Covert Segregation

Segregation will always be part of the past of the US; a smudge on the story of a country that had originally been created in order to house all people with justice. So many parts of the daily lives of people were filled with segregation that separated the races. Luckily, this was not taken lightly and movements such as the Freedom Riders began to sweep across the country in a flurry of nonviolent discontent. This wave could not be ignored and suddenly, the civil rights movement was just as important, if not more important, than the Cold War itself. Even the Kennedy’s could not give the pressing matter the cold shoulder and began to exercise many of their powers for the safety of those protesting, and, in the end, for the sake of supporting the national change of mindset that colored people were meant to be looked down upon and slandered.

Problem solved? Perhaps a majority of it. It certainly isn’t as visible today as it was pre-civil rights movement. But to say that it was completely wiped out would be a lie, and one that is evident once a person looks in the right places for the remnants of that age-old enmity between whites and colored people. It’s a bit like the changes that followed the Civil War; de jures, the idea of slavery was eradicated and American blacks were meant to be embraced as newly made citizens of the United States, but we know that the problem was not solved de facto and continued to plague the country in the form of segregation and the Jim Crow laws.

Though it seemed like the civil rights movement struck the death blow to the separation of the races, it seems that Jim Crow is still alive and pecking away at the relations of races. The acts of segregation may seem like accidents: houses of an African American community being razed in order to create a highway, the separation of African American and Anglo-American communities through the building of roads (from Regina Martin), transit systems created in order to allow people who were newly to the suburbs (mostly middle and upper-class whites). However, with some detective work, people have been uncovering disturbing secrets: that many of these were specifically created in order to separate classes, and in particular, the low class black Americans and higher class white Americans. There are frighteningly real documents from government officials stating that the prime reason for the placement of the highway was to take advantage of the low income (and thus the low prices of houses) of neighborhoods owned by poor American blacks, that buses were placed to support white flight away from neighborhoods that began to house black Americans. Clearly, extermination of racism is still to come.

Needless to say though, improvement is always on the rolls and will continue to, but it is in our power to push forward the progress of complete integration. All people, both colored and white, must act in order to create a unified position on the issue of segregation and the mistreatment of different races. Already, our president of this day and age has promoted the change by simply residing in office. If one man can promote this change, imagine what we can do together.

http://transportationnation.org/backofthebus/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/watch

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/2011/tag/kaitlyn-whiteside/