth delivered a speech best known as“Ain’t I A Woman?” to a crowded audience at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio. At the time, slavery remained in full force, a vibrant enterprise that fueled the American economy. Various laws protected that system, including the Fugitive Slave Act, which resulted in the abduction of “free” Black children, women, and men as well as those who had miraculously escaped to northern cities like Boston or Philadelphia. Bounty hunters then sold their prey to Southern plantation owners. The law denied basic protections for Black people caught in the greed-filled grasps of slavery.
Brown v. Board of Education
Linda Carol Brown—who is seven-years-old and lives in Topeka, Kansas—has to walk across railroad tracks and take an old bus to get to school, even though there is a better school five blocks from her house. Linda can't go to that school because she is black, and the schools in Topeka are segregated. In 1951, Linda's father, the Reverend Oliver Brown, goes to court to try to do something about it.
Living with Segregation
He went across the hall and went to Dr. Blalock's office and said, I would like my pay. The way you talked to me this morning, I can't take that. I wasn't raised that way. And I want my pay. — Nat Crippens, North Nashville community historian, describing Vivien Thomas's reaction after an angry Dr. Blalock swore at him.
How Housing Segregation Shaped America's 'Gayborhoods'
by Gillian Branstetter 6/6/23 ACLU
For much of the last century, the “American dream” has centered on homeownership by married, white families. Alongside explicitly racist policies like racial segregation enforced by redlining, banks and realtors routinely rejected applications for mortgage loans and housing from single or divorced adults of any race, prizing the married heterosexual white man as the most “deserving” debtor and homeowner. The further away from this ideal someone happened to live — by virtue of their race, gender, marital status, or sexuality — the less likely they were to find housing outside of the country’s growing and strictly segregated urban centers.
March 10, 1903: African American Leaders Protest Streetcar Segregation
The Streetcar Segregation Act, adopted by the Arkansas legislature in 1903, had assigned African-American and white passengers to “separate but equal” sections of streetcars.
Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital
Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation’s capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between the U.S.’s expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification.
Convict Leasing
After the Civil War, slavery persisted in the form of convict leasing, a system in which Southern states leased prisoners to private railways, mines, and large plantations. While states profited, prisoners earned no pay and faced inhumane, dangerous, and often deadly work conditions. Thousands of Black people were forced into what authors have termed “slavery by another name” until the 1930s.
In the 1930s, Mexican families helped dismantle segregation in the California school system. Education advocates now want to create greater awareness of that effort.
Over time, some cases have come to be more widely referenced than others, but all have contributed to greater civil rights protections in schools. Consider this lesser-known case that took place on Olive Street in San Diego County between 1930 and 1931, when a group of parents of Mexican heritage successfully sued the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District for trying to build and place their children in a separate “Americanization” school.
Milestones Of The Civil Rights Movement
After African Americans boycotted the Montgomery, Alabama bus system for over a year, the local bus company had agreed to desegregate its buses because it had lost so much revenue. The city and state, however, insisted that bus drivers continue to enforce Jim Crow laws. A Federal District Court then ruled that segregation on the buses was illegal. The Supreme Court affirmed that decision, Browder v. Gayle, in November 1956, handing NAACP lawyers a major victory.
Who Segregated America?
by Colin Gordon 29/6/22 DISSENT
Recent scholarship and reporting on racial disparities in the United States have emphasized the role of public policy—especially federal policy—in the creation of what the 1968 Kerner Commission famously dubbed “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” This is especially true of housing policy. Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White (2005) skewers the stark exclusion of African-American veterans from the benefits of the GI Bill. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) offers a damning synthesis on how the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) embraced Jim Crow.
Segregation 2.0: America's School-to-Prison Pipeline
In an iconic image painted after the Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, Norman Rockwell depicted a solitary black girl, dressed in a crisp white dress, walking to class on what is obviously her first day at a newly desegregated school. What sears the image in our memory are her surroundings: four federal marshals, assigned to protect her as she makes her way through a hostile crowd.
