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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the lives of young African American women living in the American South, particularly in Louisiana, during legalized segregation—a period of state-sponsored racism and white supremacy under the Jim Crow laws. It highlights the Louisiana Weekly's editorial on William McGee's conviction and death as the controversy is a variation on a familiar theme of racialized violence in the segregated South—the (extralegal or legal) lynching of black men who allegedly engaged in sex with white women—which served to prove white supremacist logic for segregation. The chapter mentions that much of the violence against black girls remained in the shadows. Not only did black women and girls face the restraints of legalized segregation and the violence of white supremacy, they also negotiated middle-class African Americans' notions of what a proper girl should be: pure and respectable, thereby finding themselves trapped in a double bind.

The introduction provides a background of the first public health nurses to begin work for the State Board of Health under Jim Crow laws by highlighting the dire need for their outreach, particularly in the rural areas among both black and white folk who were out of reach of medical care. Public health nursing came of age in the Progressive era, but Florida was behind Northern public health initiatives. Once Florida’s new group of black and white professional nurses began work, they illuminated how attitudes among national, regional, and state nursing leaders, as well as medical and public health authorities, created a wide variety of opportunities for them to grow their profession and deliver a service. White and black public health nurses were active agents for change, but cultural mores informed their practices differently. Professional patterns and social customs influenced the manner they could exert power to improve health and literally save people’s lives.

America’s decision to enter World War II further highlighted the contradictions between the nation’s democratic rhetoric and the reality of its segregated society. These contradictions that gave rise to the modern African American civil rights movement led by an African American press. Because of its transition to fascism and anti-Semitism, the positive image that many African Americans held of Germany turned into a decidedly negative one. The racist Nuremberg Laws of the Third Reich were soon compared with the Jim Crow laws of the southern United States, a comparison that began to proliferate throughout the African American press in the 1930s. This chapter examines how the African American press incorporated this analogy into a sustained campaign for civil rights in the mid-1930s and accelerated with the outbreak of World War II into the postwar period. It looks at the “Double V” campaign initiated by the Pittsburgh Courier in February 1942 and joined by African American newspapers all across the country, arguing that this was the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

This chapter attempts to map the geography of Jim Crow New Orleans, where black children learned the difference between “white” and “colored.” It looks into how black children mapped the world around them to understand the politics of segregation, and how these maps helped them learn how color and power related to their lives and assisted them in developing their sense of self in relationship to their place in the city. These mental maps are “multi-layered” and “fragmented” scales of New Orleans. They reflect children's own experiences, their cognitive development, and their growing sense of the world. With regards to the segregation, mental maps provided “imaginative order” to black girls' worlds and helped them form a growing “awareness of racialized space.” This was important to African American children, as they had to constantly learn and relearn the proper space and deportment of “colored” citizens.

This chapter analyzes the emotional toll of the “double bind” in the lives of two black girls living in downtown New Orleans—Jeanne Manuel and Ellen Hill—who were interviewed by social scientists while they were teenagers in 1938, against the backdrop of the Jim Crow laws and the Great Depression. Their life narratives reveal that that sexuality, and more specifically chastity, was at the core of the girls' subjectivities. Both were concerned with maintaining the designation of a “nice girl” living in a nice space and constantly feared that they might lose their respectability. The chapter reviews Manuel's and Hill's life stories which were collected by the government-sponsored Negro Youth Study (NYS), which sought to examine the character and personality of black children, and analyzed the “abnormal position” of black youth in U.S. society. The study reveals the centrality of geography to the girls' subjectivities.

Brown v. Board of Education established equality as a central commitment of American schools but launched more than a half century of debate over whether students from different racial, religious, gender, and ethnic backgrounds, and other lines of difference must be taught in the same classrooms. Brown explicitly rejected state-ordered racial segregation, yet neither law nor practice has produced a norm of racially integrated classrooms. Courts restrict modest voluntary efforts to achieve racially mixed schools. Schools in fact are now more racially segregated than they were at the height of the desegregation effort. Talk of this disappointing development dominated the events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision. Instead of looking at the composition of schools and classrooms, policy-makers measure racial equality in American schooling by efforts to reduce racial differentials in student performance on achievement tests, and those efforts have yielded minimal success. Historians question whether the lawyers litigating Brown undermined social changes already in the works or so narrowed reforms to the focus on schools that they turned away from the pursuit of economic justice. Commentators have even questioned whether the Court’s decision itself ever produced real civil rights reform. Although Brown focused on racial equality, it also inspired social movements to pursue equal schooling beyond racial differences, and it yielded successful legal and policy changes addressing the treatment of students’ language, gender, disability, immigration status, socioeconomic status, religion, and sexual orientation. These developments are themselves still news, inadequately acknowledged and appreciated as another key legacy of Brown. Yet here, too, judges, legislators, school officials, experts, and parents disagree over whether and when equality calls for teaching together, in the same classrooms, students who are or who are perceived to be different from one another. Parents and educators have at times pushed for separate instruction and at times for instructing different students side by side. As the twenty-first century proceeds, equality in law and policy in the United States increasingly calls for mixing English-language learners with English-speaking students and disabled with non-disabled students, but students’ residential segregation and school assignments often produce schools and classrooms divided along lines of race, ethnicity, and socio-economic class.

