what is the thesis of jim crow blues

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Jim Crow Blues

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Leon F. Litwack, Jim Crow Blues, OAH Magazine of History , Volume 18, Issue 2, January 2004, Pages 7–58, https://doi.org/10.1093/maghis/18.2.7

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What the white South lost on the battlefields of the Civil War and during Reconstruction, it would largely retake in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In what has been called the Nadir of African American history, a new generation of black southerners shared with the survivors of enslavement a sharply proscribed and deteriorating position in a South bent on commanding black lives and black labor by any means necessary. The most intense years were between 1890 and the first Great Migration in the 1910s, but the seeds had been planted in the forcible overthrow of Reconstruction in the 1870s, and the Age of Jim Crow would span more than half a century.

The term “Jim Crow,” as a way of characterizing black people, had its origins in minstrelsy in the early nineteenth century. Thomas “Daddy” Rice, a white minstrel, popularized the term. Using burnt cork to blacken his face, attired in the ill-fitting, tattered garment of a beggar, and grinning broadly, Rice imitated the dancing, singing, and demeanor generally ascribed to Negro character. Calling it “Jump Jim Crow,” he based the number on a routine he had seen performed in 1828 by an elderly and crippled Louisville stableman belonging to a Mr. Crow. “Weel about, and turn about/And do jis so;/Eb'ry time I weel about,/I jump Jim Crow” ( 1). The public responded with enthusiasm to Rice's caricature of black life. By the 1830s, minstrelsy had become one of the most popular forms of mass entertainment, “Jim Crow” had entered the American vocabulary, and many whites, North and South, came away from minstrel shows reinforced in their distorted images of black life, character, and aspirations. How a dance created by a black stableman and imitated by a white man for the amusement of white audiences would become synonymous with a system designed by whites to segregate the races is less clear. Abolitionist newspapers employed the term in the 1840s to describe separate railroad cars for blacks and whites in the North. But by the 1890s, “Jim Crow” took on additional force and meaning to denote the subordination and separation of black people in the South, much of it codified and much of it still enforced by custom, habit, and violence.

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Essential Question

How do the Country Blues reflect the challenges of sharecropping, racial injustice, and rural poverty in early 20th-century African-American life?

“As I began to get into the history of the music,” writes Amiri Baraka (writing under the name LeRoi Jones) in his book  Blues People , “I found that this was impossible without, at the same time, getting deeper into the history of the people. [The Blues] was the history of the Afro-American people as text, as tale, as story, as exposition, narrative… the music was the score, the actually expressed creative orchestration, reflection, of Afro-American life.”

In the beginning, the Blues was a music performed by poor African Americans for audiences of poor African Americans, and a reflection of their common experiences in the Jim Crow South. The Blues were one of the few forums through which poor, rural African Americans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries could articulate their experiences, attitudes, and emotions. They made music about heartbreak, about the challenges of their lives as sharecroppers, about the relentless Mississippi River floods, about the harsh mastery of white landowners.

This lesson focuses on the music through which those hardships were expressed and on the daily lives of southern blacks in the sharecropping era. It is structured around an imagined road trip through Mississippi. Students will “stop” in two places: Yazoo City, where they will learn about the sorts of natural disasters that periodically devastated already-struggling poor southerners, and Hillhouse, where they will learn about the institution of sharecropping. They will study a particular Country Blues song at each “stop” and examine it as a window onto the socioeconomic conditions of the people who created it. Students will create a scrapbook of their journey, in which they will record and analyze what they have learned about the difficulty of eking out a living in the age of sharecropping.

Upon completion of this lesson, students will:

• How Country Blues music reflected the socioeconomic experiences of southern African Americans in pre-World War II America
• The basic workings and challenges of the sharecropping system
• The effects of sharecropping on the daily lives of African-American and white tenant farmers
• The effects of natural disasters such as river floods on poor southerners in pre-World War II America
• How the paintings of Jacob Lawrence represented African American life in the South before World War II
• Closely read song lyrics for information, point of view, and argument
• Extrapolate arguments about music by assessing sound, mood, tone, and instrumentation
• Use maps to find locations and construct a logical travel sequence

J.B. Lenoir

Alabama blues, bridging the gap, bessie smith, homeless blues, lightnin' hopkins, death letter blues, charley patton, bo weavil blues, howlin' wolf, i’ll be back someday, chopping cotton in greene county, georgia, 1941, poor mother and children, california, 1936, sharecropper’s cabin and sharecropper’s wife. ten miles south of jackson, mississippi, 1937, thirteen-year old sharecropper boy near americus, georgia, 1937.

• Cotton sharecroppers. Greene County, Georgia, 1937

Refugees from the Mississippi River Flood, 1927

Motivational activity:.

• After listening to the lyrics of this song, what relationship do you think Hip Hop has with the Blues? ( Note to instructor: You may need to explain to students who Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were. )
• According to Nas, what is the relationship between music and a person’s identity — who they are?
• Show students video clip of Howlin’ Wolf performing “I’ll Be Back Someday”  (1964). Ask them to consider just what Nas might have connected with in this music.
• Display the quote below, from the 1963 book  Blues People,  by Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones):  “[The Blues] was the history of the Afro-American people as text, as tale, as story, as exposition, narrative… the music was the score, the actually expressed creative orchestration, reflection, of Afro-American life.”
• What does Baraka mean in this quote? How does Howlin’ Wolf embody this? How would you put Baraka’s ideas into your own words?
• Does “Bridging the Gap” support Baraka’s thesis? What specific examples can you identify?

1. Explain to students that in this lesson they will take an imagined road trip through Mississippi to visit two sites where they will learn about African-American life in the South in the early part of the 20th century, and how that life was reflected in Country Blues music. Students will visit two stations where they will examine a series of artifacts including film clips, photographs, visual art, and readings. They will answer a series of questions about these artifacts. For a post-lesson homework activity, students will be asked to research a third stop, the hometown of famed Blues musician B.B. King, Indianola, Mississippi. The stations are:

• Video : Bessie Smith, “Homeless Blues”
• Video : Charlie Patton, “Bol Weavil Blues”
• Video:  Son House, “Death Letter Blues”
• Image:   Paintings of Jacob Lawrence from the Great Migration Series , Panel 9
• Image:   Photo of destruction from the 1927 Mississippi River flood
• Video : Lightin’ Hopkins, “Cotton”
• Handout :  Explanation of Sharecropping  (from PBS, “ Sharecropping in Mississippi “)
• Image :  Paintings of Jacob Lawrence from the Great Migration Series , Panel 17
• Poor mother and children, California, 1936
• Sharecropper’s cabin and sharecropper’s wife, ten miles south of Jackson, Mississippi, 1937
• Thirteen-year old sharecropper boy near Americus, Georgia, 1937

2. Explain to students that after visiting the two stations, they will be asked to create a scrapbook based on their imaginary travels. (Note: It is up to the instructor whether this project will be completed at home or if additional class time will be provided, and whether it will be completed on an individual basis or by groups.)

3. Distribute  Handout 2 – Scrapbook Guidelines . Invite several students to read, having each read one part of the assignment aloud. Clarify any part of the assignment that remains unclear to students. Instruct students to be mindful of these guidelines as they visit the stations. Assign a deadline for completion of the scrapbook.

4. Divide students into groups of 3-4. Distribute   Handout 3 – Mapping Your Trip Through Mississippi , and instruct each group to complete the requirements on the handout.

5. Distribute   Handout 4 – Questions for Road Trip Stations . Inform students that they now begin their journey through the stations. In order to accommodate the needs of the classroom, they will not actually follow the route they have planned. Instead, divide groups evenly between the two stations, instructing them to finish the first and then move on to the second.

6. Instruct students to discuss the questions for each artifact as a group. Students should take notes on their own copies of the handout.

Summary Activity:

After all groups have visited both stations, reconvene the class as a whole. Refer back to the questions posed in the Motivational Activity and discuss:

• How do the artifacts you have seen reflect the themes in Baraka’s quote and in “Bridging the Gap?”
• How did the Country Blues reflect the experience of African-Americans in the rural South early part of the 20th century?

Homework/Assessment:

Have students complete the Scrapbook Activity, and have them also research a third station: Indianola, Mississippi, the hometown of Blues superstar B.B. King, who was born into a family of poor sharecroppers in 1925.

Writing Prompt:

How did the Country Blues reflect the challenges of sharecropping, racial injustice, and rural poverty in early 20th-century African-American life? Be sure to make specific references to the artifacts seen and heard in this lesson.

Extensions:

• Assign students additional research as part of the scrapbook project. You may wish to ask students to identify additional Blues songs, images, artifacts, or performers, or to compile additional information about sharecropping and/or the 1927 Mississippi River flood.
• Ask students to visit the website “ Obama’s Secret Weapon in the South .” Once they have read the story and inspected the images, ask them to discuss and/or write about the connections among prehistoric geography, southern sharecropping, the Blues, and modern presidential politics.

Handout – Explanation of Sharecropping Handout 1 – Lyrics for Songs in This Lesson Handout 2 – Scrapbook Guidelines Handout 3 – Mapping Your Trip Through Mississippi Handout 4 – Questions for Road Trip Stations

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Jim crows counterculture: The blues and black southerners, 1890-1945

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Jim Crow's Counterculture: The Blues and Black Southerners, 1890-1945

By Margaret Renkl | February 11, 2011

By R.A. Lawson Louisiana State University Press 275 pages $45

“In the late nineteenth century, black musicians in the lower Mississippi Valley, chafing under the social, legal, and economic restrictions of Jim Crow, responded with a new musical form–the blues. In Jim Crow’s Counterculture , R. A. Lawson offers a cultural history of blues musicians in the segregation era, explaining how by both accommodating and resisting Jim Crow life, blues musicians created a counterculture to incubate and nurture ideas of black individuality and citizenship. These individuals, Lawson shows, collectively demonstrate the African American struggle during the early twentieth century.”

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R.A. Lawson. Jim Crow’s Counterculture: The Blues and Black Southerners, 1890-1945

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Nota Bene Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology

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The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture

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Nineteenth-Century Music Review

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• Jim Crow's Counterculture: The Blues and Black Southerners, 1890-1945

In this Book

• R. A. Lawson
• Published by: Louisiana State University Press
• Series: Making the Modern South
• View Citation

In the late nineteenth century, black musicians in the lower Mississippi Valley, chafing under the social, legal, and economic restrictions of Jim Crow, responded with a new musical form -- the blues. In Jim Crow's Counterculture, R. A. Lawson offers a cultural history of blues musicians in the segregation era, explaining how by both accommodating and resisting Jim Crow life, blues musicians created a counterculture to incubate and nurture ideas of black individuality and citizenship. These individuals, Lawson shows, collectively demonstrate the African American struggle during the early twentieth century. Derived from the music of the black working class and popularized by commercially successful songwriter W. C. Handy, early blues provided a counterpoint to white supremacy by focusing on an anti-work ethic that promoted a culture of individual escapism -- even hedonism -- and by celebrating the very culture of sex, drugs, and violence that whites feared. According to Lawson, blues musicians such as Charley Patton and Muddy Waters drew on traditions of southern black music, including call and response forms, but they didn't merely sing of a folk past. Instead, musicians saw blues as a way out of economic subservience. Lawson chronicles the major historical developments that changed the Jim Crow South and thus the attitudes of the working-class blacks who labored in that society. The Great Migration, the Great Depression and New Deal, and two World Wars, he explains, shaped a new consciousness among southern blacks as they moved north, fought overseas, and gained better-paid employment. The "me"-centered mentality of the early blues musicians increasingly became "we"-centered as these musicians sought to enter mainstream American life by promoting hard work and patriotism. Originally drawing the attention of only a few folklorists and music promoters, popular black musicians in the 1940s such as Huddie Ledbetter and Big Bill Broonzy played music that increasingly reached across racial lines, and in the process gained what segregationists had attempted to deny them: the identity of American citizenship. By uncovering the stories of artists who expressed much in their music but left little record in traditional historical sources, Jim Crow's Counterculture offers a fresh perspective on the historical experiences of black Americans and provides a new understanding of the blues: a shared music that offered a message of personal freedom to repressed citizens.

Table of Contents

• Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
• pp. vii-viii
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Sound Check: Call and Response: The Blues of Accommodation, the Blues of Resistance
• Verse One: To Be Black Is to Be Blue: The Blues Profession and Negotiating the “Black Place” during Jim Crow
• Verse Two: Leavin' the Jim Crow Town: The Great Migration and the Blues's Broadening Horizon
• Break: Jim Crow's War for Democracy: The Blues People and World War I
• pp. 116-127
• Verse Three: Workin' on the Project: The Blues of the Great Flood and Great Depression
• pp. 128-168
• Verse Four: Uncle Sam Called Me: World War II and the Blues Counterculture of Inclusion
• pp. 169-200
• Images Plates
• Discography
• pp. 201-210
• pp. 211-244
• Bibliography
• pp. 245-266
• pp. 267-275

The Journal of Southern Religion

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Review: Jim Crow's Counterculture

Tobin miller shearer.

Tobin Miller Shearer is an assistant professor of History at University of Montana.

Cite this article

Tobin Miller Shearer, “Review: Jim Crow's Counterculture,” Journal of Southern Religion 15 (2013): http://jsr.fsu.edu/issues/vol15/shearer.html.

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R. A. Lawson. Jim Crow's Counterculture: The Blues and Black Southerners 1890-1945 . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. 304 pp. ISBN 978-0-8071-5227-0.

The field of cultural history has at times suffered from the burden of theory. In a bid to interpret costume, mores, food, or, as in this case, blues music, cultural historians have immersed themselves in postmodernism, poststructuralism, and the attendant complexities of prose that so often arise from these pursuits. R. A. Lawson, however, demonstrates how to make cultural history relevant, meaningful, and historically pertinent without encumbering the text with jargon-laced rhetoric. Moreover, his deep knowledge, sharp analysis, and rigorous contextualization of sources expand our understanding of African-American responses to institutionalized segregation, violence, and the ongoing legacies of white supremacy during the first half of the twentieth century.

In this sophisticated study of the blues in black southern culture between 1890 and 1945, Lawson contends that blues musicians fostered a flexible and durable counterculture that allowed African Americans to both resist and accommodate racism in the South and North. He traces the shift in blues music from pre-World War II me-centered themes—which he calls a “lonely sort of democratic individualism” (52)—to post-WWII we-centered themes, in which blues artists began to celebrate the possibility of full citizenship and participation in U.S. consumer culture (194). Larson also asserts that not only did blues musicians and their audiences encourage resistance to Jim Crow, they also prepared the foundation for future civil rights movement activism. Moreover, Lawson argues that U.S. popular culture owes a significant debt to the African-American community for the musical and cultural forms that emerged out of the blues enterprise.

Employing a clever titling structure that echoes his topic—chapters are labeled “Sound Check,” “Verse One,” “Break,” etc.—Lawson weaves together keen analysis of blues lyrics with rigorous historical context. At times, in fact, his discussion of the attendant historical factors surrounding a given song or blues theme seems to take on a life of its own and the blues thread is momentarily discarded. The reader may find that the level of detail offered in explanation of the demise of Reconstruction, the after effects of the Great Flood of 1927, the demographic shifts of the Great Migrations, or the ramifications of the New Deal in the Lower Mississippi Valley is not entirely necessary.

