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The slave trade separated married couples, with slaveowners exercising absolute control over their human property by deciding whether to allow or even force slaves to marry each other. Married slaves had no legal status, so their marriages lasted only until one partner was sold. After the Civil War, Whites resented the equality of legalizing marriages for Blacks, which threatened White control of Black labor.

A New Deal program created in 1935 to combat poverty was Aid to Dependent Children, which helped women who didn’t have breadwinning husbands. Unlike White women, Black women were expected to work and were denied these welfare payments. Despite Whites’ devaluation of Blacks and their marriages, the Black marriage rate was higher than the rate for Whites from 1890 to 1960. But that changed in the 1960s. As Blacks moved north in the Great Migration and civil rights activists defeated discrimination in welfare policy, it became easier for poor Black women to get welfare. White backlash against the civil rights movement eroded support for antipoverty programs and characterized Black female recipients as “welfare queens.” Labor market discrimination reduced Black men’s earnings, leaving Black women dependent on welfare benefits and subject to humiliating enforcement of the “man in the house” rule, which denied benefits if a man was living in the home. Consequently, many Black men abandoned their families to prevent the mother from losing benefits.

After the US Supreme Court struck down state “man in the house” rules in 1968, the government’s assault on Black marriages continued with President Nixon’s War on Drugs and the era of mass incarceration. By 2010, 4,347 of every 100,000 Black men were in prison, a rate six times higher than the White incarceration rate. In 1981, President Reagan signed a new federal law which treated a live-in partner’s income as if he were a stepfather, resurrecting the “man in the house” rule. Today, Black men experience the highest rates of mortality, unemployment, and incarceration, decimating the supply of Black men earning family-supporting wages, and causing the Black marriage rate to plummet. In 1960, 61% of African Americans were married; by 2020 it fell to just 30%.

Recommended reading: The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty by Jill Quadagno

America’s War on Black Families - Black History Snippets

As part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal economic recovery plan, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 established county committees to distribute farm subsidies. These committees were comprised solely of White men who ensured that most of the money was distributed to White farmers.

In the 1960s, activists aggressively increased the number of Black candidates running for county committees, while the US Commission on Civil Rights documented the entrenched discriminatory practices of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which caused the Secretary of Agriculture to appoint the department’s first civil rights director. However, the work of the office of civil rights in USDA was actively obstructed by the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee as well as President Richard Nixon’s administration.

In 1997, a class action lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, was filed by Black farmers against USDA and was settled in 1999 for $1 billion, the largest civil rights settlement in US history. The judge wrote, “the Department of Agriculture and the county commissioners discriminated against African American farmers when they denied, delayed or otherwise frustrated the applications of those farmers for farm loans and other credit and benefit programs.” Only 16,281 farmers received a $50,000 payment, only 371 farmers were granted debt relief (that they haven’t received due to lawsuits filed by White farmers claiming the relief is illegal reparations), and no farmer was given his land back. In 2010, the federal government reached a second settlement, known as Pigford II, that provided an additional $1.2 billion to Black farmers.

Recommended reading: A Brief History of Discrimination against Black Farmers—Including by the USDA - Union of Concerned Scientists

USDA Systematically Discriminated Against Black Farmers

At the end of the 19th century, America witnessed the onset of apartheid accompanied by widespread disenfranchisement and savage lynchings of Black Americans. In this environment, Black artists and authors increasingly created literature, poetry, music, and visual art to demonstrate the intellectual equality of African Americans, with the aim to achieve full citizenship rights. In this spirit, James Weldon Johnson, one of Florida’s first Black attorneys, wrote a poem honoring President Abraham Lincoln, who had worked heroically to free enslaved Black people.

Mr. Johnson, the principal of a school in Jacksonville, had a choir of 500 students perform “Lift Every Voice and Sing” for the first time in 1900. His brother John, who taught music at the school, wrote the accompanying music. This patriotic hymn tells the story of how African Americans have come from a dark past of slavery and oppression to an unrealized but bright future of liberty and equality.

The Johnson brothers soon moved to New York as the song continued to be sung by school and church groups across Florida and eventually throughout the South. After the NAACP officially adopted the song as its theme in 1919, it became known as the “Black National Anthem.” With lyrics progressing from praise to lament to prayer, this anthem of hope and freedom has inspired generations of people in America and around the world to overcome oppression and injustice.

