Conversations: Race on the Rocks

In our last episode, Dr. Kevin Boyle joined us to help us understand how the Reagan coalition led to three decades of law and order politics taking precedence over civil rights enforcement. We also briefly discussed the war on drugs and how that tied into issues of race and the impact that it had on minorities, but that was really just a brief introduction to it.

We now pick up where we left off in that conversation, digging deeper into the problem of mass incarceration that resulted from the war on drugs first initiated by Richard Nixon, and we also begin to talk about a highly controversial topic even today – protection of minority voting rights.

As a reminder, Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University specializing in 20th century United States history. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement (which, of course, happens to be our focus). He also has a long list of publications and honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others.

Join us today as we dig deeper into the events in United States history that have shaped the racial landscape of today. We discuss the increased incentive to increase the prison population due to having criminalized American Blacks and poor Americans. Dr. Boyle also talks about voter suppression and how numerous attempts have been made over the years, especially by Republican politicians, to find creative ways of suppressing the Black vote.

Dr. Boyle stresses, however, that hope is not lost. We have seen a rise in activism and conversation, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, in recent years which indicates that people believe that change is possible.

While this unfortunately closes up my conversation with Dr. Boyle, I hope that you will join me next time as I bring on another guest who will talk to us about how Christian commitments have mobilized political resistance to racism. Be sure to invite your friends to listen in as well!

Questions for Clergy and Other Group Leaders

1. How did the economics of prisoner leasing create incentives for municipalities to arrest more people?
2. How does the reality of mass incarceration affect non-minority voting?
3. What strategies have been pursued since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to suppress non-White votes?

Show Notes:

[3:06] – Dr. Uffman returns to the conversation around the experience of the young Black man or woman at the time, referring to their experience as a triple whammy.

[4:07] – Dr. Boyle makes a connection between a local economy collapsing and illicit economy.

[6:01] – The Bill Clinton administration, as Dr. Boyle explains, took a bipartisan approach by encouraging Democrats to embrace Reagan's politics.

[7:07] – Dr. Boyle describes the language used by both parties to describe some Blacks, language such as super predators.

[8:06] – Dr. Boyle discusses how mandatory sentencing led to a vast increase in the prison population.

[10:07] – We created a profit incentive, as Dr. Uffman points out, for the arrest of people who could do manual labor, leading to the poor and Blacks being arrested because they were already criminalized by Whites.

[12:49] – Dr. Uffman reflects on how many Blacks are unfairly trapped in patterns of poverty.

[14:30] – Dr. Boyle defines what the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was and what it put into effect.

[15:55] – In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some Republicans were attempting to suppress the Black vote in sneaky ways such as limiting polling places in predominantly Black communities.

[18:17] – Dr. Boyle gives an example of the Republican party recently attempting to suppress the entire vote of Detroit in the 2020 presidential election.

[21:06] – An example is offered and described by Dr. Uffman of attempting to suppress votes by requiring an official ID or driver's license.

[22:47] – Dr. Boyle explains how gerrymandering works in different ways on a racial basis such as splitting up a Black community between two White communities.

[24:45] – Gerrymandering can actually reduce the value of a singular vote.

[27:29] – Dr. Uffman prompts Dr. Boyle to focus on hope for the future, and Dr. Boyle credits the Black Lives Matter movement as a reason to have hope.

[30:09] – Dr. Boyle reiterates that there is disagreement around the solution to the problems such as whether or not we should defund the police.

• James Forman Jr. – Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast

More from Dr. Kevin Boyle:

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

In our previous episode, Dr. Kevin Boyle joined us to talk about the political coalition that united working Whites and northern Blacks during the FDR era. We also discussed how Richard Nixon's law and order rhetoric led to a rise in White resistance. We are picking up where we left off in this episode and will be tracing the strategy of the Nixon administration to shift the national focus toward priorities other than racial equality.

As a reminder, Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University specializing in 20th century United States history. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle has a long list of publications and honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others.