At the same time, such careful positioning of his sources in the historical moment allows him to explicate the popularizing role of performer and composer W. C. Handy, the significance of blues giant Leadbelly’s incarcerations, and the meaning of Muddy Waters’s rise to become “Chicago’s famous silk-suited, pompadour-wearing, fully electrified king of blues” (173). Under Lawson’s considered evaluation, such bluesmen become not just famous performers but also opportunities for evaluating and assessing the various ways in which African Americans accommodated to and resisted a society that continually sought to place them in a subservient position.

In an especially fascinating section, Lawson shows how blues performers dehumanized the Japanese but not the Germans during WWII. He argues that blues performers recognized they could encourage patriotism by stereotyping another racial minority group but not by doing the same to white people—even if the Germans were state enemies. In this section, as throughout the book, Lawson describes his subjects in the fullness of their humanity. He writes not of one-dimensional saints and sinners, but of human beings who failed, fought, wished, and won.

Lawson’s narrative follows bluesmen in their peregrinations throughout the South and in migration to the North; women are largely absent. He explains that it was men who did most of the performing and, by extension, shaped the counterculture so central to his argument, although both women and men listened to and participated in the blues scene. Leading figures like Ma Rainey and Lillie Mae Glover do make brief appearances, but the women of the blues world that Tera Hunter brings to life ( To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War, 1997) bear little on the story told here. More deliberate integration of the perspectives of women would have made for a richer presentation of the full reach of the blues counterculture.

Like gender, religion gets somewhat short shrift. Lawson does note that blues performersembodied the very antithesis of Christian charity, asceticism, and piety (1, 2, 64, 68, 72) but only in passing and without a deeper examination of the connections that existed between blues performers and Christian practitioners. As womanist scholar Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan notes, both black gospel and the blues “come out of a Black aesthetic that reflects a history, ritual, and social interaction of a collective Black ethnic, holistic, cultural identity.” 1 The themes of sorrow and remorse, abandon and return, and faithfulness and betrayal resonated with and were sometimes drawn from religious sources. A bit more attention to those connections would have strengthened an otherwise robust interrogation of blues lyrics.

Yet, in the larger context of cultural history, Lawson offers a thorough, incisive, and meticulously researched analysis of Jim Crow era blues. Readers leave the text with a new appreciation for the ways in which one musical form and the counterculture that birthed and sustained it allowed African Americans to name and claim a space of their own. Reminiscent of Robin D. G. Kelley’s work on working-class opposition to Jim Crow in buses and job sites, Lawson’s treatment offers fresh insight into the intersection of resistance and accommodation in jook joints and recording studios. Moreover, Lawson has done so in an accessible style that challenges other cultural historians to set aside jargon and make plain their claims.

Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, “Justified, Sanctified, and Redeemed: Blessed Expectation in Black Women’s Blues and Gospels,” in Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation, ed. Emilie Maureen Townes (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997), 151

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Somewhere between Jim Crow & Post-Racialism

LAWRENCE D. BOBO, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2006, is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and a founding editor of the Du Bois Review. His publications include Racialized Politics: The Debate about Racism in America (with David O. Sears and James Sidanius, 2000), Urban Inequality: Evidence from Four Cities (with Alice O’Connor and Chris Tilly, 2001), and Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute (with Mia Tuan, 2006).

In assessing the results of the Negro revolution so far, it can be concluded that Negroes have established a foothold, no more. We have written a Declaration of Independence, itself an accomplishment, but the effort to transform the words into a life experience still lies ahead.

–Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here? (1968)

By the middle of the twentieth century, the color line was as well defined and as firmly entrenched as any institution in the land. After all, it was older than most institutions, including the federal government itself. More important, it informed the content and shaped the lives of those institutions and the people who lived under them.

–John Hope Franklin, The Color Line (1993)

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

–Barack H. Obama, “A More Perfect Union” (May 18, 2008) 1

The year 1965 marked an important inflection point in the struggle for racial justice in the United States, underscoring two fundamental points about race in America. 2 First, that racial inequality and division were not only Southern problems attached to Jim Crow segregation. Second, that the nature of those inequalities and divisions was a matter not merely of formal civil status and law, but also of deeply etched economic arrangements, social and political conditions, and cultural outlooks and practices. Viewed in full, the racial divide was a challenge of truly national reach, multilayered in its complexity and depth. Therefore, the achievement of basic citizenship rights in the South was a pivotal but far from exhaustive stage of the struggle.

The positive trend of the times revolved around the achievement of voting rights. March 7, 1965, now known as Bloody Sunday, saw police and state troopers attack several hundred peaceful civil rights protestors at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The subsequent march from Selma to Montgomery, participated in by tens of thousands, along with other protest actions, provided the pressure that finally compelled Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A triumphant Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and other activists attended the signing in Washington, D.C., on August 6, 1965. It was a moment of great triumph for civil rights.

The long march to freedom seemed to be at its apex, inspiring talk of an era of “Second Reconstruction.” A decade earlier, in the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court repudiated the “separate but equal” doctrine. Subsequently, a major civil rights movement victory was achieved with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbade discrimination in employment and in most public places. With voting rights now protected as well, and the federal government authorized to intervene directly to assure those rights, one might have expected 1965 to stand as a moment of shimmering and untarnished civil rights progress. Yet the mood of optimism and triumph did not last for long.

The negative trend of the times was epitomized by deep and explosive inequalities and resentments of race smoldering in many Northern, urban ghettos. The extent to which the “race problem” was not just a Southern problem of civil rights, but a national problem of inequality woven deep into our economic and cultural fabric, would quickly be laid bare following passage of the Voting Rights Act. Scarcely five days after then-President Johnson signed the bill into law, the Los Angeles community of Watts erupted into flames. Quelling the disorder, which raged for roughly six days, required the mobilization of the National Guard and nearly fifteen thousand troops. When disorder finally subsided, thirty-four people had died, more than one thousand had been injured, well over three thousand were arrested, and approximately $35 million in property damage had been done. Subsequent studies and reports revealed patterns of police abuse, political marginalization, intense poverty, and myriad forms of economic, housing, and social discrimination as contributing to the mix of conditions that led to the riots.

It was thus more than fitting that in 1965, Dædalus committed two issues to examining the conditions of “The Negro American.” The essays were wide-ranging. The topics addressed spanned questions of power, demographic change, economic conditions, politics and civil status, religion and the church, family and community dynamics, as well as group identity, racial attitudes, and the future of race relations. Scholars from most social scientific fields, including anthropology, economics, history, law, political science, psychology, and sociology, contributed to the volumes. No single theme or message dominated these essays. Instead, the volumes wrestled with the multidimensional and complex patterns of a rapidly changing racial terrain.

Some critical observations stand out from two of those earlier essays, which have been amplified and made centerpieces of much subsequent social science scholarship. Sociologist and anthropologist St. Clair Drake drew a distinction between what he termed primary victimization and indirect victimization. Primary victimization involved overt discrimination in the labor market that imposed a job ceiling on the economic opportunities available to blacks alongside housing discrimination and segregation that relegated blacks to racially distinct urban ghettos. Indirect or secondary victimization involved the multidimensional and cumulative disadvantages resulting from primary victimization. These consequences included poorer schooling, poor health, and greater exposure to disorder and crime. In a related vein, sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan stressed the central importance of employment prospects in the wake of the civil rights victories that secured the basic citizenship rights of African Americans. Both Drake and Moynihan expressed concern about a black class structure marked by signs of a large and growing economically marginalized segment of the black community. Drake went so far as to declare, “If Negroes are not to become a permanent lumpen-proletariat within American society as a result of social forces already at work and increased automation, deliberate planning by governmental and private agencies will be necessary.” Striking a similar chord, Moynihan asserted: “[T]here would also seem to be no question that opportunities for a large mass of Negro workers in the lower ranges of training and education have not been improving, that in many ways the circumstances of these workers relative to the white work force have grown worse.” This marginalized economic status, both scholars suggested, would have ramifying effects, including weakening family structures in ways likely to worsen the challenges faced by black communities. 3

If the scholarly assessments of 1965 occurred against a backdrop of powerful and transformative mass-based movement for civil rights and an inchoate sense of deep but imminent change, the backdrop for most scholarly assessments today is the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States, the rise of a potent narrative of post-racialism, and a sense of stalemate or stagnation in racial change. Many meanings or interpretations can be attached to the term post-racial. In its simplest and least controversial form, the term is intended merely to signal a hopeful trajectory for events and social trends, not an accomplished fact of social life. It is something toward which we as a nation still strive and remain guardedly hopeful about fully achieving. Three other meanings of post-racialism are filled with more grounds for dispute and controversy. One of these meanings attaches to the waning salience of what some have portrayed as a “black victimology” narrative. From this perspective, black complaints and grievances about inequality and discrimination are wellworn tales, at least passé if not now pointedly false assessments of the main challenges facing blacks in a world largely free of the dismal burdens of overt racial divisions and oppression. 4

A second and no less controversial view of post-racialism takes the position that the level and pace of change in the demographic makeup and the identity choices and politics of Americans are rendering the traditional black-white divide irrelevant. Accordingly, Americans increasingly revere mixture and hybridity and are rushing to embrace a decidedly “beige” view of themselves and what is good for the body politic. Old-fashioned racial dichotomies pale against the surge toward flexible, deracialized, and mixed ethnoracial identities and outlooks. 5

A third, and perhaps the most controversial, view of post-racialism has the most in common with the well-rehearsed rhetoric of color blindness. To wit, American society, or at least a large and steadily growing fraction of it, has genuinely moved beyond race – so much so that we as a nation are now ready to transcend the disabling racial divisions of the past. From this perspective, nothing symbolizes better the moment of transcendence than Obama’s election as president. This transcendence is said to be especially true of a younger generation, what New Yorker editor David Remnick has referred to as “the Joshua Generation.” More than any other, this generation is ready to cross the great river of racial identity, division, and acrimony that has for so long defined American culture and politics.

It is in this context of the first African American president of the United States and the rise to prominence of the narrative of post-racialism that a group of social scientists were asked to examine, from many different disciplinary and intellectual vantage points, changes in the racial divide since the time of the Dædalus ` issues focusing on race in 1965 and 1966.

The context today has points of great discontinuity and of great similarity to that mid-1960s inflection point. From the viewpoint of 1965, the election of Obama as the first African American president of the United States, as well as the expansion and the cultural prominence and success of the black middle class of which Obama is a member, speak to the enormous and enduring successes of the civil rights era. Yet also from the standpoint of 1965, the persistence of deep poverty and joblessness for a large fraction of the black population, slowly changing rates of residential segregation by race, continued evidence of antiblack discrimination in many domains of life, and historically high rates of black incarceration signal a journey toward racial justice that remains, even by superficial accounting, seriously incomplete.

In order to set a context for the essays contained in this volume, I address three key questions in this introduction. The first concerns racial boundaries. In an era of widespread talk of having achieved the post-racial society, do we have real evidence that attention to and the meaning of basic race categories are fundamentally breaking down? The second set of questions concerns the extent of economic inequality along the racial divide. Has racial economic inequality narrowed to a point where we need no longer think or talk of black disadvantage? Or have the bases of race-linked economic inequality changed so much that, at the least, the dynamics of discrimination and prejudice no longer need concern us? The third question is, how have racial attitudes changed in the period since the mid-1960s Dædalus issues?

To foreshadow a bit, I will show that basic racial boundaries are not quickly and inevitably collapsing, though they are changing and under great pressure. Racial economic inequality is less extreme today, there is a substantial black middle class, and inequality within the black population itself has probably never been greater. Yet there remain large and durable patterns of black-white economic inequality as well, patterns that are not overcome or eliminated even for the middle class and that still rest to a significant degree on discriminatory social processes. In addition, I maintain that we continue to witness the erosion and decline of Jim Crow racist attitudes in the United States. However, in their place has emerged a new pattern of attitudes and beliefs, variously labeled symbolic racism, modern racism, color-blind racism , or as I prefer it, laissez-faire racism. The new form of racism is a more covert, sophisticated, culture-centered, and subtle racist ideology, qualitatively less extreme and more socially permeable than Jim Crow racism with its attendant biological foundations and calls for overt discrimination. But this new racism yields a powerful influence in our culture and politics. 6

Consider first the matter of group boundaries. The 2000 Census broke new ground by allowing individuals to mark more than one box in designating racial background. Indeed, great political pressure and tumult led to the decision to move the Census in a direction that more formally and institutionally acknowledged the presence of increasing mixture and heterogeneity in the American population with regard to racial background. Nearly seven million people exercised that option in 2000. The successful rise of Obama to the office of president, the first African American to do so, as a child of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, has only accelerated the sense of the newfound latitude and recognition granted to those who claim more than one racial heritage. 7

Despite Obama’s electoral success and the press attention given to the phenomenon, some will no doubt find it surprising that the overwhelming majority of Americans identify with only one race. As Figure 1 shows, less than 2 percent of the population marked more than one box on the 2000 Census in designating their racial background. Fully 98 percent marked just one. I claim no deep-rootedness or profound personal salience for these identities. Rather, my point is that we should be mindful that the level of “discussion” and contention around mixture is far out of proportion to the extent to which most Americans actually designate and see themselves in these terms. Moreover, even if we restrict attention to just those who marked more than one box, two-thirds of these respondents designated two groups other than blacks (namely, Hispanic-white, Asian-white, or Hispanic and Asian mixtures), as Figure 2 shows. Some degree of mixture with black constituted just under a third of mixed race identifiers in 2000. Given the historic size of the black population and the extended length of contact with white Americans, this remarkable result says something powerful about the potency and durability of the historic black-white divide.

It is worth recalling that sexual relations and childbearing across the racial divide are not recent phenomena. The 1890 U.S. Census contained categories for not only “Negro” but also “Mulatto,” “Quadroon,” and even “Octoroon”; these were clear signs of the extent of “mixing” that had taken place in the United States. Indeed, well over one million individuals fell into one of the mixed race categories at that time. In order to protect the institution of slavery and to prevent the offspring of white slave masters and exploited black slave women from having a claim on freedom as well as on the property of the master, slave status, as defined by law, followed the mother’s status, not the father’s. For most of its history, the United States legally barred or discouraged racial mixing and intermarriage. At the time of the Loving v. Virginia case in 1967, seventeen states still banned racial intermarriage. 8

Figure 1 Percent of Respondents to U.S. Census 2000 Identifying with One Race or Two or More Races (Non-Hispanic)

Source: Author’s analysis of data from U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Redistricting (Public Law 94-171) Summary File, 2001, Table PL1.

Figure 2 Percent of Respondents to U.S. Census 2000 Identifying with Two or More Races Who Chose Black in Combination with One or More Other Races (Non-Hispanic)

Source: Author’s analysis of data from U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Summary File 1, 2001, Matrices P8 and P10.

Formal, legal definitions of who was black, and especially the development of rules of “hypodescent,” or the one-drop rule, have a further implication that is often lost in discussions of race: these practices tended to fuse together race and class, in effect making blackness synonymous with the very bottom of the class structure. As historian David Hollinger explains:

The combination of hypodescent with the denial to blacks residing in many states with large black populations of any opportunity for legal marriage to whites ensured that the color line would long remain to a very large extent a property line. Hence the dynamics of race formation and the dynamics of class formation were, in this most crucial of all American cases, largely the same. This is one of the most important truths about the history of the United States brought into sharper focus when that history is viewed through the lens of the question of ethnoracial mixture. 9

Still, we know that today the ethnoracial landscape in the United States is changing. As of the 2000 Census, whites constituted just 69 percent of the U.S. population, with Hispanics and blacks each around 12 percent. This distribution represents a substantial decline in the percentage of whites from twenty or, even more so, forty years ago.