Recommended reading: Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century by Kevin K. Gaines

A Song of Freedom for All - Black History Snippets

In the 17th century, despite having fewer people than England, the Dutch were much richer. Jealous English aristocrats blamed their lower standing on the idleness of the poor, an attribute of particular disrepute to Reformers who condemned the idle lives of monasteries and convents, while asserting that a disposition for hard work was a sign of worthiness of heavenly rest.

As English gentlemen sought wealth in the New World, the religious zeal for hard work was found in New England but not among Virginians, who found another way of compelling men to a maximum output of labor. As masters lamented the overall lack of indentured servants and the laziness of the ones they had, the market produced a solution: slaves. To establish slavery in Virginia it wasn’t necessary to enslave anyone – they just bought people who were already enslaved. With slavery, Virginians exceeded all their previous efforts to maximize productivity as there was no limit to the work a master could command from his slaves, including making women and children work. The slave population could thus be more productive than a free population with the same age and sex structure would have been. And unlike the offspring of servants, the children of slaves became the property of their masters.

The only disadvantage that slavery presented to the slaveowners was that slaves had no incentive to work. Slaves could not be made to work out of fear of losing liberty, so they had to be made to fear for their lives. In 1669, the Virginia assembly passed a new law: if any slave resisted his master and by the extremity of the correction should die, his death would not be a crime. Such was the price of slavery, and Virginia masters were prepared to pay it to build the wealth of the nation. To get hard work out of men and women who had nothing to gain but absence of pain, White men had to be willing to beat, maim, and kill.

Recommended reading: American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund S. Morgan

Colonial Obsession With Hard Work Propelled Slavery

Just weeks after the US Supreme Court desegregated schools in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Charleston, Arkansas became the first city to integrate its schools when eleven Black students began attending formerly all-White schools. Although integration in Charleston was peaceful, intense White resistance in New Orleans prevented integration until 1960, when four courageous Black girls were permitted to attend all-White schools.

When Ruby Bridges walked into William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans’ Upper Ninth Ward, intense media coverage made her name known throughout the nation. Meanwhile, in the Lower Ninth Ward, three other girls—Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, and Tessie Prevost—climbed the steps to McDonogh 19 Elementary School. They experienced the same ostracism as Ms. Bridges, just without the viral images. Two years later, the three girls were sent to integrate another elementary school, T.J. Semmes, where they were horribly mistreated. While all the White students had withdrawn from Frantz, the racist teachers and students remained at Semmes, constantly hitting and spitting on the girls. Fearing for their safety, the girls never ate in the cafeteria.

After standing vacant for many years, Ms. Tate’s foundation acquired the McDonogh 19 school building, working to redeem its past racial injustices by transforming it into affordable senior housing. The building will also house the state’s first civil rights museum, which will tell the story of New Orleans’ school desegregation, a truth that was deliberately suppressed for sixty years.

Recommended reading: Holding onto History: Leona Tate creates New Orleans' first civil rights museum | The Latest | Gambit Weekly | nola.com

The Forgotten Girls of New Orleans School Desegregation

The US government encouraged, incentivized, and subsidized homeownership for Whites in the early 20th century, while the Federal Housing Administration’s policy of redlining prevented Blacks from participating in this act of citizenship. To alleviate the ever-present housing shortage for Blacks, the 1968 Fair Housing Act created the first low-income homeownership programs using subsidies, long amortization periods, and mortgage insurance guarantees to entice participation of the real estate industry.

Unregulated mortgage banks saw an opportunity to make money on FHA loans by charging high origination fees, servicing fees, and “discount points”–money paid by the borrower before making the first loan payment. When a loan went into foreclosure, since the front-end fees and discount points were paid first, mortgage banks had already made their profit on the loan. With the FHA guaranteeing the full amount of the loan, mortgage banks made more money on foreclosed loans than on loans paid off at maturity. They also packaged multiple mortgages and sold them to GNMA, allowing them to free up capital to originate more mortgages. GNMA was required to purchase these mortgage-backed securities at 100% of face value without any assessment of soundness. With the backing of GNMA, long-term investors didn’t have to worry about foreclosures adversely affecting their investment; FHA mortgage insurance didn’t protect the homeowner, it protected the investors.

With rising demand for mortgage-backed securities, poor, Black women were increasingly targeted for low-income homeownership programs because of their high likelihood of foreclosure. To get loans approved on substandard properties, appraisers were paid to provide inflated valuations with later investigations showing as many as 88% of appraised Section 235 properties having “significant deficiencies affecting safety, health or livability.” The US housing market that for decades had been one of racial exclusion, was transformed by HUD-FHA into one of predatory inclusion by removing financial risk for the private sector while extracting savings from the ghetto and reinvesting the money in White suburbs. The failure of the 1970s homeownership programs increased the wealth of Whites and reinforced their perception that Blacks destroy value, while a generation of Americans born in the 1960s and 1970s grew up believing that suburban housing appreciation and urban neighborhood deterioration were natural phenomena.