Join us today as we dig deeper into the events in United States history that have shaped the racial landscape of today. Dr. Boyle discusses at length how many Whites resisted school integration and how that led to long delays in integration actually being put into effect, resulting in schools actually being more segregated today than they were when forced busing was ordered by the federal government. He also begins to give us a solid understanding of how Nixon's election led to a war on drugs which caused a mass incarceration of Blacks in the United States and also caused a major shift away from civil rights legislation.

Join us next time as we dig more deeply into the issue of mass incarceration targeting Black males. We will also discuss how well we have managed to protect the voting rights of minorities. Be sure to invite your friends to listen in as well!

1. How did school desegregation turn out in South and North? What's the status now?
2. How did segregation, the advent of the Information Age, and globalization impact Blacks young men and women in the mid-1980s?
3. How the Reagan coalition impacted blacks in terms of the safety net promises of the Great Society?
4. What did both parties think would happen and what actually happened in our War on Drugs? How did that impact minorities?

[3:25] – Dr. Uffman discusses his own experience with segregation and desegregation growing up, noting that his high school didn't integrate until he was a junior in college.

[4:23] – Dr. Uffman fast-forwards to the 1990s, illustrating the changes that had taken place since his youth.

[6:39] – Dr. Boyle further elaborates upon what happened following the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in the mid-1950s, such as how many schools found loopholes to delay desegregation.

[8:08] – Dr. Boyle explains when schools in northern states needed to, by law, start desegregating and what happened as a result.

[9:12] – The critical way to integrate schools, as Dr. Boyle emphasizes, was between cities and suburbs, which led to the Supreme Court ruling in 1974 that that didn't need to be done, resulting in integration in the north coming to a halt.

[10:27] – Dr. Uffman reiterates that re-segregation is not strictly a southern phenomenon, and Dr. Boyle agrees, emphasizing that segregation is more common nowadays in the north than it is in the south.

[11:38] – Many of the United States' industrial jobs moved to other countries, and Dr. Boyle begins to touch upon what that meant for Whites and Blacks competing for industrial jobs.

[13:45] – Dr. Boyle clarifies why the shift of industrial jobs was significant from a racial standpoint, pointing to what effect that it had on Blacks at the time.

[15:52] – Dr. Uffman offers a hypothesis of how youth was not properly equipped for the new information age, and Dr. Boyle further describes what the experience might have been like for a young Black man in a big city around that time.

[17:39] – Dr. Uffman argues that the success of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama should not serve as proof that there isn't a racial problem in the United States.

[18:49] – Dr. Boyle comments on how young men and women, especially men, got caught up in the war on drugs due to joblessness.

[21:05] – Dr. Uffman prompts Dr. Boyle to talk about Ronald Reagan's harmful rhetoric regarding welfare queens and predators, prefacing that he looked up to Reagan because of the positive things that Dr. Uffman saw from him while he served in the military.

[23:36] – Ronald Reagan, as described by Dr. Boyle, was a conservative Republican in the Goldwater tradition, which meant that he believed that welfare entitled people, making them think that they didn't have to work.

[25:32] – Dr. Boyle points out that it wasn't likely a coincidence that Reagan chose to kick off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi – the town where civil rights activists were infamously murdered only sixteen years prior.

[27:13] – Dr. Boyle makes the case that Reagan's agenda was an approach to small government that he infused with racial dog whistles that then became a large part of future conservative politics.

[29:18] – Dr. Boyle insists that Richard Nixon began the war on drugs and that one of the main problems with it is that it had a racist agenda and was creating mass incarceration for Blacks.

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast

More from Dr. Kevin Boyle:

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

In our last episode, we concluded a conversation with Dr. Kevin Boyle about the struggles and the fruits of our Civil Rights era. Specifically, we talked about our struggle toward justice in regards to housing, education, and the right to vote. Welcoming back Dr. Kevin Boyle as today's guest, we take a few steps back to discuss the New Deal and its impact on the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s. 

As a reminder, Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University specializing in 20th century United States history. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle has a long list of publications and honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others. 