With continued immigration, differential group fertility patterns, and the continued degree of intermarriage and mixing, these patterns will not remain stable. Figure 3 shows the Census racial distribution projections out to the year 2050. The figure clearly shows a continued steady and rapid decline in the relative size of the white population; forecasts predict that somewhere between 2040 and 2045, whites will cease to be a numerical majority of the population. (This change could possibly happen much sooner than that.) The relative size of the Hispanic population is expected to grow substantially, with the black, Asian, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander, American Indian, and Alaska Native groups remaining relatively constant. Figure 3 strongly implies that pressure to transform our understanding of racial categories will continue.

Does that pressure for change foretell the ultimate undoing of the black-white divide? At least three lines of research raise doubts about such a forecast. First, studies of the perceptions of and identities among those of mixed racial backgrounds point to strong evidence of the cultural persistence of the one-drop rule. Systematic experiments by sociologists and social psychologists are intriguing in this regard. For example, sociologist Melissa Herman’s recent research concluded that “others’ perceptions shape a person’s identity and social understandings of race. My study found that partblack multiracial youth are more likely to be seen as black by observers and to define themselves as black when forced to choose one race.” 10

Second, studies of patterns in racial intermarriage point to a highly durable if somewhat less extreme black-white divide today. A careful assessment of racial intermarriage patterns in 1990 by demographer Vincent Kang Fu found that “one key feature of the data is overwhelming endogamy for blacks and whites. At least 92 percent of white men, white women, black women and black men are married to members of their own group.” 11 Rates of intermarriage rose for blacks and whites over the course of the 1990s. However, subsequent analysts continued to stress the degree to which a fundamental black-white divide persists. As demographers Zhenchao Qian and Daniel Lichter conclude in their analyses of U.S. Census data from 1990 and 2000:

[O]ur results also highlight a singularly persistent substantive lesson: African Americans are least likely of all racial/ ethnic minorities to marry whites. And, although the pace of marital assimilation among African Americans proceeded more rapidly over the 1990s than it did in earlier decades, the social boundaries between African American and whites remain highly rigid and resilient to change. The “one-drop” rule apparently persists for African Americans. 12

Figure 3 Population Projections by Race and Ethnicity, 2000 to 2050

Source: Author’s analysis of data on race from Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, Projected Population by Single Year of Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin for the United States: July 1, 2000 to July 1, 2050 (August 14, 2008).

Third, some key synthetic works argue for an evolving racial scheme in the United States, but a scheme that nonetheless preserves a heavily stigmatized black category. A decade ago, sociologist Herbert Gans offered the provocative but well-grounded speculation that the United States would witness a transition from a society defined by a great white–non-white divide to one increasingly defined by a black–non-black fissure, with an in-between or residual category for those granted provisional or “honorary white” status. As Gans explained: “If current trends persist, today’s multiracial hierarchy could be replaced by what I think of as a dual or bimodal one consisting of ‘nonblack’ and ‘black’ population categories, with a third ‘residual’ category for the groups that do not, or do not yet, fit into the basic dualism.” Most troubling, this new dualism would, in Gans’s expectations, continue to bring a profound sense of undeservingness and stigma for those assigned its bottom rung. 13

Gans’s remarks have recently received substantial support from demographer Frank Bean and his colleagues. Based on their extensive analyses of population trends across a variety of indicators, Bean and colleagues write: “A black-nonblack divide appears to be taking shape in the United States, in which Asians and Latinos are closer to whites. Hence, America’s color lines are moving toward a new demarcation that places many blacks in a position of disadvantage similar to that resulting from the traditional black-white divide.”

If basic racial categories and identities are not soon to dissolve, then let me now address that second set of questions, concerning the degree of racial economic inequality. I should begin by noting that there has been considerable expansion in the size, security, and, arguably, salience and influence of the black middle class. 14

Turning to the question of income, we find a similar trend. Figure 4 reports on the distribution of the population by race since 1968 across several ways of slicing the family income distribution. At the very bottom are those who the Census would designate as the “very poor”: that is, having a family income that is 50 percent or less of the poverty level. At the very top are those in the “comfortable” category, having family incomes that are five times or more the poverty level. The proportion of whites in this upper category exceeded 10 percent in 1960 and rose to nearly 30 percent by 2008. For blacks, the proportion was less than 5 percent in 1968 but about 12 percent in 2008. Likewise, the fraction in the middle class (those with family incomes more than twice the poverty level) grows for both groups. But crucially, the proportion of blacks in the “poor” (at the poverty line) or “very poor” categories remains large, at a combined figure of nearly 40 percent in 2008. This contrasts with the roughly 20 percent of whites in those same categories. 15

The official black poverty rate has fluctuated between two to three times the poverty rate for whites. Recent trend analyses suggest that this disparity declined during the economic boom years of the 1990s but remained substantial. As public policy analyst Michael Stoll explains: “Among all black families, the poverty rate declined from a 20 year high of about 40 percent in 1982 and 1993 to 25 percent in 2000. During this period, the poverty rate for white families remained fairly constant, at about 10 percent.” That figure of 25 percent remains true through more recent estimates. In addition, the Great Recession has taken a particularly heavy toll on minority communities, African Americans perhaps most of all. As the Center for American Progress declared in a recent report: “Economic security and losses during the recession and recovery exacerbated the already weak situation for African Americans. They experienced declining employment rates, rising poverty rates, falling home-ownership rates, decreasing health insurance and retirement coverage during the last business cycle from 2001 to 2007. The recession that followed made a bad situation much worse.” 16

Overall trends in poverty, however, do not fully capture the cumulative and multidimensional nature of black economic disadvantage. Sociologist William Julius Wilson stresses how circumstances of persistently weak employment prospects and joblessness, particularly for low-skilled black men, weaken the formation of stable two-parent households and undermine other community structures. Persistent economic hardship and weakened social institutions then create circumstances that lead to rising rates of single-parent households, out-of-wedlock childbearing, welfare dependency, and greater risk of juvenile delinquency and involvement in crime. Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson points to an extraordinary circumstance of exposure to living in deeply disadvantaged communities for large segments of the African American population. This disadvantage involves living in conditions that expose residents to high surrounding rates of unemployment, family breakup, individuals and families reliant on welfare, poor-performing schools, juvenile delinquency, and crime. As Sampson explains:

[A]lthough we knew that the average national rate of family disruption and poverty among blacks was two to four times higher than among whites, the number of distinct ecological contexts in which blacks achieve equality to whites is striking. In not one city of 100,000 or more in the United States do blacks live in ecological equality with whites when it comes to these basic features of economic and family organization. Accordingly, racial differences in poverty and family disruption are so strong that the “worst” urban contexts in which whites reside are considerably better than the average context of black communities. 17

Figure 4 Economic Status of the Black and White Population, 1968 to 2008

Very poor denotes below 50 percent of the poverty line; poor , 50 to 90 percent of the poverty line; near poor , 100 to 199 percent of the poverty line; middle class , 200 to 499 percent of the poverty line; and comfortable , 500 percent of poverty line. Source: Author’s analysis of data from Miriam King, Steven Ruggles, Trent Alexander, Donna Leicach, and Matthew Sobek, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: Version 2.0 (Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center, 2008).

Recent work published by sociologist Patrick Sharkey assesses race differences in the chances of mobility out of impoverished neighborhoods. The result is a very depressing one. He finds evidence of little upward social mobility for disadvantaged blacks and a fragile capacity to maintain advantaged status among even the most well-off African Americans. He writes: “[M]ore than 70% of black children who are raised in the poorest quarter of American neighborhoods will continue to live in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods as adults. Since the 1970s, more than half of black families have lived in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods in consecutive generations, compared to just 7% of white families.” Discussing the upper end, Sharkey writes: “Among the small number of black families who live in the top quartile, only 35% remain there in the second generation. By themselves, these figures reveal the striking persistence of neighborhood disadvantage among black families.” This figure of 35 percent remaining in the top quartile across generations for blacks contrasts to 63 percent among whites. Thus, “White families exhibit a high rate of mobility out of the poorest neighborhoods and a low rate of mobility out of the most affluent neighborhoods, and the opposite is true among black families.” 18

The general labor market prospects of African Americans have undergone key changes in the last several decades. Three patterns loom large. There is far more internal differentiation and inequality within the black population than was true at the close of World War II, or even during our baseline of the mid-1960s. The fortunes of men and women have recently diverged within the black community. Black women have considerably narrowed the gap between themselves and white women in terms of educational attainment, major occupational categories, and earnings. Black men have faced a growing problem of economic marginalization. Importantly, this is contingent on levels of education; education has become a far sharper dividing line, shaping life chances more heavily than ever before in the black community. 19

Several other dimensions of socioeconomic status bear mentioning. Even by conservative estimates, the high school dropout rate among blacks is twice that of whites, at 20 percent versus 11 percent. Blacks also have much lower college completion rates (17 percent versus 30 percent) and lower advanced degree completion rates (6 percent versus 11 percent). These differences are enormously consequential. As the essays in this volume by economist James Heckman and social psychologist Richard Nisbett emphasize, educational attainment and achievement increasingly define access to the good life, broadly defined. Moreover, some scholars make a strong case that important inequalities in resources still plague the educational experiences of many black school children, involving such factors as fewer well-trained teachers and less access to ap courses and other curriculum-enriching materials and experiences. 20

One of the major social trends affecting African Americans over the past several decades has been the sharply punitive and incarceration-focused turn in the American criminal justice system. Between 1980 and 2000, the rate of black incarceration nearly tripled. The black-to-white incarceration ratio increased to above eight to one during this time period. Actuarial forecasts, or lifetime estimates, of the risk of incarceration for black males born in the 1990s approach one in three, as compared to below one in ten for non-Hispanic white males. A recent major study by the Pew Foundation reported that as of 2007, one in fifteen black males age eighteen and above was in jail or prison, and one in nine black males between the ages of twenty and thirty-four was in jail or prison. Blacks constitute a hugely disproportionate share of those incarcerated relative to their numbers in the general population. 21

The reach of mass incarceration has risen to such levels that some analysts view it as altering normative life-course experiences for blacks in low-income neighborhoods. Indeed, the fabric of social life changes in heavily policed, low-income urban communities. The degree of incarceration has prompted scholars to describe the change as ushering in a new fourth stage of racial oppression, “the carceral state,” constituted by the emergence of “the new Jim Crow” or, more narrowly, racialized mass incarceration. Whichever label one employs, there is no denying that exposure to the criminal justice system touches the lives of a large fraction of the African American population, especially young men of low education and skill levels. These low levels of education and greater exposure to poverty, along with what many regard as the racially biased conduct of the War on Drugs, play a huge role in black overrepresentation in jails or federal and state prisons. 22

Processes of racial residential segregation are a key factor in contemporary racial inequality. Despite important declines in overall rates of segregation over the past three decades and blacks’ increasing suburbanization, blacks remain highly segregated from whites. Some have suggested that active self-segregation on the part of blacks is now a major factor sustaining residential segregation. A number of careful investigations of preferences for neighborhood characteristics and makeup and of the housing search process strongly challenge such claims. Instead, there is substantial evidence that, particularly among white Americans, neighborhoods and social spaces are strongly racially coded, with negative racial stereotypes playing a powerful role in shaping the degree of willingness to enter (or remain) in racially integrated living spaces. Moreover, careful auditing studies continue to show lower, but still significant, rates of antiblack discrimination on the part of real estate agents, homeowners, and landlords. 23

Lastly, I want to stress that wealth inequality between blacks and whites remains enormous. Recent scholarship has convincingly argued that wealth (or accumulated assets) is a crucial determinant of quality of life. Blacks at all levels of the class hierarchy typically possess far less wealth than otherwise comparable whites. Moreover, the composition of black wealth is more heavily based in homes and automobiles as compared to white wealth, which includes a more even spread across savings, stocks and bonds, business ownership, and other more readily liquidated assets. Whereas approximately 75 percent of whites own their homes, only 47 percent of blacks do. Looking beyond home-ownership to the full range of financial assets, analyses from sociologists Melvin Oliver and Tom Shapiro put the black-to-white wealth gap ratio in the range of ten or eleven to one. Other estimates, such as those based on Panel Study of Income Dynamics data, are lower but still represent gaping disparities. 24

In order to provide a more concrete picture of the current state of the wealth gap, Figure 5 reproduces results from a recent Brandeis University study. It shows that over the past twenty-three years, the black-white gap in median wealth rose dramatically, moving from $20,000 in 1984 to nearly $100,000 by 2007. The study also revealed that for much of this time period, middle-income white families had more wealth than even the highest income segment of African American families, with that gap rising to $56,000 by 2007. Moreover, all earners, but especially African Americans, have fallen far behind the high-income white families in median wealth holdings. To the extent that wealth bears on the capacity to survive a period of unemployment, to finance college for one’s children, or to endure a costly illness or other unexpected large expense, these figures point to an enormous and growing disparity in the life chances of blacks and whites in the United States. 25

Figure 5 Median Wealth Holdings of White Families and African American Families, 1984 to 2007

Data do not include home equity. Source: Thomas Shapiro, Tatjana Meschede, and Laura Sullivan, “The Racial Wealth Gap Increases Fourfold,” Research and Policy Brief, Institute on Assets and Social Policy, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, May 2010.

In many respects, these sizable gaps in wealth associated with race are one of the principal ways in which the cumulative and “sedimentary” impact of a long history of racial oppression manifests itself. Research has shown that black and white families do not differ substantially in the extent to which they try to save income. Much wealth is inherited; it is not the product of strictly individual merit or achievement. Furthermore, social policy in many ways played a direct role in facilitating the accumulation of wealth for many generations of white Americans while systematically constraining or undermining such opportunities for African Americans. For example, Oliver and Shapiro and political scientist Ira Katznelson both point to federal home mortgage lending guidelines and practices, which were once openly discriminatory, as playing a crucial role in this process. 26

What do we know about changes in racial attitudes in the United States? The first and most consistent finding of the major national studies of racial attitudes in the United States has been a steady repudiation of the outlooks that supported the Jim Crow social order. Jim Crow racism once reigned in American society, particularly in the South. Accordingly, blacks were understood as inherently inferior to whites, both intellectually and temperamentally. As a result, society was to be expressly ordered in terms of white privilege, with blacks relegated to secondary status in education, access to jobs, and in civic status such as the right to vote. Above all, racial mixture was to be avoided; hence, society needed to be segregated. The best survey data on American public opinion suggest that this set of ideas has been in steady retreat since the 1940s. 27

Figure 6 contains one telling illustration of this trend. It shows the percentage of white Americans in national surveys who said that they would not be willing to vote for a qualified black candidate for president if nominated by their own party. When first asked in 1958, nearly two out of three white Americans endorsed such an openly discriminatory posture. That trend has undergone unabated decline, reaching the point where roughly only one in five white Americans expressed this view by the time the Reverend Jesse Jackson launched his first bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984. It declined to fewer than one in ten by the time of Obama’s campaign in 2008.

