ABSTRACT
It is sometimes easy to forget but less than 60 years ago the United States was still a segregated society. Across the American South millions of African Americans were denied basic civil rights and excluded from the vote. Many found themselves in laboring conditions akin to debt bondage and the great majority were poorly educated. Prejudice and discrimination kept the races strictly apart, as did state laws, creating a climate of fear and repression brilliantly captured in films like Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967). Even in the North, African Americans were treated as second-class citizens, locked out of jobs and restricted to ghettos lacking proper services and housing. Ironically, black migration, which began in earnest in the 1920s but continued throughout the 1940s and 1950s, only exacerbated many of these problems, putting further pressure on already creaking infrastructures. Small wonder, then, that many grew frustrated or that some began to call for action, even if they disagreed on what form that action should take.