Join us today as we dig deeper into the events in United States history that have shaped the racial landscape of today.

1. What was the New Deal coalition, and how did FDR create it legislatively?
2. Summarize briefly the three legislative achievements of the Great Society concerning civil rights. What hopes did they spawn?
3. Describe the massive shift in the electorate and the rise of a new governing coalition that began to appear with Nixon.
4. How did White rage in response to civil rights legislation and fear set the stage for law and order politics to dominate the ensuing decades?

• [3:15] - Dr. Boyle begins the conversation today by describing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited the segregation of public space and outlawed discrimination in employment.
• [4:02] - The enduring achievements of the second civil rights movement were the the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Housing Act of 1968.
• [5:13] - Dr. Uffman reminds us that there was a Civil Rights Act passed after the Civil War but was famously vetoed by Andrew Johnson.
• [6:01] - Following the veto of that first Civil Rights Act, Dr. Uffman lists several events that took place to lead the United States to its condition in the 1950s and 60s.
• [8:22] - Discussing the achievements of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, Dr. Boyle explains the New Deal and its intent.
• [10:01] - The New Deal put into place several job programs to build the economy back up after the Great Depression. It also established Social Security which Dr. Boyle describes.
• [11:33] - The New Deal programs reached out to poor white people and to poor black people but not at the same rate.
• [12:29] - Early on, huge numbers of black people are excluded from Social Security. They are not allowed to participate in it.
• [12:50] - For all that discrimination, though, New Deal programs did help Blacks in a way that the government hadn't done before. Half of Black population in major cities were receiving federal aid.
• [13:24] - By reaching out in this way, President Roosevelt reconfigures the electoral landscape so that the Democrats become the majority party. Dr. Boyle describes how Roosevelt did this and the types of voters he drew in.
• [15:41] - In the 60s, Lyndon Johnson won the election by a landslide and put into place a culmination of the New Deal. He didn't create programs, but he made them bigger, and they were called the Great Society.
• [17:02] - The two most important programs that came out of the Great Society are Medicare and Medicaid, which we still have in place to this day.
• [18:07] - Dr. Uffman points out that at this time there was an effort to suppress the black vote, with the percentage of active black voters decreasing to 1% in some areas.
• [21:08] - Dr. Boyle describes the urban upheaval in the late 60s that "ruptured apart" the New Deal coalition and how this affected the election of 1968.
• [22:44] - Richard Nixon ran as the voice of the middle class. He wasn't calling Whites to rampage, but rather appealing to Whites who wanted things to be calm.
• [24:07] - Dr. Uffman references The Moynihan Report and the sociological factors that generated violence in urban areas where these riots were taking place.
• [25:01] - Moynihan's argument was about the breakdown of the black family. There was a rise in single parent motherhood in black communities and he argued that there was a series of structural issues that led to this going all the way back to slavery.
• [25:58] - The Moynihan Report publication date coincided with the rising fear among Whites of black lawlessness. There is not necessarily a direct connection between reality and the panic people sometimes get about crime.
• [26:47] - Blacks staged urban upheavals as a political response to racial oppression but Whites saw them as random violence.
• [27:04] - In 1966, the FBI altered the way they collected crime data. When they did that, the reports of crime spiked and made it look like we were in the middle of a crime spike. Republicans picked this up in 1968.
• [28:02] - Dr. Boyle describes this as "the perfect storm" leading into more upheavals and violence going into the 1968 election.
• [28:44] - Dr. Boyle uses an example from his hometown of Detroit setting up a rumor control center that had an extreme increase of calls after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
• [30:27] - The most common rumor that came through at this time was that Blacks were going to go through all the suburbs of white communities and kill all the white children. That is the depth of paranoia and given the time of year was also "the passover."

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast

More from Dr. Kevin Boyle:

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

With the help of our guest, Dr. Kevin Boyle, we have covered a lot of ground. In the last episode, we paused to synthesize all of the previous ten episodes, so that is an excellent summary to listen to if you are just joining in the conversation. That last episode also helped us set the stage for understanding the nonviolent movement of the 1950s and 60s that sought to restore the civil rights that were already guaranteed to all citizens by the 14th and 15th amendments but denied to Blacks during our Jim Crow era. Dr. Boyle helped us drill down into some details regarding the players, strategies, and objectives of both sides in the battle for equal opportunity in our public spaces.

Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University specializing in the 20th century United States history. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle has a long list of publications and honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others. 

Today we pick up where we left off, tracing the pivotal moments of the quest for legislation that would finally provide equal rights. We end today's eye-opening conversation with grounds for hope as we move forward to pursue racial equality in America.

1. How did we use everyday practices to enforce notions of caste?
2. So how did the movement leaders take on American practices of caste? 
3. How did we get to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and what was its significance?
4. How did we get to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and what was its importance?
5. What are some of the characteristic techniques the moderate white eschews the language of segregation and white supremacy while obstructing the change needed?

• [2:50] - In the last episode, Dr. Boyle shared with us the beginnings of America's first nonviolent movement and how it sought to call us all to be our best selves and a part of one beloved community.
• [3:54] - The people involved in this first nonviolent movement of this era were courageous in their fight for equal rights, and Dr. Uffman reminds us that they were very young. John Lewis, for example, at this time was only 19 years old.
• [5:04] - The movement followed the Gandhian principles of starting small. They began at the lunch counters, stood up for justice, and then moved out into wider protests.
• [5:52] - One of the tricky things about nonviolent protests is that they result in violence. Dr. Boyle explains how this nonviolent protest resulted in White outrage and mass arrests.
• [6:17] - Gandhian tactics create bigger and bigger and bigger events that will freeze up the power structure so that the powerless can bring down the powerful through nonviolent means. Through that, you will create the beloved community described in the Bible.
• [6:55] - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech is evoking the beloved community, but we can't hear it anymore. We've heard it so many times.
• [7:58] - Dr. Boyle describes the Freedom Riders. They were pacifists who would defy local law on the bus and bear witness. This began with CORE, a group of radical pacifists in the 1940s.
• [8:50] - In 1961, a small group of pacifists heads off on the Freedom Rides, get down to Alabama, and are brutally attacked by Whites. CORE called it all off.
• [9:39] - SNCC in Nashville picked up the Freedom Rides again, and they were also attacked. Although they were beaten, Freedom Riders accomplished the constitutional crisis they sought.
• [10:40] - President Kennedy at that time gave them federal protection. They could force federal action through redemptive suffering.
• [11:01] - Dr. Uffman points out the distinction that this was interstate transportation. Because they were crossing state lines, President Kennedy could step in.
• [12:31] - Blacks were stripped of their right to vote through disenfranchisement laws. One of the Civil Rights Movement's ironies is that you had to take your politics into the street because of disenfranchisement, and they did, to enormous effect.
• [14:00] - After Johnson was elected in 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s organization demanded voting rights. Johnson was a supporter of voting rights, but he didn't want to work on that yet. Using the same Gandhian tactics, people marched to the courthouse in Selma, Alabama, and as they were turned away, they would come back in more significant numbers.
• [15:14] - One of the protestors in Alabama was killed, and this sparked the decision to do a more dramatic demonstration: a march from Selma to Montgomery. This was a dangerous path through Alabama.
• [16:10] - Marchers set out but could not leave Selma as they were attacked by state troopers. The footage from this played on national television.
• [17:15] - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was not present at the Selma attack, traveled there and called all people of faith to join him in Selma as an act of moral witness. Nuns, priests, ministers, and rabbis flooded the town. A minister was killed, which led to more protests, and eventually, protests were started nationwide.
• [18:15] - The pressure became so great on Lyndon Johnson, he had to introduce voting rights legislation. Dr. Boyle describes this as one of the most extraordinary events of any presidency.
• [19:02] - Quoting President Johnson, Dr. Boyle explains how his speech to legislate voting rights made him one with the movement and demonstrated the beloved community.
• [20:10] - This moment was incredible, but Dr. Uffman also points out that there was backlash, and a woman was killed as a result.
• [21:01] - Another crucial piece to this story was the availability of television and watching footage of the violence and brutality.
• [22:05] - Shifting focus to the northern states, Dr. Boyle explains that there was no northern state that embraced disenfranchisement, but segregation in housing and education was enforced through violence.
• [23:27] - Brown did not apply to these northern states because segregation was not supported or enforced by law. 
• [23:43] - Voting rights aside, the difference between the north and the south regarding segregation and violence was not very profound.
• [25:22] - Dr. Uffman refers to a book called Cold War Civil Rights by Mary Dudziak. He points out that our struggle to protect Blacks' rights was seen by other countries and used in propaganda campaigns.
• [26:52] - One of the ways the Civil Rights Movement was resisted was to label institutions as communist. The NAACP was attached as communist and outlawed in many states.
• [28:45] - The myth that these problems were only in the south has been deeply ingrained for a long time. The state department marginalized the race problem as only in the south to demonstrate that it was not an American problem. They claimed it to be only a regional problem with culture.
• [30:40] - When we think of Jim Crow, we tend to only think about drinking fountains and seats on a bus, but this is a way to narrow the race problem. 
• [31:26] - Dr. Boyle illustrates the current race problem in his town of Chicago, comparing the reaction to segregated drinking fountains and housing.
• [32:44] - Dr. Uffman quotes the book A More Beautiful and Terrible History by Jeanne Theoharis that illustrates this myth on a more personal level. Her point is that to whitewash our past and maintain structures, we've had to create a culprit of stereotype: the redneck.
• [33:42] - Using Nixon's campaign moves to illustrate, Dr. Uffman explains racists were redefined. A racist isn't that genteel moderate politician that is signing the Southern Manifesto. The only racist is the redneck.
• [35:27] - There is a lot of argument surrounding an end date for the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle lists several ends that have been suggested.
• [36:29] - Regarding federal legislation and policies in the 1970s, Whites stepped away from progress, stating they had done enough. Dr. Boyle uses the series of court cases in the 70s to illustrate this.
• [37:01] - Dr. Boyle explains how we have moved backward in segregation, especially regarding schools, poverty, and incarceration.
• [38:44] - Dr. Boyle also shares how we are currently experiencing another Civil Rights movement because of this backward movement.
• [40:06] - "I don't think democracy works without hope. Democracy is built on a faith in each other and a faith in our possibilities. Even in very dark times, I think what we risk by abandoning hope is we risk the very experiment of democracy." - Dr. Kevin Boyle
• [40:54] - Dr. Boyle believes that Blacks are the most devout Americans in many ways because, despite our history, they continue to believe and demand that America believe. This is demonstrated in the last election.
• [42:03] - Vice President Kamala Harris as the first biracial and female vice president is another step forward and grounds for hope.

