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.
Those studying segregation would do well to ask several questions:
- In what ways did international events influence national attitudes toward race at the turn of the 20th century?
- When and in what contexts did racial violence flair?
- How did segregation differ in urban and rural areas?
- How did African Americans strategies to challenge segregation evolve between the 1890s, the World War I era, the New Deal years, and during World War II and the Cold War?
- What factors shaped their successes and failures?
- Finally, why did the federal government allow such blatant injustices to flourish so long? What was its role in sustaining segregation outside of the South, whether through housing, loan, or urban renewal policies?
As the primary sources show, the South's vicious de jure system of segregation stands apart. Yet the rest of the nation's reliance on both informal custom and formal policy means that segregation—as well as the white supremacy and federal complicity that sustained it—cannot be dismissed as a regional aberration in an otherwise democratic nation.