Poverty, segregation persist in U.S. schools, report says
[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/poverty-segregation-persist-in-u-s-schools-report-says by Maria Danilova 11/1/18 PBS NEWS]
WASHINGTON — Too often, low-income, black and Latino students end up in schools with crumbling walls, old textbooks and unqualified teachers, according to a report released Thursday by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Full History
In 1950, the rules of racial segregation governed the most minute details of social life in much of the United States — and the rules of segregation defied all logic. Linda Brown, a seven-year-old third grader in Topeka, Kansas, had to walk six blocks to catch the black school bus, when there was a school — a white school — seven blocks from her home.
LYNCHING IN AMERICA: CONFRONTING THE LEGACY OF RACIAL TERROR
Lynching profoundly impacted race relations in this country and shaped the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans in ways that are still evident today. Terror lynchings fueled the mass migration of millions of Black people from the South into urban ghettos in the North and West throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Lynching created a fearful environment where racial subordination and segregation was maintained with limited resistance for decades. Most critically, lynching reinforced a legacy of racial inequality that has never been adequately addressed in America.
Racism by Design: The Building of Interstate 81
by Jay A. Fernandez 10/8/23 ACLU
David Rufus was just a toddler when the bulldozers rolled into the streets of his Syracuse, New York, neighborhood in 1960. As part of the country’s interstate highways surge, city officials wanted to extend I-81 with an elevated viaduct that would cut right through the 15th Ward, where nearly 90 percent of Syracuse’s Black population lived. Protesting locals were ignored, and the razing of homes, churches, and businesses resulted in the displacement of more than 1,300 families, including Rufus’s. Over the next 50 years, the 15th Ward community suffered in every way possible—jobs, housing, schools, and public health plunged while crime, pollution, and poverty spiked.
Remembering Black Veterans Targeted for Racial Violence in the U.S.
Inspired to defend their country and pursue greater opportunity, African Americans have served in the U.S. military for generations. But for over a century, instead of being treated as honored members of society upon their return from military service, Black veterans were accosted, attacked, or lynched. EJI has documented at least 35 military veterans who were victims of racial terror lynching from 1865 to 1950.
July 11, 1951: Cicero Riot Over Housing Desegregation
by Isabel Wilkerson ZINN EDUCATION PROJECT
On the evening of July 11, 1951, one of the biggest riots in U.S. history began after a young Black couple moved into an apartment in all-white Cicero, Illinois, west of Chicago. The husband, Harvey Clark Jr., was a World War II veteran who migrated to Chicago from Mississippi and was working as a bus driver.
Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through cities in the United States, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color.
April 11, 1968: Fair Housing Act Signed Into Law
This Act was the result of years of grassroots organizing and protest across the United States. People demanded just treatment by landlords and equal access to housing in all parts of the country, not just in the “Jim Crow” segregated South.
Scholar says Trump’s efforts to reframe U.S. history is ‘reminiscent of McCarthyism’
by Amna Nawaz 20/8/25 PBS NEWS
President Trump described Smithsonian museums as “out of control” for emphasizing, in his view, “how bad slavery was.” It's part of a pattern by Trump in his second term to reframe historical narratives, in particular about racism and discrimination. Amna Nawaz spoke with historian Peniel Joseph for our series, Art in Action, exploring the intersection of art and democracy and our CANVAS coverage.
A Brief History of Race Relations in Kansas
I received my Ph.D. and Masters from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American
Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and my additional Masters in African American World Studies from the University of Iowa. I have previously served as the first Cassius Marcellus Clay Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Yale University.
Black Children Begin Movement Protesting Segregation; Face Police Brutality
On May 2, 1963, more than 1,000 Black children peacefully protested racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, as part of the Children's Crusade, beginning a movement that sparked widely publicized police brutality that shocked the nation and spurred major civil rights advances.
New Study Shows Impact of Lynching History on Life Expectancy Today
A new study from researchers at the University of South Florida found that counties in the South with the highest number of racial terror lynchings have the lowest life expectancy. Conversely, counties with no recorded history of lynchings have the highest life expectancy rate.