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast

More from Dr. Kevin Boyle:

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

In the last episode, we began a conversation about our Civil Rights era's struggles and fruits. With our guest Dr. Kevin Boyle, we discussed the efforts to obtain equal opportunity housing and began a discussion about the segregation and desegregation of schools.

Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University specializing in 20th century United States history. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle has a long list of publications and honors, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others. 

As we begin to shift our focus to voting rights, we need to cover more ground and discuss why there was such a struggle. In today's episode, we take a few minutes to recap the events we've already talked about that laid the foundation for this struggle, and we dive a little deeper into the segregation of schools and public places.

1. How did the Southern states enact their strategy of "stall and defy"?
2. How did the Northern states enact their own version of "stall and defy"?
3.  What was the context that led to the sit-ins at Woolworth's in Greensboro and Nashville? How were ue everyday practices used to enforce notions of caste?
4. What strategy did civil rights leaders pursue in their efforts to eliminate these government-sanctioned traditions and practices of caste? Why was the example of the Beloved Community so powerful for many Americans?

• [3:18] - Dr. Uffman refers back to a previous episode with Dr. Kate Masur. They talked about the national economy fueled by the commodity of cotton and US dominance of this market by exploiting Black labor.
• [4:19] - When Black leaders were asked what they wanted most that would enable them to prosper as newly freed people, they named just two things: land and education.
• [5:01] - Especially in the South, in many ways, Whites denied Blacks land and education, giving them little option but to sell their labor for low wages.
• [5:48] - For two centuries, Blacks were denied education to prevent them from rising above their racial hierarchy station. For generations, the United States would not invest in the education of Blacks.
• [6:34] - Dr. Uffman describes the measures taken by southern Whites to prevent Blacks from migrating north.
• [7:11] - In the 20th century, Dr. Uffman explains white capping as running Blacks off the land by extralegal means through terror and intimidation.
• [7:47] - Whites continued to invent ways to block Blacks from gaining space and education, specifically restrictive covenants in housing and segregated schools.
• [8:31] - Through government-initiated redlining, Blacks couldn't get a mortgage or live in areas outside their designated and segregated neighborhoods.
• [8:57] - The cycle of progress followed by backlash continued from the Civil War onward. 
• [9:16] - After decades of obtaining incremental rulings, great American heroes like Thurgood Marshall proved to the Supreme Court that states couldn't provide separate but equal educational opportunities.
• [11:42] - In May of 1954, there was a period where Civil Rights activists thought that change would come right away. Five hundred school districts voluntarily desegregated their schools. There was a sense that real change was coming.
• [12:43] - "And then what started to happen was that many of the white politicians of the south, the white democrats who had a real vested interest in maintaining the Jim Crow system, mounted this full-throated attack on the Brown ruling. They said that it was an abomination." - Dr. Kevin Boyle
• [13:12] - The Supreme Court did not say how fast the states must comply with the Brown ruling. Many southern states refused to comply, which caused a constitutional crisis.
• [14:10] - The opposition that Southern leadership put in place filtered down into the business class who created a White Citizens' Council network. Dr. Boyle describes what this did to intimidate Blacks through their economic standing.
• [15:03] - To benefit from the order to desegregate schools, Blacks needed to appeal to their school districts for permission to attend a White school. The point of the White Citizens' Councils was to intimidate Blacks so that they would not press for desegregation in their community.
