Desegregation in the United States
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Discrimination |
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US military
Early history
Starting with
During the American Civil War, Black people enlisted in large numbers. They were mostly enslaved African Americans who had escaped the South, though there were many Northern Black unionists as well. More than 180,000 Black people served with the Union army and navy during the civil war in segregated units, known as the United States Colored Troops, under the command of White officers. They were recorded and are part of the National Park Service's Civil War Soldiers & Sailors System (CWSS).[3] Around 18,000 Black people also joined the Union Navy as sailors, who are also part of the CWSS.[3]
World Wars I and II
Despite the NAACP lobbying for the commissioning of more Black officers, they were severely underrepresented throughout World War I. Upon entering office, President Woodrow Wilson officially segregated the United States navy for the first time in its history.[4]
During
For the US Army air corps, see the Tuskegee Airmen.
For the US Army, see the 761st Tank Battalion (United States).
In the Second World War, the US Navy first experimented with integration aboard
The US Navy's newest component, the Seabees, had the same ingrained attitudes and approaches but ended up at the forefront of change. In February 1942, the
Modern history
On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9981 ordered the integration of the armed forces following World War II, a major advance in civil rights.[11] Using the executive order meant that Truman could bypass Congress. Representatives of the Solid South, all White Democrats, would likely have stonewalled related legislation.
For instance, two months prior to Truman's executive order in May 1948,
At the end of June 1950, the
On 12 October 1972, a racially fraught riot occurred on USS Kitty Hawk.[13] "Despite the presence of a Black executive officer, the ship's second-in-command, many Black sailors felt they were dealt harsher punishments and menial assignments because of their race".[14]
US housing law
The practice of
It was only after the
US education system
After
A major decline in manufacturing in northern cities, with a shift of jobs to suburbs,
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University says that desegregation of US public schools peaked in 1988. As of 2005, the proportion of Black students at schools with a White majority was at "a level lower than in any year since 1968".[17]
Some critics of school desegregation have argued that court-enforced desegregation efforts of the 1960s were either unnecessary or self-defeating, ultimately resulting in White flight from cities to suburbs. Middle class and wealthy White people continued moving from cities to suburbs during the 1970s and later, in part to escape certain integrated public school systems, but also as part of the suburbanization caused by movement of jobs to suburbs, continuing state and federal support for expansion of highways, and changes in the economy.
Some White parents in Louisiana said that they were afraid to drop off their children because of all the mobs surrounding the desegregated schools.[18]
Sociologist David Armor states in his 1995 book Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law that efforts to change the racial compositions of schools had not contributed substantially to academic achievement by minorities. Carl L. Bankston and Stephen J. Caldas, in their books A Troubled Dream: The Promise and Failure of School Desegregation in Louisiana (2002) and Forced to Fail: The Paradox of School Desegregation (2005), argued that continuing racial inequality in the larger American society had undermined efforts to force schools to desegregate.[19] They maintained that racial inequality had resulted in popular associations between school achievement and race. Therefore, the achievement levels of American schools were generally associated with their class and racial compositions. This meant that even parents without racial prejudice tended to seek middle class or better residential neighborhoods in seeking the best schools for their children. As a result, efforts to impose court-ordered desegregation often led to school districts with too few White students for effective desegregation, as White students increasingly left for majority White suburban districts or for private schools.
Asian Americans
The increasing diversity of American society has led to more complex issues related to school and ethnic proportion. In the 1994 federal court case
The newspaper AsianWeek documented the Chinese American parents' challenge. Since Chinese Americans were already nearly half the student population, the consent decree had the effect of requiring the competitive Lowell High School in San Francisco, California, to apply much higher academic admission standards for Chinese American students. However, the civil rights group Chinese for Affirmative Action sided with the school district, arguing that such standards were not harmful to Chinese Americans, and were necessary to avoid the resegregation of schools. In 2006, Chinese parents continued to protest against race-based school assignments.[20]
See also
- Achievement gap in the United States
- Civil rights movement (1896–1954)
- Educational inequality in the United States
- List of sports desegregation firsts
- Military history of African Americans
- Multiculturalism
- Timeline of the civil rights movement
References
- ^ Caves, R. W. (2004). Encyclopedia of the City. Routledge. p. 175.
- U.S. Army. 2003. Archived from the originalon 2007-07-16. Retrieved 2008-03-09.
- ^ National Park Service, Department of the Interior. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
- ^ Aneja, Abhay; Xu, Guo (2020-12-02). "The Costs of Employment Segregation: Evidence from the Federal Government under Wilson".
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(help) - ^ a b Martin Blumenson, Eisenhower (Ballantine Books Inc.: New York, 1972) p. 127; Jonathan Jordan, American Warlords: How Roosevelt's High Command Led America to Victory in World War II, (Penguin 2015), 54-58, 143-45.
- ISBN 9781891442230.
- ^ Antill, Peter (2003), Peleliu, battle for (Operation Stalemate II) - The Pacific War's Forgotten Battle, September–November 1944, "HITTING THE BEACH 3rd paragraph" [1] Archived 2018-03-15 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Thirty Fourth Naval Construction Battalion, Cmdr Lester M. Marx, Schwabacher Frey Company, San Francisco, CA, 1946 [2]
- ^ 80th naval construction battalion, Bickford Engraving And Electrotype Co. 20 Matheewson Street, Providence, RI, 1946 [3]
- ^ "Seabeemagazine online 2014/03/06". Archived from the original on 2018-05-19. Retrieved 2018-05-17.
- ISBN 9780415895583.
- ISBN 9780807835135.
- ISBN 9780230613614
- Pritzker Military Libraryon February 18, 2010
- S2CID 140451875.
- ^ Jonathan Kozol, "Segregation and Its Calamitous Effects: America's 'Apartheid' Schools" Archived 2007-02-02 at the Wayback Machine, VUE (Voices in Urban Education), Number 10, Winter 2006, Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Brown University.
- The Nation, December 19, 2005. p. 26
- ^ "1960 Year In Review: Schools Desegregate". United Press International. 1960. Retrieved 27 February 2015.
- S2CID 201738276.
- ^ "Back to School for Integration: The Catch-22 of Excellence and Diversity Without Race" Archived 2006-08-21 at the Wayback Machine, AsianWeek
External links
- Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity
- School Desegregation and Equal Educational Opportunity, part of the Civil Rights 101 Reference Guide From civilrights.org.
- Guardians of Freedom - 50th Anniversary of Operation Arkansas, by ARMY.MIL
- Civil Rights Project at Harvard University
- Commission for Racial Equality, race equality body in the UK
- Memphis Civil Rights Digital Archive Archived 2008-07-26 at the Wayback Machine
- Trumanlibrary.org
- Ussmason.org
- Bedfordbulletin.com[permanent dead link]
- John Egerton, "Walking into History: The Beginning of School Desegregation in Nashville," Southern Spaces, 4 May 2009, southernspaces.org
- Ruthie Yow, "'It's Being Black and Poor': Race, Class, and Desegregation at Pebblebrook High," Southern Spaces, 20 February 2012, southernspaces.org