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Segregation

Why African Americans Were More Likely to Die During the 1918 Flu Pandemic

Why African Americans Were More Likely to Die During the 1918 Flu Pandemic

By Commentaries/Opinions, COVID-19 (Coronavirus)

By Rodney A. Brooks — When it came to getting healthcare during the 1918 influenza epidemic, America’s Black communities, hobbled by poverty, Jim Crow segregation and rampant discrimination, were mostly forced to fend for themselves. Opportunities for hospital care proved scarce, leaving many relying on family care and, where available, the small but burgeoning ranks of Black nurses. When the 1918 influenza epidemic began, African Americans were already beset by a barrage of social, medical…

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George Wallace blocking a federal agent from entering the University of Alabama to enroll Black students, 1963.

Is Freedom White?

By Editors' Choice

In a political season of dog whistles, we must be attentive to how talk of American freedom has long been connected to the presumed right of whites to dominate everyone else. By Jefferson Cowie, Boston Review — “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Alabama governor George Wallace’s most famous sentence fired through the frigid air on the coldest day anyone in the state could remember. His 1963 inaugural address—written by a…

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Housing Segregation

Black Households Earned 61 Cents for Every Dollar of White Median Incomes

By Commentaries/Opinions

Police violence linked to segregated housing. By Charlene Crowell — The August 23 police shooting of an unarmed Black man in Kenosha, WI, triggered yet another round of community protests and national news coverage of a Black man. A series of multiple gunshots fired by a local police officer, were not fatal for 29-year old Jacob Blake; but may have permanently paralyzed him from the waist down. Days later on…

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Protest outside the Minnesota State Capitol demanding reparations, St Paul MN, June 19 2020.

It’s Time for Reparations and Transitional Justice for African Americans

By Commentaries/Opinions, Reparations

The country needs truth-telling and acceptance of our moral, legal, political, and sociocultural responsibilities. By Joyce Hope Scott, BU Today — This is a transformative moment in history in the United States as well as in the rest of the world. Despite myths of a post-racial society as a result of many positive social transformations, we are today again forced to examine our inheritance of America’s great sin—slavery and its…

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Theodore Roosevelt was one of many U.S. presidents who was racist.

Presidents have a long history of condescension, indifference and outright racism towards Black Americans

By Editors' Choice

President Woodrow Wilson told Black leaders, ‘Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.’ He was one in a long line of racist American presidents. By Stephen A. Jones and Eric Freedman — The fury over racial injustice that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s killing has forced Americans to confront their history. That’s unfamiliar territory for most Americans, whose…

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African-American students from Saint Augustine College study while participating in a sit-in at a lunch counter reserved for white customers in Raleigh, N.C.

What People Still Get Wrong About Segregation

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Andrew Joseph Pegoda — During Black History Month and beyond, Americans are generally taught to believe that contact between white and black Americans was gradually prohibited after Reconstruction through a combination of social and legal traditions. Under the regime of Jim Crow segregation, two supposedly “separate but equal” societies gradually emerged — one for white people, another for black people — and lasted until the ’50s and ’60s. The two societies in that infamous phrase were never equal…

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Protesters outside the Howard County Board of Education building in Ellicott City, Md., last month.

Where Civility Is a Motto, a School Integration Fight Turns Bitter

By News & Current Affairs

A plan to desegregate schools in a liberal Maryland suburb founded on values of tolerance has met with stiff resistance. By Dana Goldstein, New York Times. Columbia, Md. — The planned community of Columbia, southwest of Baltimore, has prided itself on its ethos of inclusion ever since it was founded more than half a century ago. Racially integrated. Affordable apartments near big homes. “The Next America” was its optimistic,…

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Elijah Cummings

Long Before Trump’s Tweets, Baltimore Had Become a ‘Target.’ Here’s How Segregation Helped Create Its Problems

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Mahita Gajanan, Time — State leaders, city officials and resident and several Democratic presidential candidates have rushed to defend the city of Baltimore after President Donald Trump lobbed an attack against Rep. Elijah Cummings and his Maryland district, which includes much of the city. In tweets over the weekend, Trump claimed that Cummings’ Baltimore-area district is “considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States,” and called it…

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George C. Wallace

Daughter of Notorious Segregationist George Wallace Says Trump Is Worse Than Her Father

By News & Current Affairs

By Ramsey Touchberry, Newsweek — As President Donald Trump continues to invoke race as a major talking point ahead of the 2020 election, the daughter of an infamous segregationist politician from decades ago sees parallels between her father, former Alabama Governor George Wallace, and Trump. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Peggy Wallace Kennedy said. “I saw daddy a lot in 2016.” She suggested that Trump, a president who has…

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