• [15:44] - From the business class, the opposition trickled down into violence. Dr. Boyle uses the story of Emmett Till to illustrate the level of violence during this time.
• [16:29] - Bringing the Southern Manifesto into the discussion, Dr. Uffman lists some prominent senators and representatives who did not sign, including Lyndon B. Johnson.
• [17:12] - Dr. Boyle explains the feedback loop created by the initial opposition of southern politicians that led to the Southern Manifesto.
• [17:58] - Dr. Uffman compares the Southern Manifesto language to the language we hear today regarding the Supreme Court's overreaching.
• [18:41] - After the Brown ruling, Southern Whites increased efforts to suppress Black votes. Dr. Uffman points out that the state of Georgia changed its flag and passed a resolution repealing the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. 
• [19:56] - Dr. Boyle explains that Whites had doubled down on Jim Crow as a defense of what they had come to see as their way of life. It turned already rapid racism into something deeper and more explosive.
• [21:19] - Dr. Uffman lists the states that by 1963 did not have a single black child attending school with white children.
• [22:09] - The state of Delaware voted to take a 12-year delay before they even thought about desegregating schools. Many districts in the state of Virginia shut down their public school system completely for years.
• [24:37] - The implementation order that came a year after the Brown ruling, called Brown II, decreed that states would need to desegregate schools "with all deliberate speed." The vague language created the possibility for states to ignore the ruling, and they did.
• [25:44] - Later, part of federal aid qualification to public schools was to comply with Brown. Then schools tried to find ways to avoid compliance without appearing to.
• [26:33] - Dr. Uffman illustrates just how long it took for his hometown to adopt any solution to comply with the Brown ruling.
• [27:33] - Most people may not realize that the Brown decision did not apply to the northern states. It applied only to states where schools were segregated by law. In the north, although schools were segregated, they were not segregated wasn't by law.
• [28:26] - The NAACP then launched a series of court cases that lasted many years in an attempt to get justices to see that northern schools were also segregated.
• [30:03] - The northern states got around this because children attended their neighborhood schools. Because neighborhoods were segregated, they didn't need to enforce segregation of schools by law.
• [32:00] - The segregation of space served two purposes. One was economical, and the other was about humiliation. Dr. Boyle uses the examples of separate drinking fountains and seating on buses to illustrate how Whites reminded Blacks symbolically that they were of less value in the social hierarchy.
• [33:08] - Dr. Boyle shares a story from a colleague not being allowed to try on a hat in a Woolworth's in the 1960s because of the color of her skin. This was so humiliating for her that she remembers it decades later.
• [34:40] - Access to public spaces was all symbolic. It was about imprinting that caste system into people's minds, both Blacks and Whites.
• [36:18] - Dr. Boyle describes the start of the sit-in movement and tells the story of Reverend James Lawson as an organizer of nonviolent campaigns against racial segregation.
• [38:50] - Shifting to Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Boyle explains how King took the Christian story of redemption and infused it into the movement. 
• [40:44] - Before the sit-ins took off, Lawson preached and trained young men and women, including John Lewis. The goal of sit-ins during this wave of activism is to create "The Beloved Community."
• [42:09] - Dr. Boyle describes the beginning of the sit-in movement that led to Martin Luther King Jr.'s creation of SNCC. SNCC became the "shock troops" of the Civil Rights Movement.
• [42:54] - Next episode, we will welcome back Dr. Kevin Boyle to discuss voting rights.