In broad sweep, though not necessarily in exact levels, the trend seen in Figure 6 is true of most questions on racial attitudes from national surveys that deal with broad principles of whether American society should be integrated or segregated, discriminatory or nondiscriminatory on the basis of race. Whether the specific domain involved school integration, residential integration, or even racial intermarriage, the level of endorsement of discriminatory, segregationist responses has continued to decline. To an important degree, these changes have been led by highly educated whites and those outside the South. African Americans have never endorsed elements of the Jim Crow outlook to any substantial degree, though many of these questions were not initially asked of black respondents out of fear that the questions would be regarded as an insult, or to the assumption that their responses were predictable.

Figure 6 Percent of Whites Who Said They Would Not Vote for a Black Presidential Candidate, 1958 to 2008

The Gallup Poll asked, “If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be black, would you vote for that person?” The General Social Survey (GSS) asked, “If your party nominated a (negro/black/African-American) for President, would you vote for him if he were qualified for the job?” Source: Author’s analysis of data from Gallup Poll, 1958–2007; Jeffrey M. Jones, “Some Americans Reluctant to Vote for Mormon, 72-Year-Old Presidential Candidates,” in The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 2007, ed. George Horace Gallup (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 77–78; author’s analysis of data from GSS Cumulative Data File, 1972–2008.

This picture of the repudiation of Jim Crow is complicated somewhat by evidence of significant social distance preferences. To be sure, low and typically declining percentages of whites objected when asked about entering into integrated social settings – neighborhoods or schools – where one or just a small number of blacks might be present. But as the number of blacks involved increased, and as one shifts from more impersonal and public domains of life (workplaces, schools, neighborhoods) to more intimate and personal domains (intermarriage), expressed levels of white resistance rise and the degree of positive change is not as great.

The notion of the 1960s as an inflection point in the struggle for racial change is reinforced by the growing preoccupation of studies of racial attitudes in the post-1960 period with matters of public policy. These studies consider levels of support or opposition to public policies designed to bring about greater racial equality (antidiscrimination laws and various forms of affirmative action) and actual integration (open housing laws and methods of school desegregation such as school busing). The picture that results is complex but has several recurrent features. Blacks are typically far more supportive of social-policy intervention on matters of race than are whites. In general, support for policy or governmental intervention to bring about greater integration or to reduce racial inequality lags well behind endorsement of similar broad principles or ideals. This finding has led many scholars to note a “principle-implementation gap.” Some policies, however, have wider appeal than others. Efforts to enhance or improve the human capital attributes of blacks and other minority group members are more popular than policies that call for group preferences. Forms of affirmative action that imply quotas or otherwise disregard meritocratic criteria of reward are deeply unpopular.

One important line of investigation seeking to understand the principle implementation gap involved assessments of perceptions and causal attributions for racial inequality. To the extent that many individuals do not perceive much racial inequality, or explain it in terms of individual dispositions and choices (as opposed to structural constraints and conditions such as discrimination), then there is little need seen for government action. Table 1 shows responses to a series of questions on possible causes of black-white economic inequality that included “less inborn ability,” “lack of motivation and willpower,” “no chance for an education,” and “mainly due to discrimination.” The questions thus span biological basis (ability), cultural basis (motivation), a weak form of structural constraint (education), and finally, a strong structural constraint (discrimination). 28

There is low and decreasing support among whites for the overtly racist belief that blacks have less inborn ability. The most widely endorsed account among whites points to a lack of motivation or willpower on the part of blacks as a key factor in racial inequality, though this attribution declines over time. Attributions to discrimination as well as to the weaker structural account of lack of a chance for education also decline among whites. Blacks are generally far more likely than whites to endorse structural accounts of racial inequality, particularly the strongest attribution of discrimination. However, like their white counterparts, a declining number of blacks point to discrimination as the key factor, and there is actually a rise in the percentage of African Americans attributing racial inequality to a lack of motivation or willpower on the part of blacks themselves. More detailed multivariate analyses suggest that there has been growth in cultural attributions for racial inequality. Among African Americans this growth seems most prominent among somewhat younger, ideologically conservative, and less well-educated individuals. 29

Table 1 Explanations for Racial Socioeconomic Inequality by Education and Age across Selected Years

Respondents were asked, “On the average (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are”: “mainly due to discrimination”; “because most (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) have less inborn ability to learn”; “because most (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) don’t have the chance for education that it takes to rise out of poverty”; or “because most (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty?” N for whites ranges between 5,307 and 16,906. N for blacks ranges between 517 and 2,387. Source: Author’s analysis of data from General Social Survey, 1977–2008.

Another line of analysis of racial attitudes sparked in part by the principle implementation gap involved renewed interest in the extent of negative racial stereotyping. Figure 7 shows trends in whites’ stereotype trait ratings of whites as compared to blacks on the dimensions of being hardworking or lazy and intelligent or unintelligent. In 1990, when these trait-rating stereotype questions were first posed in national surveys, more than 60 percent of whites rated whites as more likely to be hardworking than blacks, and just under 60 percent rated blacks as less intelligent. A variety of other trait dimensions were included in this early assessment, such as welfare dependency, involvement in drugs and gangs, and levels of patriotism. Whites usually expressed a substantially negative image of blacks relative to how they rated whites across this array of traits. The trends suggest some slight reduction in negative stereotyping over the past two decades, but such negative images of blacks still remain quite commonplace. To the extent that unfavorable beliefs about the behavioral characteristics of blacks have a bearing on levels of support for policies designed to benefit blacks, these data imply, and much evidence confirms, that negative beliefs about blacks’ abilities and behavioral choices contribute to low levels of white support for significant social policy interventions to ameliorate racial inequality. 30

Figure 7 Percent of Respondents Who Said Whites Are More Hardworking or More Intelligent than Blacks, 1990 to 2008

White respondents were asked to rate blacks and whites according to whether they thought blacks and whites tended to be hardworking or lazy. Respondents were also asked, “Do people in these groups tend to be unintelligent or tend to be intelligent? Where would you rate whites in general on this scale? Blacks?” The comparison is generated by subtracting the scores whites are given on a one to seven point scale from the scores blacks are given on each measure. On the resulting scale, positive numbers indicate that blacks are rated as possessing more of the desirable trait than whites; negative scores indicate that whites are rated more positively; and scores of zero indicate that both groups received equal ratings. Negative scores were coded as agreeing. Seven percent of whites rated blacks as more hardworking than whites, and 6 percent rated blacks as more intelligent. Source: Author’s analysis of data from General Social Survey, 1990–2008.

A third and perhaps most vigorously considered resolution of the principle implementation gap involves the hypothesis that a new form of antiblack racism is at the root of much white opposition to policies aimed at reducing racial inequality. This scholarship has focused largely on the emergence of attitudes of resentment toward the demands or grievances voiced by African Americans and the expectation of governmental redress for those demands and grievances. Figure 8 shows trends for one question frequently used to tap such sentiments; respondents are asked to agree or disagree with the statement, “Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without special favors.” Throughout the 1994 to 2008 time span, roughly three-fourths of white Americans agreed with this assertion. The figure shows no meaningful trend, despite a slight dip in 2004: the lopsided view among whites is that blacks need to make it all on their own. 31

Figure 8 Percent of Respondents Agreeing with the Belief that Blacks Should Overcome Prejudice without Special Favors, 1994 to 2008

Respondents were asked, “Do you agree strongly, agree somewhat, neither agree nor disagree, disagree somewhat, or disagree strongly with the following statement: Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without special favors.” “Agree strongly” and “agree somewhat” responses are coded as agreeing. Source: Author’s analysis of data from General Social Survey, 1994–2008.

Throughout the fourteen-year time span, whites were always substantially more likely to endorse this viewpoint than blacks; however, not only did a nontrivial number of blacks agree with it (about 50 percent), but the black-white gap actually narrowed slightly over time. The meaning and effects of this type of outlook vary in important ways depending on race, usually carrying less potent implications for policy views among blacks than among whites. Indeed, one reason for focusing on this type of attitude is that it and similar items are found to correlate with a wide range of socialpolicy outlooks. And some evidence suggests that how attitudes and outlooks connect with partisanship and voting behavior may be strengthening and growing. 32

Judged by the trends considered here and in the essays in this volume, declarations of having arrived at the post-racial moment are premature. Much has changed – and unequivocally for the better – in light of where the United States stood in 1965. Indeed, I will speculate that none of the contributors to the 1965/1966 Dædalus volumes would have considered likely changes that have now, a mere four or so decades later, been realized, including the election of an African American President of the United States, the appointment of the first black Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the appointment of two different African American Secretaries of State. Similarly, the size and reach of today’s black middle class were not easy to forecast from the scholarly perch of mid-1960s data and understandings. At the same time, troublingly entrenched patterns of poverty, segregation, gaps in educational attainment and achievement, racial identity formation, and disparaging racial stereotypes all endure into the present, even if in somewhat less extreme forms. And the scandalous rise in what is now termed racialized mass incarceration was not foreseen but now adds a new measure of urgency to these concerns.

The very complex and contradictory nature of these changes cautions against the urge to make sweeping and simple declarations about where we now stand. But our nation’s “mixed” or ambiguous circumstance – suspended uncomfortably somewhere between the collapse of the Jim Crow social order and a post-racial social order that has yet to be attained – gives rise to many intense exchanges over whether or how much “race matters.” This is true of scholarly discourse, where many see racial division as a deeply entrenched and tragic American flaw and many others see racial division as a waning exception to the coming triumph of American liberalism. 33

Average Americans, both black and white, face and wage much of the same debate in their day-to-day lives. One way of capturing this dynamic is illustrated in Figure 9, which shows the percentage of white and black respondents in a 2009 national survey that asked, “Do you think that blacks have achieved racial equality, will soon achieve racial equality, will not achieve racial equality in your lifetime, or will never achieve racial equality?” Fielded after the 2008 election and the inauguration of Obama in early 2009, these results are instructive. Almost two out of three white Americans (61.3 percent) said that blacks have achieved racial equality. Another 21.5 percent of whites endorse the view that blacks will soon achieve racial equality. Thus, the overwhelming fraction of white Americans see the post-racial moment as effectively here (83.8 percent). Fewer than one in five blacks endorsed the idea that they have already achieved racial equality. A more substantial fraction, 36.2 percent, believe that they will soon achieve racial equality. African Americans, then, are divided almost evenly between those doubtful that racial equality will soon be achieved (with more than one in ten saying that it will never be achieved) and those who see equality as within reach, at 46.6 percent versus 53.6 percent. 34

Figure 9 Whites’ and Blacks’ Beliefs about when Racial Equality will be Achieved

Respondents were asked, “Do you think that blacks have achieved racial equality, will soon achieve racial equality, will not achieve racial equality in your lifetime, or will never achieve racial equality?” Source: Lawrence D. Bobo and Alicia Simmons, Race Cues, Attitudes and Punitiveness Survey (Data Collected by Polimetrix), Department of Sociology, Harvard University, July 2009.

These results underscore why discussions of race so easily and quickly become polarized and fractious along racial lines. The central tendencies of public opinion on these issues, despite real increasing overlap, remain enormously far apart between black and white Americans. When such differences in perception and belief are grounded in, or at least reinforced by, wide economic inequality, persistent residential segregation, largely racially homogeneous family units and close friendship networks, and a popular culture still suffused with negative ideas and images about African Americans, then there should be little surprise that we still find it enormously difficult to have sustained civil discussions about race and racial matters. Despite growing much closer together in recent decades, the gaps in perspective between blacks and whites are still sizable.

The ideas and evidence marshaled in this Dædalus issue should help sharpen our focus and open up productive new lines of discourse and inquiry. Four of the essays directly engage central, but changing, features of racial stratification in the United States. Sociologist Douglas S. Massey provides a trenchant, broad map of change in the status of African Americans. Sociologist William Julius Wilson reviews and assesses his fieldde fining argument about the “declining significance of race.” The core framework is sustained, he maintains, by much subsequent careful research; but Wilson stresses now the special importance of employment in the government sector to the economic well-being of many African Americans. Economist James J. Heckman focuses on education, building the case for enhancing the capacities of families and communities to prepare children to get the most out of schooling. Social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett looks closely at the types of early intervention strategies that evidence suggests are most likely to improve ultimate educational attainment and achievement.

Three essays put the changing status of African Americans in more explicit political, policy-related, and legal perspectives. Political scientist Rogers M. Smith and his colleagues identify the pivotal role played by agents of competing racial policy coalitions, pointing to the differing agendas and degrees of political success and influence of those pursuing a color-blind strategy and those pursuing a color-conscious strategy. Legal scholar Michael J. Klarman challenges the presumption that the U.S. Supreme Court has been a special ally or supporter of African American interests and claims. He suggests that the Court has often, particularly in a string of recent rulings, tilted heavily in the direction of a color-blind set of principles that do little to advance the interests of black communities. Political scientist Daniel Sabbagh traces the impetus for affirmative action and its evolution in the United States and compares that to how affirmative action is now pursued in a number of other countries.

Several essays examine the cultural dynamics of race and racial identities. Anthropologists Marcyliena Morgan and Dionne Bennett examine the remarkable dynamism, worldwide spread, and influence of hip-hop music. Social psychologists Jennifer A. Richeson and Maureen A. Craig examine the psychological dynamics of identity choices facing minority communities and individuals in this era of rapid population change. Political scientist Jennifer L. Hochschild and her colleagues assess how younger cohorts of Americans are bringing different views of race and its importance to politics and social life.

Three essays pivot off the 2008 presidential election. Political scientist Taeku Lee examines the complex role of race, group identity, and immigrant status in forging new political identities, coalitions, and voting behavior. Political scientist Cathy J. Cohen shows the continuing racial consciousness and orientations of black youth. Sociologist Alford A. Young, Jr., examines the special meaning of Obama’s candidacy and success for young black men.

Two final essays push in quite different directions. Sociologist Roger Waldinger argues that even as the black-white divide remains an important problem, we as a nation are facing deep contradictions in how we deal with immigration and immigrants themselves, particularly those coming from Latin America. Historian Martha Biondi muses on continuities with and departures from past traditions in recent discourse surrounding the mission of African American studies programs and departments.

This issue is a companion volume to the Winter 2011 issue of Dædalus , Race in the Age of Obama, guest edited by Gerald Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. It has been my privilege to work with Gerald on this project, and I am grateful to the contributors to this volume for their informed analyses.

This essay’s epigraphs from Martin Luther King, Jr., John Hope Franklin, and Barack Obama, each in its own fashion, remind us of the depth and complexity of race in the United States. Although it is tempting to seek quick and simple assessments of where we have been and where we are going, it is wise, instead, to wrestle with taking stock of all the variegated and nuanced circumstances underlying the black-white divide and its associated phenomena. Just as 1965 seemed a point of inflection, of contradictory lines of development, future generations may look back and regard 2011 as a similarly fraught moment. At the same time that a nation celebrates the historic election of an African American president, the cultural production of demeaning antiblack images – postcards featuring watermelons on the White House lawn prior to the annual Easter egg roll, Obama featured in loincloth and with a bone through his nose in ads denouncing the health care bill, a cartoon showing police officers shooting an out-of-control chimpanzee under the heading “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill” – are ugly reminders of some of the more overtly racialized reactions to the ascendancy of an African American to the presidency of the United States.