Recommended reading: Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Predatory Loans Were Developed for Black Borrowers

From the founding of Jamestown in 1607, and despite the arrival twelve years later of the first Africans who came not as fellow immigrants but as enslaved property, White Americans established the pattern of living in largely all-White communities for the next 260 years. After the Civil War, when Black Americans were legally free to live wherever they chose, White residents initially prevented them from living in their communities. As the government gradually enforced Black Americans’ right to live anywhere, White residents left the cities they had inhabited for three centuries and moved to the new suburbs.

Although some young White people are moving into gentrified downtown neighborhoods, census data show that the White population is declining in broader urban areas as they move farther out to exurbs, often in neighboring counties. Those who don’t relocate to whiter public school districts often enroll their children in private schools, which are usually whiter than the cities in which they are located. School district gerrymandering has also become a form of White flight without physical relocation. Recent studies by EdBuild and the American Educational Research Association show that school secession is significantly increasing school segregation under the seemingly nonracial banner of “local control.”

White society places a higher value on property than on Black people, and the fear of losing property value has been the impetus for White flight. White people have treated Black people as a problem to be solved rather than as people to be known. Today, the US has more than twice as many majority-Black cities as it did in 1970. White flight caused this major shift in urban demographics and the subsequent disinvestment and home devaluation totaling trillions of dollars. As White residents left American cities, property values fell. This reduced property tax revenue, producing underfunded public services, which contributed to rising crime and poverty. Once cities had sufficiently declined, “urban renewal” was used to justify the construction of highways, factories, waste disposal sites, and other hazardous industries in majority-Black neighborhoods. Decades later, these cities still face costly social, infrastructure, and modernization challenges, yet they have less revenue per capita than in 1970.

Recommended reading: White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism by Kevin M. Kruse

White Flight Kept America Segregated

After WWII, Nashville’s Jefferson Street was the center of a neighborhood where a thriving music scene and prosperous business community were the realization of the American dream for Blacks. In 1955, Nashville began planning the construction of I-40. A preliminary study routed the highway parallel to Charlotte Avenue, but the final recommendation placed it in its present location, through North Nashville along Jefferson Street. In 1967, the I-40 Steering Committee, an organization of Black residents affected by the proposed plan, unsuccessfully sued the state in US District Court for a lack of public hearings and alleging racial discrimination in the choice of the highway’s path.

Not only would the interstate destroy businesses, homes, and the Jefferson Street Church of Christ, but it also bisected the remaining community. The Federal Highway Administrator stated in 1968 that the initial route was changed due to its effects on businesses, homes, and a hospital. However, the final route eliminated twice as many homes and three times as many businesses as the original route. The difference? The first route displaced White-owned houses and businesses and a Whites-only hospital, whereas the final route displaced Black-owned homes and businesses.

Nearly 80% of Nashville’s Black-owned businesses were destroyed to build I-40. The routing of I-65 went through the neighborhoods north and west of the Capitol where 94% of evicted people were Black. Many of those evicted from the Capitol Hill neighborhood moved to the Edgehill neighborhood. Ten years later, construction of I-40 and I-65 isolated Edgehill from downtown and the east, forcing many Blacks to experience eviction again. In 2021, Nashville applied for a federal Infrastructure for Rebuilding America grant to construct a lid over I-40, creating 3.4 acres of new land to reconnect the divided Black neighborhoods. As of 2025, the project remains in the planning phase.

Recommended reading: Deborah N. Archer, "White Men's Roads through Black Men's Homes": Advancing Racial Equity through Highway Reconstruction, 73 Vanderbilt Law Review 1259 (2020)

I-40 Destroys Thriving Black Nashville Neighborhood

In the 1960s, construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway destroyed housing and divided Black-majority neighborhoods in New York City. This, along with government and business disinvestment, set the stage for the rise of gangs in the city. Amidst the urban decay, block parties were a popular way for Black youth to find something to enjoy in the ghetto. On a sweltering Saturday night in August 1973, an otherwise ordinary end-of-summer party in the Bronx became the site of something extraordinary. The party was hosted by DJ Kool Herc who debuted a new technique he’d developed that extended the dance breaks in songs, allowing dancers to show off their skills longer and keep the crowd hyped. Since there was no singing during these breaks, Herc’s friend, Coke La Rock, would get on the mic and call out the names of the dancers, motivating them to show off their moves while he freestyled rhymes to keep the party going.