This chapter focuses on the Knight family of the Jones County region of Mississippi, who had long confounded notions about race in the United States. Descended from white Southerners, former slaves, and Native Americans, they did not fit into the discrete categories of racial identity demanded by Jim Crow laws in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Furthermore, many of the family members refused to abide by the South's “one drop” rule, which demanded that white persons with any degree of African ancestry identify themselves as black. The lives of the multiracial Knight women reveal various strategies by which conventions of gender, class, and marriage might be manipulated to escape the worst effects of racial discrimination.

The chapter demonstrates the intellectual sources from which Gandhi and King drew their inspiration; besides the external sources, both of them seem to have drawn more on the indigenous intellectual sources: for Gandhi, it was the Indian religious and other classical texts while King focused more on the New Testament. Furthermore, in formulating their political strategies, they depended a great deal on their colleagues who held similar ideological predisposition: The chapter thus argues that without their equally committed partners it would not have been possible for them to achieve what they sought to achieve. What was unique in their endeavour was a very creative blending of religion with non-violence which acted most effectively in non-violent civil disobedience against racial atrocities and colonial exploitation in the US and India respectively.

Americans enjoy one of the highest per capita standards of living in the history of world, and there is little doubt that good institutions have played a key role in producing this outcome. However, the history of the United States is not without its stains, of which race is one of the most scarring and certainly one of the most enduring. Although the Civil War ended slavery, the belief system prevailed for much longer before it came under scrutiny and, ultimately, changed for the better. This chapter traces the government's role in policy toward African Americans, encompassing the promotion and protection of slavery, the development of Jim Crow laws and segregated schools in the southern states, and the modern era, when government policies have been more favorable in protecting blacks' rights. It describes changes over time in the absolute and relative living standards of African Americans, from the era of slavery to the present, and asks how government affected the economic history of African Americans in the past several decades.

After the war, Cecelia and William moved back to Louisville. This chapter looks at their experiences in the context of African American life in this period. Cecelia and William faced persistent racial discrimination and low wages for hard work. In the mid 1880s, William disappeared while looking for work, and Cecelia was left alone. This chapter describes her ultimately successful efforts to secure a Civil War widow's pension, and analyzes the workings of the pension system. It also looks at her daughter's marriage to Alexander Reels, and her support for the aging Cecelia. It also describes Cecelia's renewed connection with Fanny and, after Fanny's death, her correspondence with Rogers Clark, Fanny's son.

This introductory chapter outlines the armed resistance of African Americans during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, otherwise known as the Black Power era. It serves as an entry point in the entire discussion of book, which explores black protection efforts in various southern and northern locales, and analyzes the evolution of armed militancy, the significance of tactical nonviolence, and the intricate relationship between self-defense and manhood. Armed resistance served as a significant auxiliary to nonviolent protest in the southern civil rights struggle. Such protective efforts helped local freedom movements survive in the face of white violence, bolstered the morale of civil rights activists, instilled pride in black protectors, and sometimes served as an additional means of coercion in the fight against racism and inequality, specifically against the Jim Crow laws.

This chapter describes how Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Jackson Gray, and Annie Devine became the first Black women in American history to be seated on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Some Freedom Party members, including Hamer, were now seriously considering making the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) a separate political party rather than continuing to work with the national Democratic Party. However, this drew widespread criticism from Black and white progressives across the country, and strong pushback from mainstream Democratic politicians as well as more moderate and conservative Freedom Party members. The chapter then considers how the Voting Rights Act gave the federal government, and activists, the legal tools to dismantle those old Jim Crow laws. The expansion of the Freedom Party then created more work for Hamer and she developed key relationships with white and Black leaders in the growing Feminist Movement. By the mid-1970s, often sick and unable to work, Hamer faded from public view. She later died on March 14, 1977, at the age of fifty-nine.

The architects of Brown v. Board of Education soldiered through long struggles and many obstacles, but even they would probably be surprised by the state of affairs emerging half a century following the decision. Brown influenced expanding use of social sciences by lawyers pursuing social change and especially educational reforms. The state of racial integration in education might be stunningly disappointing, but Brown has also produced unexpected dividends addressing historic educational disadvantages based on gender, disability, language, immigrant status, poverty, sexual orientation, and religion. This dual legacy of disappointment and promise raises profound questions about the priority the nation gives not just to equal opportunity but also to social integration, the movement of individuals from previously excluded or subordinated groups into the social mainstream where they can join others in pursuing opportunities and enriching society. Because this aspiration gained support from social science evidence in the Brown litigation itself, this chapter considers the strengths and limitations of social science research on social integration, including research launched in the wake of the Brown litigation. The boost Brown gave to the field of social psychology to advance racial equality has some irony, given the reliance by defenders of racial segregation on eugenics and other “scientific” theories of their day. The contribution of social psychology to the cause of racial justice is particularly contested, as many critics have contended that its use contributed to narrowing policy debates to a focus on psychological damage rather than structures of racial oppression and the role of community supports in academic success. It might even be fair to conclude that when it comes to racial relations in the United States, there is more success in the growth of the research field studying social integration than there is success in actual social integration. Hence, paying attention to contemporary social science in assessing how social integration affects academic achievement, social cohesion, individual development, economic and social opportunities, and civic engagement and democracy means remaining mindful of the limitations of research and continuing to subject its assumptions to scrutiny.