Those Who Don't Learn from History are Destined to Repeat It
by Kenneth W. Chandler 28/6/11 ACLU
June 25 marked the 70th anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt's, Executive Order 8802, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion and national origin in federal defense contracts. It is important to understand both the historical implications of this executive order and how it was reversed by President George W. Bush's "Faith-Based" executive order more than 60 years later.
The Truth About Confederate-Named Schools
Every day in the U.S., thousands of children across the country attend schools named in honor of Confederate leaders who fought to preserve slavery and racial hierarchy in America. Simply by going to school, young people are taught to embrace the names, likenesses, and symbols of men who fought a brutal war against the U.S. in order to preserve white supremacy.
American port cities from New England to New Orleans were shaped by the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
Between 1501 and 1867, nearly 13 million African people were kidnapped, forced onto European and American ships, and trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean to be enslaved, abused, and forever separated from their homes, families, and cultures.
A history of residential segregation in the US
by Les Picker 18/5/15 WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
In The National Rise in Residential Segregation (NBER Working Paper No.20934), Trevon Logan and John Parmanintroduce a first-of-its-kind measure of residential segregation based upon the racial similarity of next-door neighbors. Using the complete manuscript pages of the federal census to identify the races of next-door neighbors for the period 1880-1940, the authors were able to analyze segregation consistently and comprehensively for all areas in the United States, allowing for an in-depth view of the variation in segregation across time and space.
What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot.
by Kevin M. Kruse 14/8/19 The New York Times Magazine
Atlanta has some of the worst traffic in the United States. Drivers there average two hours each week mired in gridlock, hung up at countless spots, from the constantly clogged Georgia 400 to a complicated cluster of overpasses at Tom Moreland Interchange, better known as “Spaghetti Junction.” The Downtown Connector — a 12-to-14-lane megahighway that in theory connects the city’s north to its south — regularly has three-mile-long traffic jams that last four hours or more.
Still Separate, Still Unequal: Teaching about School Segregation and Educational Inequality
by Keith Meatto 2/5/19 The New York Times
Racial segregation in public education has been illegal for 65 years in the United States. Yet American public schools remain largely separate and unequal — with profound consequences for students, especially students of color.
The Best MuckReads on America’s Troubled History With Race
by Adam Harris 24/2/16 PROPUBLICA
There have been several events throughout American history that have, for some, signaled the beginning of a post-racial society. The election of Barack Obama to the office of President of the United States is the latest milestone. But the reality is, many believe that racism is still a big problem in the U.S.
Racial History of American Swimming Pools
So there was a study released last week that caught my eye. According to USA Swimming, over 58 percent of African-American children can't swim. That's almost double the rate of white children. And African-American children drown at nearly three times the overall rate. That got us here at the BPP asking questions about, well, race and swimming. And it turns out there's a lot to say about the topic.
A vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining, evictions and exclusion, separates black and white America.
by The New York Times Magazine
Elmore Bolling, whose brothers called him Buddy, was a kind of one-man economy in Lowndesboro, Ala. He leased a plantation, where he had a general store with a gas station out front and a catering business; he grew cotton, corn and sugar cane. He also owned a small fleet of trucks that ran livestock and made deliveries between Lowndesboro and Montgomery. At his peak, Bolling employed as many as 40 people, all of them black like him.
The black immigrant who challenged US segregation - nearly 190 years ago
by Mariana Schreiber 21/7/21 BBC
During the crossing, Harriett, who wasn't feeling well, tried to seek shelter with her daughter in an area of the ship exclusively for women, but their path was blocked. The reason? They were black, and only white women were allowed in the ladies' cabin, comfortable accommodation with private berths.
Blood And Betrayal In The Southwest
Latino USA looks into the long and little-told history of segregation, discrimination, and state-sanctioned violence towards Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest.
=====https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/the-rope-the-forgotten-history-of- segregated-rock-roll-concerts-126235/===== by Steve Knopper 22/2/21 RollingStone
One night in the late 1950s, the Flamingos’ bus pulled up to a concert hall in Birmingham, Alabama, and a row of 30 to 50 police officers holding rifles and billy clubs was waiting for them. The cops escorted the six-member doo-wop group, famous for “I Only Have Eyes for You” and “The Ladder of Love,” to its dressing room and gave strict instructions.