Two years later, when police shot and killed an unarmed Black man, his death inspired his friend Afrika Bambaataa to redirect his energies toward nonviolence. Bambaataa had just entered a UNICEF essay contest and won a trip to Nigeria, an experience that motivated him to create a community of positivity and Black empowerment in NYC. He began collaborating with other DJs and MCs to create an alternative to gang life with a group he called the Zulu Nation, which spread peace and unity through breakdancing competitions in the Bronx.

When singer Silvia Robinson went to one of these parties in 1979, she was inspired to recruit several MCs to record what became the first commercial rap song, “Rapper’s Delight.” The music of DJs and rappers became known as “hip-hop” as it rapidly spread the voices of urban Blacks across America, with the lyrics conveying the truth of life in the ghetto. Born in oppression, hip-hop became the sound of freedom. By 2017, hip-hop proclaimed its endurance by becoming America’s most popular music genre, and in 2023, fifty years after hip-hop’s birth, DJ Kool Herc was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Recommended reading: Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang and D.J. Kool Herc

Hip-Hop Became the Sound of Freedom

On January 8, 1867, African American men obtained the right to vote in Washington, D.C. after Congress overrode the veto of President Andrew Johnson. Because the District of Columbia was not a state, the right to vote was limited to local elections and not in federal elections. As the rapidly growing Black population exercised their power of self-rule in the District, Congress responded in 1874 by replacing D.C.’s elected government with three presidentially appointed commissioners. As Sen. John Tyler Morgan of Alabama explained, after “the negroes came into this district,” it became necessary to “deny the right of suffrage entirely to every human being…[to] burn down the barn to get rid of the rats.” A newspaper wrote in 1878 that D.C.’s “present form of alien government is about as bad as to be devised. But a system which gives the control of the district to ignorant and depraved Negroes is still worse.”

In 1961, Congress gave the District three electoral votes, enabling residents to vote for president while still not having representation in Congress. Then, in 1973, Congress enacted the District of Columbia Home Rule Act returning local control to Washington residents 99 years after removing democracy from the District. Although the Act allowed the city council to pass criminal laws, it required continued reliance on federal prosecutors to enforce them with no control over who served as prosecutor.

In 2019, when the District decided to reduce sentencing ranges for felons found in possession of a firearm, the U.S. Attorney’s office announced it would begin to prosecute such cases in federal court where sentencing ranges were twice as long. Analysis shows that prosecutors selectively enforced this policy only in predominantly Black neighborhoods resulting in 97 percent of those charged being Black.

Recommended reading: Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital by Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove

Congress Prevents Democracy in America’s Capital

After the Civil War, a new generation of Black Southerners was born who would not experience slavery. Born free, yet not truly free because of Black Codes that created a segregated society, relegating Black people to second-class citizenship. At the same time, a new generation of White Southerners inherited legal and social supremacy over their Black neighbors, though without the ownership interest their slaveholding ancestors had held. Without the incentive to protect their property, White hostility toward Black people grew increasingly violent.

Facing brutal labor conditions for little or no pay, Jim Crow segregation, voter suppression, and the constant threat of lynching, young Black Americans began searching for a way out. That opportunity emerged during WWI, when reduced immigration from Europe created labor shortages in the North. In February 1916, the Chicago Defender reported that several hundred Black migrants had recently left Selma, Alabama; one explained simply that “treatment doesn’t warrant staying.” Their migration was a response to an economic and social order hostile to their existence. They wanted freedom, so they did what the Pilgrims had done under British tyranny: they left. Through that act, they declared their independence.

Over six decades, more than six million Black Americans left the eleven former Confederate states and settled across the US. In 1910, 90% of Black Americans lived in the South; by 1970, 47% lived in the North and West. This rapid migration transformed America’s social and economic landscape. Although Black migrants moved to every state, more than two-thirds settled in roughly a dozen major cities, creating the critical mass that helped shape African American identity in the arts, business, churches, and politics. Despite anti-Black hostility and discrimination, Black workers earned higher wages than they had in the South, helping reduce the share of Black families living below the poverty line from 87% in 1940 to 30% by 1970.