As a result of complex and contradictory indicators, no pithy phrase or bold declaration can possibly do justice to the full body of research, evidence, and ideas reviewed here. One optimistic trend is that examinations of the status of blacks have moved to a place of prominence and sophistication in the social sciences that probably was never imagined by founding figures of the tradition, such as W.E.B. Du Bois. That accumulating body of knowledge and theory, including the new contributions herein, deepens our understanding of the experience of race in the United States. The configuration and salience of the color line some fifty or one hundred years from now, however, cannot be forecast with any measure of certainty. Perhaps the strongest general declaration one can make at present is that we stand somewhere between a Jim Crow past and the aspiration of a postracial future.

1 Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Bantam, 1968), 19; John Hope Franklin, The Color Line: Legacy for the 21st Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 36; Barack H. Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” speech delivered at the National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, May 18, 2008.

2 I wish to thank Alicia Simmons, Victor Thompson, and Deborah De Laurell for their invaluable assistance in preparing this essay. I am responsible for any remaining errors or shortcomings.

3 St. Clair Drake, “The Social and Economic Status of the Negro in the United States,” Dædalus 94 (4) (Fall 1965): 3–46; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Employment, Income, and the Ordeal of the Negro Family,” Dædalus 94 (4) (Fall 1965): 134–159.

4 See John McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (New York: Free Press, 2000); and Charles Johnson, “The End of the Black American Narrative,” The American Scholar 77 (3) (Summer 2008).

5 See Hua Hsu, “The End of White America?” The Atlantic, January/February 2009; and Susan Saulny, “Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above,” The New York Times, January 29, 2011.

6 On laissez-faire racism, see Lawrence D. Bobo, James R. Kluegel, and Ryan A. Smith, “Laissez-Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology,” in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change, ed. Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin (Greenwood, Conn.: Praeger, 1997), 15–44; on modern or symbolic racism, see David O. Sears, “Symbolic Racism,” in Eliminating Racism: Profiles in Controversy, ed. Phyllis A. Katz and Dalmas A. Taylor (New York: Plenum Press, 1988), 53–84; and on color-blind racism, see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Colorblind Racism and Racial Inequality in Contemporary America (Boulder, Colo.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010).

7 See C. Matthew Snipp, “Defining Race and Ethnicity: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Census,” in Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, ed. Hazel R. Markus and Paula M.L. Moya (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 105–122. It is noteworthy that Obama himself checked only the “Black” category rather than marking more than one race on his 2010 Census form.

8 On the history of “mixing” in the United States, see Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” Journal of American History 82 (1995): 941–964; and Victor Thompson, “The Strange Career of Racial Science: Racial Categories and African American Identity,” in The Oxford Handbook of African American Citizenship, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

9 David A. Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States,” American Historical Review 108 (December 2003): 1305–1390.

10 Melissa R. Herman, “Do You See Who I Am?: How Observers’ Background Affects the Perceptions of Multiracial Faces,” Social Psychology Quarterly 73 (2010): 58–78; see also Arnold K. Ho, Jim Sidanius, Daniel T. Levin, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Evidence for Hypodescent and Racial Hierarchy in the Categorization and Perception of Biracial Individuals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94 (2010): 1–15.

11 Vincent Kang Fu, “How Many Melting Pots?: Intermarriage, Panethnicity, and the Black/ Non-Black Divide in the United States,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 38 (2007): 215–237. On the point of a racial preference hierarchy, see Vincent Kang Fu, “Racial Intermarriage Pairings,” Demography 38 (2001): 147–159.

12 Zenchao Qian and Daniel T. Lichter, “Social Boundaries and Marital Assimilation: Interpreting Trends in Racial and Ethnic Intermarriage,” American Sociological Review 72 (2007): 68–94. See also Zenchao Qian, “Breaking the Last Taboo: Interracial Marriage in America,” Contexts 4 (2005): 33–37.

13 Herbert J. Gans, “The Possibility of a New Racial Hierarchy in the Twenty-First Century United States,” in The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries, ed. Michèle Lamont (New York: Russell Sage, 1999), 371–390; and Frank D. Bean et al., “The New U.S. Immigrants: How Do They Affect Our Understanding of the African American Experience?” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621 (2009): 202–220. For closely related discussions, see Mary C. Waters, Black Identities : West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Milton Vickerman, “Recent Immigration and Race: Continuity and Change,” Du Bois Review 4 (2007): 141–165.

14 See Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Karyn Lacy, Blue Chip Black: Race, Class and Status in the New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Mary Pattillo, Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

15 See Michael A. Stoll, “African Americans and the Color Line,” in The American People: Census 2000, ed. Reynolds Farley and John Haaga (New York: Russell Sage, 2005), 380–414, esp. 395; and Lawrence D. Bobo, “An American Conundrum: Race, Sociology, and the African American Road to Citizenship,” in The Oxford Handbook of African American Citizenship, ed. Gates.

16 Christian E. Weller, Jaryn Fields, and Folayemi Agbede, “The State of Communities of Color in the U.S. Economy” (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, January 21, 2011), http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/01/coc_snapshot.html/print.html (accessed January 23, 2011)

17 William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears:The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996); and Robert J. Sampson, “Urban Black Violence: The Effect of Male Joblessness and Family Disruption,” American Journal of Sociology 93 (1987): 348–382.

18 Patrick Sharkey, “The Intergenerational Transmission of Context,” American Journal of Sociology 113 (4): 931–969. See also Tom Hertz, “Rags, Riches, and Race: The Intergenerational Economic Mobility of Black and White Families in the United States,” in Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success, ed. Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and Melissa Osborne Groves (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).

19 See Michael B. Katz, Mark J. Stern, and Jamie J. Fader, “The New African American Inequality,” The Journal of American History 92 (1) (2005): 75–108.

20 Linda Darling Hammond, “The Color Line in American Education: Race, Resources, and Student Achievement,” Du Bois Review 1 (2004): 213–246; and Linda Darling Hammond, “Structured for Failure: Race, Resources, and Student Achievement,” in Doing Race, ed. Markus and Moya, 295–321.

21 Alfred Blumstein, “Race and Criminal Justice,” in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, Volume II, ed. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2001), 21–31; and Pew Center on the States, “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Charitable Trusts, 2008).

22 Generally, see Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage, 2006). On changes in the normative life trajectories, see Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life-Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration,” American Sociological Review 69 (2004): 151–169. On the social costs of heavy police scrutiny of poor neighborhoods, see Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment and Society 3 (2001): 95–135; and Alice Goffman, “On the Run: Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto,” American Sociological Review 74 (2009): 339–357. On the rising incarceration rates for blacks more broadly, see Lawrence D. Bobo and Victor Thompson, “Racialized Mass Incarceration: Poverty, Prejudice, and Punitiveness,” in Doing Race, ed. Markus and Moya, 322–355; and Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).

23 Generally, see Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Camille Z. Charles, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?: Race, Class, and Residence in Los Angeles (New York: Russell Sage, 2006); Robert J. Sampson, “Seeing Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of ‘Broken Windows,’” Social Psychology Quarterly 67 (2004): 319–342; Maria Krysan, Mick Couper, Reynolds Farley, and Tyrone A. Forman, “Does Race Matter in Neighborhood Preferences? Results from a Video Experiment,” American Journal of Sociology 115 (2) (2009): 527–559; and Devah Pager and Hana Shepherd, “The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets,” Annual Review of Sociology 34 (2008): 181–209.

24 Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995); Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Thomas M. Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

25 Thomas M. Shapiro, Tatjana Meschede, and Laura Sullivan, “The Racial Wealth Gap Increases Fourfold,” Research and Policy Brief, Institute on Assets and Social Policy, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, May 2010.

26 See Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold Story of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005).

27 I owe much of this discussion of racial attitudes to Howard Schuman, Charlotte Steeh, Lawrence D. Bobo, and Maria Krysan, Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). See also Lawrence D. Bobo, “Racial Attitudes and Relations at the Close of the Twentieth Century,” in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, Volume 1 , ed. Neil J. Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2001), 264–301; and Maria Krysan, “From Color Caste to Color Blind?: Racial Attitudes Since World War II,” in The Oxford Handbook of African American Citizenship, ed. Gates.

28 Important early work on attributions for racial inequality appears in Howard Schuman, “Sociological Racism,” Society 7 (1969): 44–48; Richard Apostle et al., The Anatomy of Racial Attitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); James R. Kluegel and Eliot R. Smith, Beliefs About Inequality: Americans’ Views of What Is and What Ought to Be (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1986); Paul M. Sniderman and Michael G. Hagen, Race and Inequality: A Study in American Values (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1985); and James R. Kluegel “Trends in Whites’ Explanations of the Black-White Gap in Socioeconomic Status, 1977–1989,” American Sociological Review 55 (1990): 512–525.

29 Matthew O. Hunt, “African-American, Hispanic, and White Beliefs about Black/White Inequality, 1977–2004,” American Sociological Review 72 (2007): 390–415; Lawrence D. Bobo et al., “The Real Record on Racial Attitudes,” in Social Trends in the United States 1972–2008: Evidence from the General Social Survey, ed. Peter V. Marsden (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

30 On the stereotype measures, see Tom W. Smith, “Ethnic Images,” gss Technical Report No. 19 (Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, 1990); and Lawrence D. Bobo and James R. Kluegel, “Status, Ideology, and Dimensions of Whites’ Racial Beliefs and Attitudes: Progress and Stagnation,” in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s, ed. Tuch and Martin, 93–120. On the stereotype connection to public policy views, see Martin I. Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Lawrence D. Bobo and James R. Kluegel, “Opposition to Race-Targeting: Self-Interest, Stratification Ideology, or Racial Attitudes?” American Sociological Review 58 (1993): 443–464; and Steven A. Tuch and Michael Hughes, “Whites’ Racial Policy Attitudes,” Social Science Quarterly 77 (1996): 723–745.

31 For one excellent empirical report, see David O. Sears, Collette van Larr, Mary Carillo, and Rick Kosterman, “Is It Really Racism?: The Origins of White American Opposition to Race-Targeted Policies,” Public Opinion Quarterly 61 (1997): 16–53. For a careful review and assessment of debates regarding the new racism hypothesis, see Maria Krysan, “Prejudice, Politics, and Public Opinion: Understanding the Sources of Racial Policy Attitudes,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 135–168.

32 For a discussion of the growing role of such resentments in partisan outlooks and political behavior, see Nicholas A. Valentino and David O. Sears, “Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South,” American Journal of Political Science 49 (2005): 672–688. For differential effects by race, see Lawrence D. Bobo and Devon Johnson, “A Taste for Punishment: Black and White Americans’ Views on the Death Penalty and the War on Drugs,” Du Bois Review 1 (2004): 151–180.

33 Those representative of the “deeply rooted racial flaw” camp would include Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White: Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Scribner, 1992); Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Joe R. Feagin, Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations (New York: Routledge, 2000); Michael K. Brown et al., White-Washing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Douglas S. Massey, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (New York: Russell Sage, 2006). Those representative of the “triumph of American liberalism” camp would include Nathan Glazer, “The Emergence of an American Ethnic Pattern,” in From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, ed. Ronald Takaki (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 11–23; Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Basic Civitas, 1997); Paul M. Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines, Reaching Beyond Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); and Richard D. Alba, Blurring the Color Line: The New Chance for a More Integrated America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).

34 These numbers point to a sharp rise in the percentage of white Americans endorsing the view that we have or will soon achieve racial equality; the figure rose from about 66 percent in 2000 to over 80 percent in 2009. A similar increase occurred among blacks: while 27 percent endorsed this view in 2000, the figure rose to 53 percent in 2009; thus, it nearly doubled. The 2000 survey allowed respondents to answer, “Don’t know”; the 2009 survey did not. These percentages are calculated without the “don’t know” responses. The 2000 results are reported in Lawrence D. Bobo, “Inequalities that Endure? Racial Ideology, American Politics, and the Peculiar Role of the Social Sciences,” in The Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity, ed. Maria Krysan and Amanda E. Lewis (New York: Russell Sage, 2004), 13–42.

America’s Black-White Divide: Looking Back, Looking Around, Looking Forward

• Jacob Attias
• Malcolm Davis

Music during Jim Crow

Jim crow train.

This song was released in 1941 by Josh White while Jim Crow laws were still in use. During this time, separate but equal was found to be constitutionally legal. In public, everything from water fountains to restaurants were split into white and colored sections. Josh White was a very popular Blues singer during the time period and released an album “Jim Crow Blues” which showed a political side of music. In this specific song, White tackles doing a simple task in riding a train. He sings about hearing the train whistle and wishing Jim Crow laws didn’t exist so he would be able to ride. White goes on to sing “Stop Jim Crow so I can ride, Black and White folks ridin’ side by side”. White obviously was against the use of Jim Crow laws and dreams of a time where African Americans and white people can do everyday things in cooperation. White being a popular bluesman during the time, made this song very important. Many people listened to this song, and heard his political view of opposing Jim Crow laws.

Jim Crow Blues Album Review

Musuem Exhibit JCT 

This newspaper article is a review of Josh White’s new album, “Jim Crow Blues”. The author, Howard Taubman, praises Josh White’s courage to create music that has a political background that hits home for so many southerners. The article actually discusses the song “Jim Crow Trains”, and references other songs on the album. Taubman uses his article to not only review White’s album but discuss the political views brought up in songs. Taubman mentions that this album doesn’t capture a pretty time period, but the songs very accurately depict the time. He writes about how the album touches on “The other side of Blues”. In his perspective, he sees Blues as not just a couple similar songs on “Love, razors, dice, and death”. Essentially he is pinpointing two polar sides of the Blues. One side that is almost stereotypical and expected and the other serves as a platform of expressing the flaws of daily life for African Americans. Blues typically serve as a genuine expression of a culture. Historically they cover topics from relationships to working in the fields too long. This album review touches on the songs themselves, and also dives into why White’s album is more than just music. The article references the lyrics fighting for the rights of African Americans.

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Jim Crow Laws

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 22, 2024 | Original: February 28, 2018

Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation . Named after a Black minstrel show character, the laws—which existed for about 100 years, from the post- Civil War era until 1968—were meant to marginalize African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education or other opportunities. Those who attempted to defy Jim Crow laws often faced arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence and death.

Black Codes

The roots of Jim Crow laws began as early as 1865, immediately following the ratification of the 13th Amendment , which abolished slavery in the United States.

Black codes were strict local and state laws that detailed when, where and how formerly enslaved people could work, and for how much compensation. The codes appeared throughout the South as a legal way to put Black citizens into indentured servitude, to take voting rights away, to control where they lived and how they traveled and to seize children for labor purposes.

The legal system was stacked against Black citizens, with former Confederate soldiers working as police and judges, making it difficult for African Americans to win court cases and ensuring they were subject to Black codes.

These codes worked in conjunction with labor camps for the incarcerated, where prisoners were treated as enslaved people. Black offenders typically received longer sentences than their white equals, and because of the grueling work, often did not live out their entire sentence.

Ku Klux Klan

During the Reconstruction era, local governments, as well as the national Democratic Party and President Andrew Johnson , thwarted efforts to help Black Americans move forward.

Violence was on the rise, making danger a regular aspect of African American life. Black schools were vandalized and destroyed, and bands of violent white people attacked, tortured and lynched Black citizens in the night. Families were attacked and forced off their land all across the South.

The most ruthless organization of the Jim Crow era, the Ku Klux Klan , was born in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee , as a private club for Confederate veterans.

The KKK grew into a secret society terrorizing Black communities and seeping through white Southern culture, with members at the highest levels of government and in the lowest echelons of criminal back alleys.

