Volume 43, Number 6 · April 4, 1996
Land of Opportunity?
By George M. Fredrickson
Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation
by Jennifer L Hochschild
Princeton University Press, 412 pp., $29.95
From the founding of the nation to the present, American democracy has been tested, and has usually been found wanting whenever the question of justice and equality for Americans of African descent has been raised. After the Civil War, the newly freed slaves were granted citizenship rights by constitutional amendment, but by the 1890s that citizenship had become second-class at best. In the southern states citizenship did not include the right to vote, to use the same public facilities as whites, or to be protected from racist violence. During and immediately after World War II, many white Americans woke up to the fact that legalized segregation, disfranchisement, and lynch law violated the American creed of equal rights and opportunities. When blacks challenged the southern racial order through nonviolent demonstrations that threatened to plunge the region into chaos and to embarrass the United States in the eyes of the world, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 finally made African Americans full citizens in a legally enforceable way. But it soon became apparent that legal and political equality could not produce social and economic equality. Blacks as a group remained substantially poorer than white Americans and continued to suffer from discrimination in employment and housing, as well as from the accumulated disadvantages inherited from more than three hundred years of white domination and exploitation.
Review, 3877 words
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