Race, Class and Gender /

Race, Class and Gender / Blacks & Latinos

The impact of issues relative to ethnicity, socioeconomic class and gender on African-Americans and Latinos from WWII through the 1970s was dramatic and socially significant, both in terms of the welfare of Blacks and Latinos, and in terms of the overall well-being of the nation. The social change activism of Blacks and Latinos, in particular Blacks, and the legal challenges that led the Supreme Court to strike down unfair, unconstitutional laws, changed America from a segregated nation into a far more integrated country - albeit racism and discrimination still exists and may always exist to some degree.

In the book a Social and Political History of the United States the author (p. 562) notes that the most "blatant" omission of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal was racial fairness and justice. Even after defeating the racist fanatic Hitler, and the end of WWII, Caucasian-Americans were not ready to open the door for Blacks and Latinos when it came to racial justice. Indeed, the Cold War was a major distraction to the fight for racial justice that was unfortunate because millions of African-Americans were not able to vote and did not enjoy the protections that the Constitution gave to Caucasian citizens.

And so as President Truman ran for reelection in 1948, he did something about the situation by ordering the armed forces and federal civil service to be integrated. He campaigned on a platform of civil rights, and black voters in many northern cities helped him eek out a narrow victory over Thomas Dewey (Jones, 562).

That huge turnout of black voters had an impact on the future of rights for minorities; and even though Truman caused divisions within the Democratic Party (many Southern Democrats rejected Truman's call for civil rights), he set the tone and the stage for future gains by blacks. The country began a crackdown in the early 1950s on suspected communists in the U.S. And Jones asserts on page 564 that the anticommunist movement actually helped the fight for equal rights in the U.S. The NAACP supported Truman in his effort to root out communists in return for his support of civil rights legislation.

Another positive things for blacks after the war was the GI Bill; many veterans of color were able to buy homes even though the housing in the suburbs were dominated by Caucasians, Jones points out on page 576. This is an example of how ordinary people who happened to be of color and happened to have served patriotically in WWII used the GI Bill to help break down the color barrier - and economic barrier - that had previously existed in housing developments. On page 577 the author discusses the fact that while blacks and Latinos were gradually moving from lower economic classes into the middle class, there was still discrimination in the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), which gave loans for people to buy new houses. The policy known as "red lining" blocked blacks and Latinos from certain neighborhoods, a new kind of Jim Crow.

Jones alludes to the play, Raisin in the Sun, which was first performed on Broadway in 1959, and it had a dramatic impact because it was the first time a play about an African-American family had appeared on stage in a musical in New York. A lot of blacks had performed and acted and sang and danced in Broadway musical productions before 1959, but never had there been a play that really reflected how life was for blacks in America.

The fact that the play's scene was set in the low-income areas on the south side of Chicago made it very realistic. It was an eye-opener for a lot of white folks, and that was important at that time, because in America a lot of Jim Crow attitudes and mentalities were still out there. The "American Dream" of a nice house in a nice neighborhood had not yet been realized by the great majority of black and Latino families.

At the same time, many Mexican field workers and other Latino immigrants began arriving in large numbers in the Southwest, looking for, and finding, jobs that paid more than they could make in their home country. Puerto Ricans moved into New York City and other Eastern cities where, Jones states on 578, they could earn "four times" what the average wage was on the island.

In the Struggle for Democracy (Greenberg, 483-84) the author explains that gradually, little by little, the Supreme Court of the United States responded to the need to rule segregation unconstitutional. And in the process the Court ruled that any law passed using the criteria of race was also unconstitutional. The Brown v. Board of Education vote in 1954 meant that segregation in schools was not constitutional and it was the agency of black activists and advocates that got it done by bringing litigation forward. Meantime Jones mentions that Eisenhower had a "hands-off" policy regarding enforcing the Brown v. Board of Education; and while that "emboldened" segregationists and racists to resist the Supreme Court ruling, it activated ordinary African-Americans to joined in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Thanks to the marching feet of tens of thousands of Black Americans - and the boycotts led by people like Rosa Parks and others - their efforts pushed the issue until the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Over 250,000 Americans, many of then Black, attended the Martin Luther King "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963 in Washington D.C. Many believed that this was the largest demonstration of its kind in U.S. history, and it was clearly a case of a multitude of Black Americans deciding to step forward and show their support for social change and justice.

Still, just because there are laws against discrimination based on race that doesn't mean that fairness and racial peace exists in the workplace. Greenberg (485) writes that over one-third of African-Americans and more than one out of five Latino and Asian men have run into some for of job discrimination (in 2001). The country clearly has a long way to go until justice is a fact of life for all Americans. Racial profiling is another example of racism that has seemed to become institutionalized in America, and the only way for minorities to fight back has been to use their agency as citizens to convince elected officials that profiling does really happen.

Indeed, Eighty-three percent of African-Americans believe racial profiling "is real," according to a Gallup poll in 2001. In Illinois, there is a law against racial profiling ("The Illinois Racial Profiling Law"); all law enforcement departments are required to report details of traffic stops. The 2004 results, according to Northwestern University Institute on Race and Justice, show that while there is no "statewide pattern of racial bias," in many communities, "minority drivers are two to three times as likely to be the subject of a 'consent search'," a search of the driver's vehicle with permission of the driver, when no "probable cause" was presented by the officer. All the data gathered by Illinois is tainted, however, because over 50 police agencies "failed to provide data as required by law," Northwestern University reported. And also, there is "no penalty" for failure to provide data.