1.09.2008

Sundown Towns

Cross-posted from The Blog and the Bullet.

Ann blogs about the history of sundown towns and their continued existence today:
Many Americans ask themselves why is that black citizens remain the outsiders in this supposed moral society that rewards hard work. Many people wonder why black citizens have made so little progress in the following 143 years after the abolition of slavery. What they do not know is that there was a time when black Americans lived in better more racially diverse conditions during the 1870s and the earlier 1880s, when Reconstruction was struggling to avoid the vise-like death grip that burgeoning white supremacy had caught it in. Many Americans do not realize that de jure residential segregation grew progressivly worse until around 1968, and that it did not start to somewhat decrease until the 1970s, 1980s, well after the Civil Rights Movement had ended.

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