Jim Crow Laws Expand

At the start of the 1880s, big cities in the South were not wholly beholden to Jim Crow laws and Black Americans found more freedom in them.

This led to substantial Black populations moving to the cities and, as the decade progressed, white city dwellers demanded more laws to limit opportunities for African Americans.

Jim Crow laws soon spread around the country with even more force than previously. Public parks were forbidden for African Americans to enter, and theaters and restaurants were segregated.

Segregated waiting rooms in bus and train stations were required, as well as water fountains, restrooms, building entrances, elevators, cemeteries, even amusement-park cashier windows.

Laws forbade African Americans from living in white neighborhoods. Segregation was enforced for public pools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails and residential homes for the elderly and handicapped.

Some states required separate textbooks for Black and white students. New Orleans mandated the segregation of prostitutes according to race. In Atlanta, African Americans in court were given a different Bible from white people to swear on. Marriage and cohabitation between white and Black people was strictly forbidden in most Southern states.

It was not uncommon to see signs posted at town and city limits warning African Americans that they were not welcome there.

Ida B. Wells

As oppressive as the Jim Crow era was, it was also a time when many African Americans around the country stepped forward into leadership roles to vigorously oppose the laws.

Memphis teacher Ida B. Wells became a prominent activist against Jim Crow laws after refusing to leave a first-class train car designated for white people only. A conductor forcibly removed her and she successfully sued the railroad, though that decision was later reversed by a higher court.

Angry at the injustice, Wells devoted herself to fighting Jim Crow laws. Her vehicle for dissent was newspaper writing: In 1889 she became co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and used her position to take on school segregation and sexual harassment.

Wells traveled throughout the South to publicize her work and advocated for the arming of Black citizens. Wells also investigated lynchings and wrote about her findings.

A mob destroyed her newspaper and threatened her with death, forcing her to move to the North, where she continued her efforts against Jim Crow laws and lynching.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Charlotte Hawkins Brown was a North Carolina-born, Massachusetts-raised Black woman who returned to her birthplace at the age of 17, in 1901, to work as a teacher for the American Missionary Association.

After funding was withdrawn for that school, Brown began fundraising to start her own school, named the Palmer Memorial Institute.

Brown became the first Black woman to create a Black school in North Carolina and through her education work became a fierce and vocal opponent of Jim Crow laws.

Isaiah Montgomery

Not everyone battled for equal rights within white society—some chose a separatist approach.

Convinced by Jim Crow laws that Black and white people could not live peaceably together, formerly enslaved Isaiah Montgomery created the African American-only town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi , in 1887.

Montgomery recruited other former enslaved people to settle in the wilderness with him, clearing the land and forging a settlement that included several schools, an Andrew Carnegie -funded library, a hospital, three cotton gins, a bank and a sawmill. Mound Bayou still exists today, and is still almost 100 percent Black.

Jim Crow Laws in the 20th Century

As the 20th century progressed, Jim Crow laws flourished within an oppressive society marked by violence.

Following World War I , the NAACP noted that lynchings had become so prevalent that it sent investigator Walter White to the South. White had lighter skin and could infiltrate white hate groups.

As lynchings increased, so did race riots, with at least 25 across the United States over several months in 1919, a period sometimes referred to as “ Red Summer .” In retaliation, white authorities charged Black communities with conspiring to conquer white America.

With Jim Crow dominating the landscape, education increasingly under attack and few opportunities for Black college graduates, the Great Migration of the 1920s saw a significant migration of educated Black people out of the South, spurred on by publications like The Chicago Defender , which encouraged Black Americans to move north.

Read by millions of Southern Black people, white people attempted to ban the newspaper and threatened violence against any caught reading or distributing it.

The poverty of the Great Depression only deepened resentment, with a rise in lynchings, and after World War II , even Black veterans returning home met with segregation and violence.

Jim Crow in the North

The North was not immune to Jim Crow-like laws. Some states required Black people to own property before they could vote, schools and neighborhoods were segregated, and businesses displayed “Whites Only” signs.

In Ohio, segregationist Allen Granbery Thurman ran for governor in 1867 promising to bar Black citizens from voting. After he narrowly lost that political race, Thurman was appointed to the U.S. Senate, where he fought to dissolve Reconstruction-era reforms benefiting African Americans.

After World War II , suburban developments in the North and South were created with legal covenants that did not allow Black families, and Black people often found it difficult or impossible to obtain mortgages for homes in certain “red-lined” neighborhoods.

When Did Jim Crow Laws End?

The post-World War II era saw an increase in civil rights activities in the African American community, with a focus on ensuring that Black citizens were able to vote. This ushered in the civil rights movement , resulting in the removal of Jim Crow laws.

In 1948 President Harry Truman ordered integration in the military, and in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that educational segregation was unconstitutional, bringing to an end the era of “separate-but-equal” education.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act , which legally ended the segregation that had been institutionalized by Jim Crow laws.

And in 1965, the Voting Rights Act halted efforts to keep minorities from voting. The Fair Housing Act of 1968, which ended discrimination in renting and selling homes, followed.

Jim Crow laws were technically off the books, though that has not always guaranteed full integration or adherence to anti-racism laws throughout the United States. Several recent pieces of legislation—such as House Bill 1020 in Mississippi, which aimed to disenfranchise the majority-Black capital city of Jackson by creating a new judicial district overseen by white leaders—are often compared to Jim Crow laws.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Richard Wormser . Segregated America. Smithsonian Institute . Jim Crow Laws. National Park Service . “Exploiting Black Labor After the Abolition of Slavery.” The Conversation . “Hundreds of black Americans were killed during 'Red Summer.' A century later, still ignored.” Associated Press/USA Today . “Here's What's Become Of A Historic All-Black Town In The Mississippi Delta.” NPR . 

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Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow

by Leon F. Litwack

Educator since 2019

4 contributions

I am a PhD student from the Ohio State University where I am studying the Southern United States and the legacy of the Confederacy.

Last Updated September 5, 2023.

Leon F. Litwack's book Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998) follows up on his landmark text Been in the Storm So Long (1979), which focused on the African American experience during Reconstruction. Trouble in Mind is thematically similar but extends his area of study from the 1890s to the Great Migration (beginning roughly in 1916).

Much of his book deals with the paternalism emblematic of the white South. Paternalism is the concept that slave masters treated their slaves like children and that, in return, the slaves were completely happy serving their masters. In many ways, this idea ties into the cult of Southern honor—in which, for white Southerners, taking care of their families (which they believed included slaves) was paramount. The biggest issue with paternalism is that it drove much of the violence and structures of slavery and completely defined the slaves as being subservient and compliant even when they were not. It has largely been disowned as an actual ideology, but during the period that Litwack covers, many former owners felt that African Americans born after slavery was abolished were no longer mindful and respectful towards the white South and their former masters.

The core of Litwack's book is the exploration of the racial hierarchy that drove the South following the ending of Reconstruction. Slavery no longer existed, but many former slaveowners wanted to regain their honor through paternalism, so they created more laws to try and control the lives of African Americans. One way Litwack explores these racial interactions is through a "bottom up" approach. He does not focus on major African American leaders or their ideologies; instead, he analyzes the daily lived experiences of the African American community under racial hierarchy.

Litwack frames the beginning of his book around the metaphor of baptisms and uses the metaphor to highlight how African Americans dealt with the boundaries of the racial hierarchy as they learned what was—or was not—allowed. He argues that most of the African American community knew the rules and boundaries that guided their lives by the time they were ten years old. They also understood the consequences of breaking the fragile racial line: lynchings.

Merriam-Webster defines lynching as "to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal approval or permission." The penalty, during this time period, for breaking the racial hierarchy was quite literally death. Litwack spends a good portion of the book exploring and describing lynchings and how no African American was exempt from the fear and violence they engendered. Litwack notes that the lynchings had to be a spectacle in order to teach the other African Americans in the communities about the importance of minding the racial line. In this sense, lynchings fulfilled two goals: one, they removed an African American who breached the line, and two, they taught a lesson to the African American community of what could happen if they decided to cross the line.

Litwack describes some of the debates about the education of blacks within the Jim Crow South and explains how white Southerners did not want to overeducate the freed African Americans out of fear that they would no longer be complacent. Litwack argues that the debates about complacency and education continued to relate to the structures created during slavery: that is, of making money from the labor of African Americans with as little expense as possible.

The racialized labor system went against the typical American ethos of working hard and enjoying the fruits of your labor. Instead, it was clearly designed to keep African Americans in a state of...

(This entire section contains 965 words.)

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poverty. Despite this, Litwack describes how some African Americans resisted this system and prospered, becoming a threat to the racial hierarchy of the white South.

In order to resist these forms of violence and control, Litwack explains how many African Americans became reliant on their communities and developed their own institutions away from the prying eyes of the white South. This also gave members of the community a chance to develop important skills in fields such as banking and real estate, and fostered the creation of an African American middle class. Of these African American institutions, Litwack places the most emphasis on the African American church, which not only provided the community with ways to fill their spiritual needs but also provided a local community meeting—and rallying—point.

Litwack notes that not all African Americans faced racial hierarchy with complacency. The African American community resisted in several ways. Many of these resistance strategies were peaceful; they focused on boycotts of segregated spaces (especially transportation) and more subtle attempts to undermine the hierarchy through personal actions. Litwack notes that some African Americans did engage in violence against white Southerners, but ultimately these attempts were not enough to completely destroy the racial system under Jim Crow.

Litwack eventually ties the African Americans' desire for their own communities into the idea of the Great Migration (beginning roughly in 1916). The Great Migration was a mass movement that lasted for decades in which African Americans moved from the South towards the North in order to find better treatment and jobs. Many African Americans moved to larger cities in the North, such as New York and Chicago. While they managed to escape Jim Crow, they were unable to completely escape the shadow of racism throughout the twentieth century.

Litwack focuses on the everyday experiences of these individuals as they attempted to create their own communities away from the eyes of the white South. They tried to escape the threat of lynchings by developing their own societies often centered on the church. Nevertheless, African Americans continued to face the racial hierarchy of the South, which prevented them from developing a large middle class and kept many African Americans in abject poverty.

Cite this page as follows:

Morrow, Joshua. "Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow - Analysis." eNotes Publishing, edited by eNotes Editorial, eNotes.com, Inc., 30 June 2024 <https://www.enotes.com/topics/trouble-mind-leon-f-litwack/in-depth#in-depth-analysis-867725>

Who Was Jim Crow?

Fifty years ago, the voting Rights Act targeted the laws and practices of Jim Crow. Here’s where the name came from.

Geography, Social Studies, U.S. History

Thomas Dartmouth Rice was a white American stage performer in the early 1830s. He is best known for popularizing the derogatory practice of blackface with an act called “Jump, Jim Crow” (or “Jumping Jim Crow”).

Portrait from the New York Public Library Digital Collections

In 1944, the Detroit, Michigan, chapter of the NAACP held a mock-funeral for him. In 1963, participants in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom symbolically buried him. Racial discrimination existed throughout the United States in the 20th century, but it had a special name in the South— Jim Crow . Fifty years ago, this Thursday [August 6,2015], U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson tried to bury Jim Crow  by signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. The Voting Rights Act and its predecessor, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, fought racial discrimination laws in the South by banning legal segregation in public accommodations and outlawing the poll taxes and tests that were used to stop African Americans from voting. Today, we still use the term “ Jim Crow ” to describe that system of segregation and discrimination in the South. But the system’s namesake isn’t actually southern. Jim Crow came from the North. “Jump, Jim Crow” Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white man, was born in New York City in 1808. He devoted himself to the theater in his 20s, and in the early 1830s, he began performing the act that would make him famous: He painted his face black and did a song and dance he claimed were inspired by an enslaved Black person he saw. The act was called “Jump, Jim Crow” (or “Jumping Jim Crow”). “He would put on not only blackface makeup, but shabby dress that imitated in his mind—and white people’s minds of the time—the dress and aspect and demeanor of the southern enslaved black person,” says Eric Lott, author of  Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class,  and professor of English and American Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Rice’s routine was a hit in New York City, New York, one of many of places in the North where working-class whites could see blackface minstrelsy , which was quickly becoming a dominant form of theater and a leading source for popular music in the United States. (Performing in blackface is highly offensive to this day.) Rice took his act on tour, even going as far as England; and as his popularity grew, his stage name seeped into the culture. Jim Crow was a harmful caricature . The show exploited stereotyped speech, movement, and physical features attributed to Black people to mock them. It entertained, and miseducated, whites at the expense of Blacks, all for Rice's financial benefit. “‘Jumping Jim Crow ’ and just ‘ Jim Crow ’ generally sort of became shorthand—or one shorthand, anyway—for describing African Americans in this country,” Lott says. “So much so,” he says, “that by the time of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s  Uncle Tom’s Cabin , which was twenty years later in 1852,” one character refers to another as Jim Crow . (In a strange full-circle, Rice later played Uncle Tom in blackface stage adaptations of the novel, which often reversed the book’s abolitionist message.) Regardless of whether the term “ Jim Crow ” existed before Rice took it to the stage, his act helped popularize it as a derogatory term for African Americans. To call someone “ Jim Crow ” wasn’t just to point out his or her skin color: It was to reduce that person to the kind of caricature that Rice performed on stage. From the Theater to the Legislature After the Civil War , southern states passed laws that discriminated against African Americans who had just been released from slavery; and as early as the 1890s, these laws had gained a nickname. In 1899, North Carolina’s  Goldsboro Daily Argus  published an article subtitled “How ‘Capt. Tilley’ of the A. & N.C. Road Enforces the Jim Crow Law.” “Travelers on the Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad during the present month have noted the drawing of the color line in the passenger coaches,” the paper reported. “Captain Tilley … is unceasing in his efforts to see that the color line, otherwise the Jim Crow law, is literally and fearfully enforced.” Experts don’t really know how a racist performance in the North came to represent racist laws and policies in the South. But they can speculate . Since the phrase originated in blackface minstrelsy , Lott says that it’s almost “perversely accurate … that it should come to be the name for official segregation and state-sponsored racism .” “I think probably in the popular white mind,” he says, “it was just used because that’s just how they referred to black people.” “Sometimes in history a movie comes out or a book comes out and it just changes the language … and you can point at it,” says David Pilgrim, Director of the  Jim Crow Museum and Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. “And in just this case,” he says, “I think it just evolved. And I think it was from many sources.” However, it happened, the new meaning stuck. Blackface minstrelsy ’s popularity faded (but never died) and T.D. Rice is barely remembered. Most people today don’t know his name. But everybody knows Jim Crow . This article was originally published August 6, 2015.

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Home / In the Classroom / Index of Lesson Plans and Activities for Grades 6-12 / “Jazz is About Collaboration”: Jim Crow Laws And Segregation

“Jazz is About Collaboration”: Jim Crow Laws And Segregation

Estimated Time of Completion:  One week of class time, and a second week of meeting and writing time for small groups which may be done independently.

• To learn about the importance of jazz music in American life during the Depression.
• To learn about Jim Crow laws and their effect on African-Americans.
• To appreciate that de facto segregation existed even where segregation was not mandated by law.
• To contrast the ways in which America’s most significant contribution to the arts, jazz music, depended on collaboration, whereas segregation valued separation above all else.
• To pave the way for students to understand the Civil Rights movement.

Materials Needed

• The PBS Ken Burns documentary JAZZ. This lesson uses primarily Episodes Five and Six.
• The PBS Web site that accompanies the JAZZ series, as well as other Web sites listed in the lesson.
• Writing implements for keeping a diary.
• Art materials for creating posters. For one optional activity, a tape recorder would be useful.
• A road map/atlas of the United States.

