Above: Black Children with White Doll, 1942. The Gordon Parks Foundation.
Separate But Equal
The Jim Crow South
While the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawed segregation in public schools, the case did not guarantee improved living conditions for African Americans; many continued to encounter aggressive discrimination directed towards them through the means of lynching, bombing, and verbal abuse.
Also, the segregation of other public facilities continued to be enforced. Such facilities for blacks were nearly always inferior to those designated for whites, if they existed at all. Discrimination wasn’t only limited to the south; common northern practices such as redlining, mortgage discrimination, and blockbusting were designed to alienate African Americans. “Except for a small minority enjoying upper or middle class status, the masses of American Negroes, in the rural south and in the segregated slum quarters in the southern cities, are destitute.” -Gunnar Myrdal, author of An American Dilemma, 1944 |