From segregation to Selma: View iconic photos from the Civil Rights movement
“So much of our turbulent history – the stain of slavery and anguish of civil war, the yoke of segregation and tyranny of Jim Crow, the death of four little girls in Birmingham, and the dream of a Baptist preacher – met on this bridge,” he said. “It was not a clash of armies, but a clash of wills; a contest to determine the meaning of America.”
Preserving history of Mexican American school segregation
by Russell Contreras 9/12/21 AXIOS
Activists in the small town of Marfa, Texas, are working to get national recognition for a building once used as a segregated school for Mexican American students, some of who were used as extras in the 1956 movie, "Giant."
African Americans in Las Vegas
From the 1950s to the early 1960s, in the midst of the economic boom that was occurring in America, Las Vegas experienced spectacular growth. Tourists supplied the city with some $200 million in profits every year. The number of resorts on the Strip was increasing rapidly, and the city proclaimed itself the "Entertainment Capital" of the country. However, outside of the neon glow of downtown Las Vegas, across the Fremont Street railroad tracks, lay the reality of racial segregation.
Profiles in perseverance
Every Black History Month, we tend to celebrate the same cast of historic figures. They are the civil rights leaders and abolitionists whose faces we see plastered on calendars and postage stamps. They resurface each February when the nation commemorates African Americans who have transformed America.
Exploring the AMA’s History of Discrimination
by Jonathan Sidhu 16/7/08 PROPUBLICA
Last Thursday, the American Medical Association apologized for its history of discrimination against African-American physicians. The apology comes on the heels of a JAMA paper published ($) by a panel of independent experts, which among other things detailed how the AMA worked to close down African-American medical schools.
I’m a black man who moved to the Deep South. Here’s what it’s teaching me about race.
The South represents slavery and bigotry. Living here has emboldened me like nowhere else I’ve been before.
Report: School Segregation Is Back, 60 Years After “Brown”
by Sarah Childress 15/5/14 FRONTLINE
The report found that re-segregation has happened gradually, amid court rulings allowing states to set aside integration orders, and a growing Latino population, which has experienced the most dramatic increase in segregation.
Barack Obama legacy: Did he improve US race relations?
When in the 1950s, a former TV executive by the name of E Frederic Morrow became the first black White House aide not to have a job description that included turning down beds, polishing shoes or serving drinks with a deferential bow, he was prohibited from ever being alone in the same room as a white woman.
The white Southerners who fought US segregation
The black neighbourhood of Greenville in segregated 1960s Mississippi had never seen anything like it. Neither had Mr Gorton when he encountered white people praying alongside their black brethren during an impromptu street-side Pentecostal revival.
Claudette Colvin: The 15-year-old who came before Rosa Parks
by Taylor-Dior Rumble 10/3/18 BBC
In March 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks defied segregation laws by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin did exactly the same thing. Eclipsed by Parks, her act of defiance was largely ignored for many years. She herself didn't talk about it much, but she spoke recently to the BBC.
Case in Point
America has a long history of social upheaval and cultural mood swings. These shifts leave clear signs of their passing. The trick is knowing how to read the signs, and interpret their meaning.
Wernher von Braun’s Record on Civil Rights
by Steven Moss and Richard Paul PBS Shows
In June 1965, Alabama governor George C. Wallace scheduled a tour of NASA’s Huntsville, Alabama test site, the Marshall Space Flight Center. The visit was part of a road trip he organized for small town newspaper editors, designed to show them “the real Alabama.” Wallace had come into office promising "segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever" and backed up that promise by standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama to personally block African-American students from enrolling.
Next time someone questions America’s history of racism, show them this video
America has a long history of systemic racism: From the dehumanization of black people to justify slavery to the policies of segregation and mass incarceration that followed emancipation, the country has always made it difficult for many minorities to rise out of their literal and figurative shackles.