This lesson correlates to the National Standards for History, National Center for History in the Schools located online at  https://socialsciences.ucla.edu/ :

• Analyze the role of new laws and the federal judiciary in instituting racial inequality and in disfranchising various racial groups.
• Understand how new cultural movements reflected and changed American society.
• Understand how American life changed during the 1930s. Analyze the impact of the Great Depression on the American family and on ethnic and racial minorities. Explain the cultural life of the Depression years in art, literature and music.

Procedures and Activities

Activity 1: jazz in the 30s.

Show the segment “Like Taking a Drug” from Episode Five of JAZZ. It begins approximately 53 minutes into the film and ends 6 minutes later with a new a title, “Men Working Together.” The segment depicts the first teen craze in America generated by popular musicians—replete with screaming fan clubs, dance crazes, and clothing fads. Although the decade is the 1930s (and much may appear funny and quaint to teens today), much else will strike them as eerily familiar.

After watching the segment, discuss the similarities and differences between “swing fans” and today’s music fans. What kinds of new technologies enabled jazz to become the first of all teen crazes (e.g. records, radio, the first sound films)? Do recording stars today get a similar reaction from their audiences? Ask students how they would have felt if they had been the leader of a jazz band in the 1930s.

Now tell students that you are going to divide the class into teams. Each team will form an imaginary jazz band that will tour America in the late 1930s. It is the height of the Swing Band Era, and jazz musicians have become celebrities and sex symbols. Their music, played incessantly on the radio, blares across Depression America, lifting spirits and luring Americans to halls and clubs where they can dance their troubles away.

Tell students that each band will have the opportunity to decide what instruments each member will play, what they will name their band, what style of music from the ’30s they’ll play, who their idols are, how they will dress, and so forth. As they go on their imaginary tour, each band member will be asked to keep a diary of events.

Show the first 45 minutes of Episode Six, or select from the segments below those you have time for and deem most important:

Depression America and Jazz From the beginning to approximately 13 minutes into Episode Six, the film covers an overview of Depression America including its effect on African Americans, the commercialization of Big Bands in the East and why musicians are drawn to the Midwest, where a more pulsating blues sound is still alive. It also introduces us to Coleman Hawkins.

Lester Young

From approximately 13 minutes to 19 minutes into Episode Six, the video highlights the importance of the saxophonist Lester Young who heads for Kansas City. The sequence begins with a street scene.

Kansas City

From 19 minutes to 28 minutes into Episode Six, the Kansas City scene itself is the focus, including the life of musicians who improvise well into the night. This sequence begins with the heading “Kansas City” and ends by introducing Count Basie.

Count Basie From 28 minutes to 34 minutes, we learn about the life and music of Count Basie. It begins with the chapter title “Count Basie.”

Mary Lou Williams From 35 minutes to 42 minutes, the film focuses on the role of women in jazz, highlighting the importance of Mary Lou Williams. This sequence ends with the title, “Memories of You.”

Memories of You From 42 minutes to approximately 47 minutes, the film covers a bit of Louis Armstrong, more on Count Basie (who adds singer Jimmy Rushing to his band), the venues where jazz bands played in Depression America, and the importance of music to America at this time. It ends with the title “Musical Kinship.”

As students watch the segments have them take notes in the following categories; alternatively, stop after each segment to discuss the following topics

• What were the hardships faced by Americans, and especially African-Americans, during the Depression?
• What are the instruments you hear in jazz bands during this time?
• How did jazz bands travel at this time?
• Were the jazz bands themselves integrated?
• Did the jazz bands play to integrated audiences?
• What were some of the important cities in the jazz world?
• What were some of the popular dances in the ’30s? How do these dances differ from the dances of today?
• What kinds of clothing did people wear in their everyday lives during the ’30s? When they were dancing?
• Who are some of the important jazz artists at this time? How many of them seem to have been women? What were some of the problems female jazz artists may have faced?
• Which one of these musicians did you like most and why?

Activity 2: Creating the Band

Now assign students to their jazz band teams. (Teams of 4 or 5 members work best, but you can easily make them larger.) Although there were many all-white or all-African-American bands in the 1930s, in order to illustrate the effects of segregation on American life tell students that most of their members must assume the roles of African-American men. Each band should also include one white male musician (or manager) and one African-American woman. (There were some female artists performing at this time, but not many. Wives of the performers occasionally accompanied the band on tour.)

Then, if you have time, show the following clips from JAZZ:

In Episode Five, in the section “Men Working Together” there is a segment about Benny Goodman’s decision to include Teddy Wilson, an African-American pianist, in his trio. It begins around 104 minutes into the video.

I n Episode Five, the segment seven minutes (trains with hobos) to 21 minutes into the video (streetcars with sound of horn) explains how white America made jazz a big business and reaped the profits for itself. It also shows how Duke Ellington responded to the painful effects of segregation.

Episode Eight, approximately 34 minutes into the film, describes how in 1947 Louis Armstrong invited Jack Teagarten (a white trombonist) to play with him at Town Hall. The sequence ends approximately five minutes later when the city of New Orleans refuses to let the two play together.

Questions to pose if you have time to show the above clips:

• Was segregation a problem only in the South?
• Were segregated jazz groups the norm because of how black musicians felt about white musicians, and vice versa, or because of how their audiences responded?
• How did some African-American artists deal with the injustices and humiliations of segregation?

Ask each team to decide together the following:

• The name of their band.
• Their band’s hometown
• The band members’ names.
• The instrument(s) each band member plays.
• The general style of the band’s music.
• The jazz musician most admired by the band.
• The band’s hopes for the future.

Also ask that each team designate which band members function as manager, arranger, conductor, and so forth.

Direct students to the Jazz Lounge on the PBS JAZZ Web site for information about jazz styles. To help students figure out what instruments were in a jazz swing band, direct them to the “Behind the Beat” section of the JAZZ Web site and ask them to look at the credits for recordings made in the 1930s. For ideas about some famous jazz artists, students can do research in the Biographies section of the PBS Web site, as well as the following: “Jazz Essays” at  http://www.redhotjazz.com/essays.html

Activity 3: Writing Biographies

Now ask that each student write a biography of themselves as a jazz artist. First, they should figure out how old they are at the moment (c. 1937), then work back in time and figure out when they were born (e.g. 1915). Using the historical and social information on the PBS JAZZ Web site, students should try to interpret how historical events would have affected them and their familiess, particularly from an African-American perspective.

Suggest that students look at some real-life biographies of jazz artists on the JAZZ site. If you have class time, show more JAZZ video clips of the early lives of great jazz artists like Louis Armstrong (Episode Two, the sequence “The Gift” which begins approximately six minutes into the film); Billie Holiday (Episode Five, beginning about 107 minutes into the film and ending about six minutes later); and Duke Ellington (Episode 2, approximately 143 minutes into the video).

Activity 4: Sharing Biographies

Now members of each jazz band need to get to know each other’s fictional selves.

Ask each team member to share his or her biography with members of the group. Each group should sit in a cirlce, and each person in the circle should pass his or her biography one person to the left. The person on the left should read the biography and ask its author any questions which seem important.

Now members of the band should introduce one another. In other words, each person will introduce to the entire group the person whose biography they have read. Encourage students to ham it up a bit… “Joe is the best pianist since Jelly Roll Morton, and he will make our band the equal of Duke Ellington’s anyday.”

Activity 5: Constructing the Story of the Band

If you have the time, show this segment from the JAZZ documentary:

Episode Seven, “We Need to Be Free” which begins approximately 116 minutes into the film. You need only show the next ten minutes, the section which demonstrates how Duke Ellington wrote specifically for the instrumentalists in his band, and how he got them to play their best on stage even if they were not on speaking terms offstage.

Ask students in what ways making music is like playing on a team. For what reasons might band members not get along? They might compete for audience “ratings,” disagree with each other’s politics, have dated the same man or woman, etc. Why might some band members be good friends? They might hail from the same city, like the same foods, share a love of the same sport, admire each other’s musicianship, etc.

Now ask students to create the story of the band itself. Keeping in mind that they now need to blend their individual biographies into a group identity, have them answer the following questions:

• Which musician(s) started the group and why? What city did the band start in?
• Which musicians were added later to the group, and why?
• What older musicians sponsored the group, or were mentors to some of the players?
• Has the band had any serious disagreements to date?
• What financial risks or problems face the band?
• What recordings has the group made together? Name them.
• Describe the band’s very best concert ever.
• Describe what reviewers are saying about the band.
• Describe what the band’s critics are saying about the band.
• Describe the band’s goals for the next year.

Now ask the group to write a “band biography.” Each member of the band should keep a copy of it for later use.

Activity 6: Planning a Tour

Based on what they have read, seen on the video, or experienced first hand, ask students to formulate an itinerary departing from either New York City or Chicago. Each band’s itinerary should include a minimum of three cities. Require that one of cities be in a Southern state. Also require that the tour include two small town venues in between big cities, such as a college campus, movie theater or hotel ballroom. One of the small town stops must also be in a Southern state. Tell students that they can travel a maximum of 400 miles between stops. Distribute road maps or atlases, or access online mapping sites like  MapQuest  or  Vicinity . Ask students to plot their route from city to city, without using today’s super highways (most of which were not yet built).

Depending on your time schedule, you may or may not wish to ask students to search online for information about each city they visit. A good source of information about various cities in the 1930s would be the WPA guides that were written at the time and can be found in reprints for such cities as New Orleans or New York City. The Library of Congress’s  WPA Life Histories  collection, organized by state and available online, is a great place to start. Individual WPA guides for  Virginia  and  Tennessee  are available online.

Activity 7: Publicity

• Posters and flyers. Use album cover art for inspiration.
• Radio commercials. These could be taped and include an excerpt of the band’s music. If you have musicians in your class, ask them to create their own. Otherwise may use tapes, CD’s or perhaps download something from the PBS JAZZ Web site from a group they would like to emulate.
• Dance numbers presented live. These should correspond to one of the band’s latest hits. Check out the “Dance” section of the JAZZ Web site for more information.

Activity 8: Learning About Segregation

The bands are now ready to go on their imaginary journeys. Help the class consider the travel arrangements they will have to make. Who will drive? Will the manager have to make reservations? Where will the band eat and sleep? What luggage will they have? How can the band travel as economically as possible during hard times?

Then ask the class to consider the following question:

What would be different about taking this tour back in 1937 compared to today?

Students will naturally think of many things; it’s the Depression, there was no air conditioning, etc. Some students may or may not think of segregation. You may wish to explain the difference between de facto segregation in the North and West and segregation based on state statutes in the South. You may also wish to assign textbook reading on Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court decision which made segregation legal. Now ask, what would segregation mean on a day-to-day basis for their tours?

To answer this question, ask students to read “The Jim Crow Years” set in Little Rock Arkansas from  Will the Circle Be Unbroken?  It is one of 26 scripts produced by the Southern Regional Council, based on an oral history project. The Southern Regional Council works to promote racial justice, protect democratic rights and broaden civic participation. An article about the series appeared in the May/June 2000 issue of  Social Education .

From the script students will be able to:

• Deduce the “rules” of the Jim Crow South.
• Learn how the rules affected every aspect of everyday life for both blacks and whites.
• Appreciate the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that African-Americans fought the system.
• Learn that some whites also struggled to liberate the South from the stranglehold of Jim Crow.

The script can be downloaded, printed, and distributed to students. (The SRC has granted PBS permission to do so for purposes of this lesson.) Alternatively, you can have students read the script online, or order the CD’s and tapes of the program from the SRC.

If you download and print it, students can perform a dramatic reading of the script. Including the Narrator, there are 20 roles. The most pivotal of these is Ozell Sutton, an African-American who grew up the son of a sharecropper. Later he became a journalist for the  Arkansas Democrat  and Special Assistant to Governor Winthrop Rockefeller. Brownie Ledbetter is a white woman who expresses her outrage at the segregationist mores under which she lives.

After students have either read or enacted the script, they should be able to answer the Jim Crow Study Guide questions in class discussion or in writing.

Now ask the class to make a list of all the “rules,” big and small, that segregation imposed on life in the South before and during the 1960s. Then ask, What will this mean for you as your jazz band tours the South? Allow considerable time for discussion. It is in the minutia of daily life that students will understand segregation’s full impact.

For documents relating to segregation, search “American Memory” of the Library of Congress at  http://memory.loc.gov/  or the National Archives at  http://www.archives.gov/research_room/arc/index.html .

Activity 9: On the Road

Show Episode Five, beginning about 43 minutes into the film with an image of a train and the title “The Road” and ending at about 52 minutes.

Based on what they’ve seen in the film clip, ask students to make lists of the kinds of difficulties they will encounter on the road, both physical and psychological.

Activity 10: Keeping a Diary

• Your bus or car breaks down and you need to get help.
• A member of your band gets sick and you need to get medical help.
• You must house your band players in a small town where there is no hotel for African Americans.
• You must figure out what to do for a concert in which black and white players cannot be seen on stage together.
• You must figure out how to house the band overnight, since the black and white players will not be allowed to stay in the same hotel.
• Two band members are having serious interpersonal differences and do not want to play together that evening.
• You play to your most enthusiastic crowd yet.
• You enter a new and exciting city you have never been to before; describe it.
• You are exhausted and booked to play at a dance hall where few people show up.
• On the road you are struck by the suffering of many people in Depressio-era America.
• A band member is insulted by a racial slur or indignity.
• You have been driving in the South and cannot find a restroom marked “For Colored Men” or “For Colored Women”
• An incident occurs which lets you know that there are some white Southerners who feel that Jim Crow laws are burdensome and unjust.
• A policeman stops your bus on the road to make inquiries.
• You meet some aspiring jazz musicians who admire your group.
• You learn that the all-white jazz band that played before you earned almost twice as much as your group did.

Activity 11: Sharing Diaries, Sharing Experiences

Suggestions for debriefing from the Jazz Tour experience:

• Diaries can be shared in many ways. Band members can read each other’s diaries, or each band can present their overall experience to the class by reading excerpts from their diaries and playing their music (performed live, or taken from a tape or CD).
• Hold a discussion about what students learned about the impact of segregation. Why is segregation antithetical to the “all men are created equal” premise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?
• How is segregation antithetical to the creative and collaborative nature of jazz music? What other ventures in life would be stymied or stifled altogether under a segregated system?

Assessment Suggestions

• Students may be evaluated on their diary entries. You may read and grade them according to a rubric you introduce at the start, or you may let students evaluate each other’s work and provide feedback. It is important that the entries reflect what students have learned about a segregated America.
• Students may be evaluated for their advertisements for their band, their band biography, for their overall ability to work productively within a group, and for their participation in class discussion.

Extensions / Adaptations

• Ask students to read a biography of one jazz artist. Ask students to write a review or present a talk which addresses the effect of segregation on the artist and his or her work.
• Compare the Supreme Court decisions of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to Brown v. the Board of Education (1954). How did the 1954 decision eventually lead to the demise of segregation?
• Arguments over the most effective ways to integrate America still cause controversy. Choose an issue like school vouchers or affirmative action and hold a debate.