Recommended reading: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

The Great Migration Led Black Americans to Freedom

Toys often reflect the social and political context of the time, thus toys of the late 1800s had racist themes like “Old Aunt Chloe, the Negro Washerwoman” who was described as “faithful at her toil.” In the 1890s, a popular game called “Pickaninny Toy Target” featured Black children who fell into the mouth of an alligator when the target was hit: “Three little darkies, what a jolly crew. An alligator swallowed one then there was two.”

In 1921, the “Alabama Coon Jigger”, which was a wind-up figurine of a Black man dancing, was in the Sears catalog and sold over 8 million units. Toys like “The Negro Porter Pushes His Cart (1921)” and the game “Tip the Bell Boy (1929)” where the players shoot a ball at a Black bell boy, reinforced in children what Blacks were supposed to be like. The 1924 Sears catalog had the “Aunt Jemima Doll with Ma-Ma voice” dressed in a “costume of floral pattern cotton material with large white apron and collar; also red bandanna” who made “delicious pancakes [while] taking care of other dollies.” The idea that a White girl would own a Black doll to care for her White dolls showed Whites’ fondness for subservient Black domestic labor.

Long after the Civil War, these nationally available toys illustrate that White culture desired continued control of Black behavior by normalizing White supremacy through childhood play. Portraying violence against Blacks as entertainment was a casual demonstration of White power as White children were encouraged to enjoy assaulting Black bodies. Through the selling and buying of subservient Black figurines, White consumers kept the nostalgia of slavery alive for their children. The informal culture of play also included jump rope chants with one of the best-known chants, documented in every US state, being “Eney, meeny, miny, mo / Catch a nigger by the toe / If he hollers let him go / Eney, meeny, miny, mo.”

Recommended reading: Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South, Kristina DuRocher, University Press of Kentucky, 2011.

Racist Toys Normalized White Supremacy for Children

The Red Summer of 1919 was a period of White-on-Black race riots in dozens of American cities. The riots in Chicago resulted in the deaths of twenty-three Black and fifteen White people and injured hundreds. In the aftermath, the governor of Illinois established the Chicago Commission on Race Relations to investigate the riots and make recommendations to prevent their reoccurrence. Below is an excerpt from the commission’s 1922 report:

“The relation of whites and Negroes in the United States is our most grave and perplexing domestic problem. Many white Americans, while technically recognizing Negroes as citizens, cannot bring themselves to feel that they should participate in government as freely as other citizens. It is important for our white citizens always to remember that the Negroes alone of all our immigrants came to America against their will by the special compelling invitation of the whites; that the institution of slavery was introduced, expanded, and maintained in the United States by the white people and for their own benefit; and that they likewise created the conditions that followed emancipation. Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro’s making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. Centuries of the Negro slave trade and of slavery as an institution have created, and are often deemed to justify, the deep-seated prejudice against Negroes. The great body of anti-Negro public opinion, preserved in the literature and traditions of the white race during the long, unhappy progress of the Negro from savagery through slavery to citizenship, has exercised a persistent and powerful effect, both conscious and unconscious, upon the thinking and the behavior of the white group generally.

Racial misunderstanding has been fostered by the ignorance and indifference of many white citizens concerning the marvelous industry and courage shown by the Negroes and the success they have achieved in their fifty-nine years of freedom. It is of the first importance that old prejudices against the Negroes, based upon their misfortunes and not on their faults, be supplanted with respect, encouragement, and co-operation, and with a recognition of their heroic struggles for self-improvement and of their worthy achievements as loyal American citizens. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem…is the first step toward its solution.”

Recommended reading: Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America by Cameron McWhirter

Forgotten Wisdom From the Red Summer of 1919

Sixteen years after Brown v. Board, federal courts finally forced schools in Jackson, Mississippi to desegregate, which led to White families fleeing the city, shrinking the city’s tax base and the public funding of infrastructure maintenance. For decades, statewide elected officials who decide how to spend state and federal money have been White, while Jackson’s residents, over 80% of whom are Black, have lived with regularly contaminated water. In 2022, Jackson went months without any water at all due to a failed water treatment plant resulting from fifty years of disinvestment by White politicians.

From 2003 to 2009, severe financial mismanagement by the mayor of Flint, Michigan led to the governor of Michigan exercising his emergency power to appoint an administrator to run Flint, usurping its citizens’ democratic right to elect their leader. The governor’s appointed administrators made severe budget cuts including the decision in 2013 to stop pumping treated water from Detroit and instead use water from the Flint River to supply its residents. When the city failed to treat the water properly, lead started leaching into the water supply. Despite repeated complaints from residents of bad-tasting, murky, and foul-smelling water, officials insisted the water was safe.

