Chapter Main Points

  • At the beginning of the 20th century, the racial oppression of African Americans took the form of a rigid com­petitive system of group relations and de jure segregation. This system ended because of changing economic and political conditions, changing legal precedents, and a mass protest movement initiated by African Americans.
     
  • The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) was the single most powerful blow struck against legalized segregation. A nonviolent direct action campaign was launched in the South to challenge and defeat segregation. The U.S. Congress delivered the final blows to de jure segregation in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
     
  • Outside the South, the concerns of the African American community had centered on access to school­ing, jobs, housing, health care, and other opportunities. African Americans’ frustration and anger were expressed in the urban riots of the 1960s. The Black Power movement addressed the massive problems of racial inequality remaining after the victories of the civil rights movement.
     
  • Black–white relations since the 1960s have been characterized by continuing inequality, separation, and hostility, along with substantial improvements in status for some African Americans. Class differentiation within the African American community is greater than ever before.
     
  • The African American family has been perceived as weak, unstable, and a cause of continuing poverty. Culture of poverty theory attributes poverty to certain characteristics of the poor. An alternative view sees problems such as high rates of family desertion by men as the result of poverty, rather than the cause.
     
  • Anti-black prejudice and discrimination are manifested in more subtle, covert forms (modern racism and institutional discrimination) in contemporary society.
     
  • African Americans are largely acculturated, but centuries of separate development have created a unique black experience in American society.
     
  • There have been real improvements for many African Americans, but, the overall secondary structural assimilation of African Americans remains low. Evidence of racial inequalities in residence, schooling, politics, jobs, income, unemployment, and poverty is massive and underlines the realities of the urban underclass.
     
  • In the area of primary structural assimilation, interracial interaction and friendships are rising. Interracial marriages are increasing, although they remain a tiny percentage of all marriages.
     
  • Compared with their situation at the start of the 20th century, African Americans have made considerable improvements in quality of life but the distance to true racial equality remains enormous.