About the Author

Joan Brodsky Schur teaches social studies and English at the Village Community School in New York City. Her work in the classroom has been described in various articles she has written over the years for  Social Education . Joan and fellow-colleague Sari Grossman are the editors of  In A New Land: An Anthology of Immigrant Literature . Joan is also a contributing author to the Constitution Community, a Web site of the National Archives at  http://www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/constitution_community.html .

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Rep. Byron Donalds, his gigantic Jim Crow myth and a forgotten fact about Black voters

John A. Tures

As we celebrated Juneteenth last week, a political argument is brewing about the legacy of the Jim Crow era.

It’s important, generally, to provide greater scrutiny of that era, lest we repeat, or even in some cases maintain, the legacy of that time frame in America.

But Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) ignited an acute firestorm of opposition and support at a June political event.

NBC reported that Donalds, a Trump campaign surrogate and potential vice presidential short-lister, “suggested that by embracing Democrats, circumstances have worsened for Black people. He pointed to programs enacted by President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s that included expanding federal food stamps, housing, welfare and Medicaid for low-income Americans.

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“‘You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together. During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively,’ Donalds told the audience Tuesday.”

Critics listed a myriad of horrors from the Jim Crow era, from KKK violence to curtailed voting rights to unconstitutional discrimination. Donalds defended himself, saying his remarks were only limited to Black families.

I researched whether Black people really “voted conservatively” during the Jim Crow era.

Bottom line: Donalds’ assertion is not supported by the evidence.

As Daphney Douglas at Salve Regina University discovered in her thesis, African Americans overwhelmingly voted for Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936, well before the 1960s. Proquest found that 71 percent of African Americans voted Democratic in that election, according to news reports.

Douglas lists the actions that Republican Herbert Hoover engaged in that drove African Americans from the Republican Party, such as the Supreme Court nomination of John Parker.

African Americans tended to vote for Republicans before Hoover on the basis of civil rights issues typically against the conservative Democrats who pushed for segregation.

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But for Northern liberal Democrats, African American voters clearly felt differently.

Donalds is also mistaken about the source of African American poverty. Research by scholars at the Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies in 2022 found that “although Black wealth growth outpaced that of white Americans’ between 1870 and 1930, the rate of convergence in these years lags far behind what would be expected had the two groups enjoyed equal conditions for wealth accumulation. Indeed, the historical record is rife with instances of expropriation of Black wealth, exclusion of Black Americans from the political process, and legally sanctioned segregation and discrimination in land, labor, and capital markets. All of these factors likely contributed to sluggish convergence over this period.”

Moreover, the programs Donalds blames for African American poverty aren’t responsible for that.

The Griswold Center scholars found : “During the 1960s through the 1980s, convergence regains speed, exceeding what would be predicted by our equal-conditions benchmark. The dismantling of Jim Crow through Black activism and civil rights legislation, expansions of the social safety net, and improved labor standards during this period may have boosted wealth-accumulating conditions for Black Americans.

Although the wealth gap remained sizable in these decades, it remained on track to converge. From today’s vantage point, however, these gains were short-lived. Starting in the 1980s, we document a widening of the racial gap in capital gains as well as a complete stalling of income convergence. These forces have caused the wealth gap to leave the convergence path altogether and to start increasing again.”

The economic numbers show that problems emerged when the beneficial policies of the 1960s were rolled back in the 1980s.

I agree with Donalds in his criticism of Florida education standards, which insist that there were “benefits” of slavery .

But he and I disagree about the legacy of Jim Crow. Black families were not better off economically during that dark time. The policies of the 1960s closed the racial gap in earnings but were rolled back in the 1980s. And African American support of Democrats began decades earlier than Donalds claims.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at [email protected] . His “X” account is JohnTures2.

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Should trump be allowed to run for office, judge chutkan will allow the doj put on a 'mini-trial' after the immunity ruling: expert.

Appearing with her colleague Alex Witt on MSNBC, former prosecutor and host of her own show, Katie Phang made her prediction on how the Supreme Court will rule on Donald Trump's bid for absolute immunity on Monday and how Judge Tanya Chutkan will proceed afterward. According to Phang, she expects the nation's highest court — which has been dragging its feet on the highly anticipated ruling — will instruct Chutkan to define which acts Trump committed fall under presidential powers and which ones are outside the scope of protection. Phang suggested Chutkan would jump into the case with both feet immediately after all of the delays. '"I believe, as do others, that Judge Chutkan will be told she needs to make a determination as to what conduct that is alleged in the indictment is quote 'official acts as president' and what conduct is quote 'unofficial acts.' The unofficial acts do not get the immunity." "I'm a believer and I've been pushing this idea you will see an evidentiary hearing that Judge Chutkan will do and I think very quickly, she's going to put the pedal to the metal on this," she added. "And the evidence you'll be hearing will be an opportunity for special counsel Jack Smith to present the entirety of the indictment because I believe the indictment against Donald Trump is all unofficial acts; none of that was kosher, none of it was supposed to happen, it was all illegal." "You will see special counsel Jack Smith put on what I'm going to call a mini-trial through the course of the evidentiary hearing so Americans can hear what Donald Trump did."

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A 'must-watch' wide-open Democratic convention could be a nightmare for Trump: analyst

In the aftermath of President Joe Biden's poor performance on Thursday night when he debated Donald Trump , one Washington Post contributing columnist suggested that, i f Biden stepped aside as multiple commentators are urging him to do, it c ould cause problems for the convicted felon ex-president.

According to longtime political observer Matt Bai, a wide-open Democratic convention scheduled to begin August 19th in Chicago would become must-see TV for Americans who would then be unsure who the Democratic nominee would be — thereby engaging potential voters who planned to sit this election out over dissatisfaction with the choices they've been given.

As Bai wrote, a typical convention where the eventual presidential and vice presidential nominees are already known, is far less compelling than the "chaos" that comes with a brokered convention.

Pointing to the possibility Biden could step aside, he wrote, "The question everyone’s asking is: What comes next? If the answer is chaos and contention, I think Democrats would be wise to bring it on."

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After writing, "Democrats harbor a deep, almost pathological fear of disorderly conventions," he suggested, "Parties, like all big institutions in American life, are losing their currency. Nominating conventions barely register on the public radar these days, for the few hours that anyone bothers to televise them while the rest of America is at the lake or the beach. We skim right over the dull choreography of the modern convention; it is the junk mail of prime-time programming."

Having made that point, he advised, "If Biden were to accept reality and step aside, for once, Democrats would have a genuine opportunity to match Trump’s theatrical dominance," before adding, "What could draw more people into politics than a must-watch nightly drama, with the fate of the nation at stake?"

As he sees it, the attention-starved Trump would be caught flat-footed by the Democrats stealing the limelight from him.

"I have to believe that Trump — a modern-day P.T. Barnum who feeds off the boring artifice of his adversaries — fears that spectacle more than anything," he predicted before admitting, "I understand why Democrats flinch at the thought of blowing everything up now, with the primaries over and the convention approaching. I get that chaos and dissension always come with a mountain of risk."

"Is it more risk than the one they’re taking with Biden at the top of the ticket? If you watched the debate, you already know the answer," he concluded.

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Trump unhappy he's not getting enough praise for his 'fantastic' debate performance

On Saturday morning, Donald Trump took to his Truth Social platform to claim, without a shred of evidence, that he was " fantastic " when he took on President Joe Biden during Thursday night's first 2024 presidential debate. Then he complained because too much attention was paid to Biden in the aftermath. Despite multiple commentators stating Biden lost the debate more than the former president won it with what CNN claimed were over 30 documented lies, Trump asserted that his appearance was universally acclaimed, going so far as to say some unnamed commentators asserted that he "had the greatest debate performance in the long and storied history of Presidential Debates." Specifically, Trump wrote, "As I walked off the stage on Thursday night, at the end of the highly anticipated 'Debate,' anchors, political reporters and all screamed that I had had the greatest debate performance in the long and storied history of Presidential Debates. They all said, effectively, 'Trump was fantastic!'" He then complained that he was not getting continuing praise he claimed was being lavished on him later Friday. "This theme was universal, even at CNN & MSDNC, but by Friday evening it was all about the poor performance of Crooked Joe, and not so much about how well I did," he whined. "Oh well, that’s the way it is but, importantly, the result is the same !!!"

Why I'm sticking with Joe Biden

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Legacy admissions helped me get into college. They should be abolished.

I didn't understand that having a family legacy at this school was specifically a function of my white privilege – not just a matter of good luck..

In order to graduate from high school with honors, I needed to write a thesis, and for my topic I chose affirmative action . I referred to the practice as “a broken device” and called it unfair toward white people. I thought that academic performance should be the sole basis for getting into college.

While I drafted this thesis for my private high school in Texas, I applied to a prestigious college in New York. I hoped to become a fifth-generation alum from that school. My paternal lineage there didn’t just stretch back into the 20th century; it went back to the 19th, my father told me. He really wanted me to attend this school. He instructed me to write down on the application the names of my ancestors who attended, and to mention this during my inevitable interview.

I was accepted through early decision, well before finishing my thesis. I also received some scholarship money. My father was so proud of me for going “back East,” as the saying went.

After reading a draft of my thesis, my father, who was a college professor, said he agreed with the premise of my paper. My father imparted the conservative concept of personal responsibility, pulling oneself up by their bootstraps. And he was the one who suggested that I reference the 1978 Supreme Court case  Regents of the University of California v. Bakke , in which a white man named Allan Bakke claimed that he was unfairly excluded from admission to a medical school because of racial quotas.

However, I remember my father also suggesting that I admit in my thesis a part of how I got into college: through a family legacy. He said this was a special advantage, as was affirmative action in a different way .

Family legacies are a function of white privilege

It had not occurred to me that I was engaging in an unfair practice. So I added a brief line of disclosure to my thesis without actually reconsidering my view that affirmative action was a bad thing. I was unwilling to believe that I hadn’t gotten into college purely through hard work, which was valued so highly in my household. Upon presenting my thesis, I received lots of praise from my teachers and graduated with honors.

This was back in 2000, and affirmative action had been around on a large scale since the '60s . Just last month, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions, and in response, many have protested legacy admissions, which are believed to  primarily benefit white students .

Who gets to go to college? Supreme Court ends affirmative action in admissions. Colleges will be whiter for it.

I didn’t understand that having a family legacy at this school was specifically a function of my white privilege, not just a matter of good luck. I remember my father saying that my academic record was good and that the legacy was just insurance. Other parents were buying entire buildings on college campuses, my father said, funding their endowments and making backroom deals with deans. We couldn’t afford to do those things and therefore couldn’t compete with those people, so I needed to play up my legacy as much as possible. A degree from this school was supposed to be my ticket to an upwardly mobile life.

I was diligent in high school, both in and out of class. My after-school job was tutoring other students. I volunteered at my church, played violin competitively, acted in school plays, wrote for the school newspaper and participated in 4-H. I was in the National Honor Society, served on the student council and took 14 standardized tests to get into college: two PSATs, four SATs, four SAT II subject tests and four AP tests. But the legacy was meant to be the single most valuable piece of that puzzle.

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That legacy existed only on my father’s side of the family – the white side. My white grandfather was a psychiatrist who raised my father in Los Angeles and sent him to a private high school. My father then went to college and got his Ph.D., which allowed him to become a college professor.

My mother, who was Black, had a different story. My Black grandfather graduated from a colored high school in Mississippi, and after the family migrated up to Detroit, he worked on a Chrysler assembly line. My mother’s aunt was determined to help her go to college, after which she got a master’s degree. My mother didn’t talk much about the Jim Crow era, nor about political issues like affirmative action. All I knew was that she voted Democratic, and that my father teased her for that.

Both of my parents were intelligent and hardworking, and both received scholarship money for most of their schooling. But one of them was born with advantages that the other never had.

I took a spot at my college from someone else

I applied to college as a white person, not just as a function of my family legacy but also on paper. My parents hid the fact that I was biracial for many years in a misguided effort to protect me, so when I was applying to college, I marked myself Caucasian.  I believed myself to be a white girl  with very curly hair and a caramel-colored summer tan, and several bullies who taunted me for being, in their estimation, ugly.

I took a spot at my college from someone else, and I took scholarship money from someone else. The scholarship money was need-based, not merit-based, and it was calculated from my father’s income. It seems ridiculous to give a financial reward to a student whose generational advantages are as significant as mine.

What do you need to get into college? How 'objective' assessments fail students.

Not only was my father in a position to send me to a private high school, and give me a four-generation legacy at a particular college, but he was a college professor himself – he knew everything there was to know about college prep and admissions, and he handed all of that knowledge to me. I didn't have to figure out a thing.

I’ll never know if I could have gotten into that college without the family legacy, or if I earned any of the things that followed, like my master’s degree or my Fulbright grant. My education was built on my ability to benefit from white supremacy.

When my mother passed away, I was cleaning out her apartment and found my high school thesis on affirmative action. It was bound in black pleather, the pages still crisp. I flipped through it, winced at my self-righteous tone and dropped it into the trash.

At 17 years old, I wish I had spent less time grabbing every opportunity for myself and more time considering the racism in our educational system. I wish that my parents had explained this system to me, and that my high school teachers had done the same. But more than that, I hope that legacy admissions end. Students like me should not receive extra unfair advantages on top of our white privilege.

Sarah Enelow-Snyder is a writer from Texas, based in New Jersey. She has an essay in the anthology " Horse Girls " from Harper Perennial.  

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page , on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter .

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Mavis Staples Is an American Institution. She’s Not Done Singing Yet.

After more than seven decades onstage, the gospel and soul great decided last year that it was time to retire. Then she realized she still had work to do.

By Grayson Haver Currin

Reporting from Chicago and Los Angeles

On a rainy April day in Chicago, Mavis Staples sat in the restaurant of the towering downtown Chicago building where she’s lived for the past four years. For two hours, she talked about the civil rights movement and faith. And finally, she mentioned her old flame Bob Dylan.

The singer-songwriter first proposed to Staples after a kiss at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival; she hid from him during a show at the Apollo decades later, fearing he’d ask again. They’ve remained friends, even taking daily strolls during a 2016 tour together. She’d heard rumors he would soon retire, finally wrapping his fabled Never Ending Tour. Staples knew he would hate it.

“Oh, Bobby : He gotta keep on singing,” Staples said. “I could handle it more than him. I will call him and say, ‘Don’t retire, Bobby. You don’t know what you’re doing.’”

Staples speaks from experience: Late in the summer of 2023, soon after turning 84, she told her manager she was done. She’d been on the road for 76 years, ever since her father, Roebuck Staples, known as Pops, assembled a family band when she was 8. The Staple Singers became a gospel fulcrum of the civil rights movement and, later, a force for bending genres — mixing funk, rock and soul inside their spiritual mission, an all-American alchemy. The band’s mightiest singer and sole survivor since the death of her sister Yvonne in 2018 and brother, Pervis , in 2021, Mavis remained in high demand, a historical treasure commanding a thunderous contralto.

“Being an American and not believing in royalty, meeting her was the closest I’d ever felt,” said Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, who marveled at her while watching “ The Last Waltz ” decades before he produced a string of her poignant albums. “I felt the same way when I met Johnny Cash, like meeting a dollar bill or bald eagle.”

A seemingly indomitable extrovert, Staples had deeply resented being homebound during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. So she returned to the road with gusto, playing more than 50 shows last summer. But in July, she missed the end of a moving walkway in Germany and fell on her face. Was this, she wondered, the life she wanted? She’d previously mentioned retirement, but now she insisted.

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