ABSTRACT

Nearly one hundred years ago, noted African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois observed that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (1903). More recently, historian John Hope Franklin (1993) has predicted that “the problem of the twenty-first century will be the problem of the color line” (p. 5). It would be fair to say, in fact, that race has been a constant American preoccupation since the seventeenth century. Race relations has been called a perennial American dilemma (Clayton and Watson, 1996), and racial injustice, according to Appiah and Guttman (1996), remains perhaps the most “morally and intellectually vexing problem in the public life of this country” (p. 107).