ic sidewalks, segregation established an intricate set of rules to govern every kind of interracial contact that were reinforced by its repeated daily humiliations. Laws and practices that assigned African American laborers the most menial and lowest-paying jobs and kept them out of labor unions ensured their economic subordination.
White newspapers stirred fears of black criminality and white police often arrested black people for the most minor infractions. As the primary source from the Cleveland Advocate in 1918 suggests, all-white juries and white judges punished African Americans more severely than whites, even when whites had committed the greater crime (see Primary Source "'Colored' Gets Three Years -- 'White' Gets Thirty Days" ). More broadly, Southern courts sentenced a disproportionate number of African Americans to chain gangs and prison.
Segregation literally rendered African American life less valuable than white life. Black Southerners had higher mortality rates, for example, because they lived in areas where white officials did not invest in improving sanitation and because the lack of public spending on health services for black people typically meant fewer hospitals and treatment options. An untold number of black adults and black children died as a result.
Students need a clear understanding that violence—or the threat of it—was central to maintaining segregation, and what made racial terrorism so effective was its randomness in execution. Rumors of rape might spur a lynching or a race riot in which white mobs attacked entire black communities.
Textbooks obscure how lynching functioned as a political and economic tool. They do not explain spectacle lynchings which were highly ritualized events that drew hundreds or thousands of onlookers. Nor do the textbooks examine the specific contexts in which racial violence flourished and how these changed over time. Textbooks also fail to call adequate attention to the reality that this violence was national in scope. Primary sources like Claude McKay's 1919 poem "If We Must Die" express African American responses to the racial violence that erupted following World War I (see Primary Source "If We Must Die" ).
Also absent in textbooks are the organized efforts, first led by African Americans and later by interracial groups, to combat lynching and their failure to secure federal anti-lynching legislation. The December 1930 newsletter from the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching reviews disfranchisement's effects on Southern politics and condemns mob violence that resulted in lynching (see Primary Source News Bulletin, December 1 ).
Textbooks that portray segregation as a prelude to a more celebratory narrative of the civil rights era collapse the history of earlier generations of African American people into a monolithic victimhood. Yet the dependence on violence as the ultimate enforcement tool underscores the difficult work of white supremacy. During Reconstruction, African Americans established churches, schools, businesses, and mutual aid societies to institutionalize their freedom, strengthen their communities, and train future leaders. They did not cease to act politically after losing the right to vote.
An almost exclusive focus on the Brown decision in textbooks eclipses other legal battles for equality in education, employment, and housing, along with the right to vote in the all-white Democratic primary. Primary sources demonstrate that African Americans embraced a variety of strategies to combat segregation's injustices.
The excerpt from the Supreme Court's 1948 decision in Shelley v. Kraemer, for example, pertains to a battle for equal access to housing outside of the South (see Primary Source Excerpt from Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson ). At the same time, textbook celebrations of Brown overlook both the overt and the subtle delay tactics designed by state legislatures, which kept some school districts segregated into the early 1970s, as well as recent court decisions that have led to re-segregation in public schools.
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