Flint’s residents, over 56% of whom are Black, suffered nearly two years until the federal government intervened to begin correcting the problem. The Michigan Civil Rights Commission concluded that the response to the Flint water crisis was “the result of systemic racism that was built into the foundation and growth of Flint, its industry and the suburban area surrounding it.” In August 2020, Michigan agreed to pay Flint residents $600 million for failing to protect them from lead poisoning. In December 2022, Congress allocated $600 million for repairs to Jackson’s water system and the problems are still not fixed.

Recommended viewing: How Jackson, Mississippi's water crisis is a sign of larger racial inequities

Failing Infrastructure Disproportionately Affects Black Communities

Julius Rosenwald was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1862, and raised by his Jewish immigrant parents in their home across the street from where Abraham Lincoln had been raised. He later moved to Chicago where he became a successful businessman, rising to become president of Sears Roebuck in 1908. In the late 1800s, Black shoppers in the South were victims of price gouging and were denied access to quality products in White-owned stores. After Congress passed the Rural Free Delivery Act in 1893, Sears began delivering catalogs directly to rural families, enabling Black customers to order products that local stores refused to sell to them. The catalog’s affordable guitars launched the careers of B.B. King and Muddy Waters, and more importantly, provided dignity and equal consumer opportunities for millions of African Americans.

Rabbi Emil Hirsch, who led Rosenwald’s synagogue, was a co-founder of the NAACP in 1909 alongside W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells. In 1910, Rosenwald read Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, learning how education transformed Washington’s life after he was freed from slavery and inspired him to start Tuskegee Institute. A year later, they met through a mutual friend, and Washington invited Rosenwald to join Tuskegee’s board. Their shared commitment to improving the lives of African Americans inspired them to establish schools for Black children throughout the rural South. Rosenwald funded half the costs, while each local Black community contributed the rest through cash, land, and labor. This partnership resulted in the construction of 4,977 Rosenwald schools across 15 states between 1912 and 1932, educating more than 700,000 students.

A 2009 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found that during their existence, Rosenwald schools were the single most significant contributor in narrowing the educational gap between Black and White communities in the South. The schools’ impact helped drive the Great Migration, as educated Black workers sought better job prospects in the North, while those who stayed in the South saw their wages rise by 35% relative to Whites. The collaboration between Washington and Rosenwald shows how improving school quality and access can substantially increase productivity in deprived areas within a single generation.

Recommended reading: A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools That Changed America by Andrew Feiler

Rosenwald Schools Transformed a Generation of African Americans

Ignorance Is a Choice - Black History Snippets

In Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye, Claudia is a Black girl living in 1940s Ohio who has internalized a deep-seated sense of self-hatred because she does not match society’s beauty standards, which are socially constructed on White superiority. Because she lacks the qualities valued by the community, she has a low sense of self-worth, which manifests as anger and defiance in response to rejection. She destroys a White doll and refuses to admire Shirley Temple, resenting the idea that she should admire that which resembles nothing of herself. Claudia’s rejection of societal values allows her to show compassion for Pecola, another Black girl who suffers immensely from believing she will always be ugly.

In March 1965, Hugh Hefner challenged the dominant culture’s beauty standards by choosing Jennifer Jackson as the first Black Playboy centerfold, an extraordinary move given that, for decades, Black women had been portrayed in media almost exclusively as maids. Nevertheless, high profile recognition of Black beauty remained scarce. Vogue magazine, the standard-bearer for women’s beauty for the previous 82 years, finally featured a Black woman, Beverly Johnson, on its cover in 1974. The Miss America pageant, which began in 1921, had a rule stating that contestants had to be “of the white race.” Even after removing this rule in the late 1960s, state pageants continued to exclude Black participants. It wasn’t until 1984 that Vanessa Williams became the first Black woman to win Miss America.

In the 1980s, just south of Ms. Morrison’s hometown in Ohio, Victoria’s Secret began selling lingerie nationwide through its mail-order catalog, generating more than $100 billion over the next four decades. Yet, it didn’t feature a Black woman on its cover until Tyra Banks in 1997. Similarly, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, first published in 1964, was the magazine’s best-selling issue every year, yet it didn’t feature a Black woman on its cover until Ms. Banks in 1997. People magazine first named a Black woman, Halle Berry, as the World’s Most Beautiful Woman in 2003 and has only done so twice more with Beyoncé in 2012 and Lupita Nyong’o in 2014.

Recommended reading: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Black is Beautiful - Black History Snippets