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast

More from Dr. Kevin Boyle:

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

In this eye-opening episode, we welcome back Dr. Kevin Boyle. In the previous episode, Dr. Boyle reminded us of important parts of the 20th century Civil Rights Movement regarding, in particular, how housing policies and private practices sculpted the racial topography with which we struggle today.

Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the 20th century United States. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle has a long list of publications and honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others. 

In today's episode, we pick up where we left off as a segue into our discussion on education and schools' desegregation. What progress did we make in the 60s and 70s, and how has that progress impacted us today? Dr. Boyle connects the housing regulations we discussed in the last episode to the problems the country faced in schools during that time. Although Dr. Boyle shares that our progress continues to be painfully slow, he gives us grounds for hope as we continue to try to move forward in understanding the structural racism of the past and present.

1. What was schooling like for persons of color?  What de facto public policies did we sustain that distinguished what was possible for whites and persons of color in both the South and the North?
2. What constitutional crisis did the Little Rock Nine provoke when the Arkansas governor ordered the National Guard to prevent them from attending a White school? What federal policy arose from that crisis?
3. What educational crisis did President Nixon inherit and how was it resolved?
4. How did busing seek to desegregate the schools and how was it received by Whites and Blacks? What crucial limitation did the Supreme Court of the United States place on busing that resulted in a hardening of the color lines in our cities, strengthening structural racism?

• [3:07] - Dr. Boyle starts today by reminding us about housing and the accessibility of housing in the 1950s and 1960s.
• [4:22] - In Dr. Boyle's book, he demonstrates how Blacks pushed back against the system from the 1920s onward. 
• [5:01] - Three times, the United States Congress tried to pass legislation that would make housing practices of the 50s and 60s illegal. It failed twice but passed in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
• [5:50] - Although the Fair Housing Act of 1968 passed, many discriminatory practices continued due to lack of enforcement.
• [6:23] - Dr. Boyle illustrates current segregation in housing with the 2010 census data. Housing is still to this day the most enduring form of segregation.
• [8:54] - Shifting to the topic of education, Dr. Boyle and Dr. Uffman discuss the NAACP's long legal campaign against the legal segregation of schools.
• [9:50] - Brown v. Board of Education is a landmark case, but Dr. Boyle points out that it only applied to those states where school segregation was legal. The ruling was ambiguous, and not much changed.
• [10:55] - The school board in Little Rock, Arkansas, decided to work with the NAACP and the federal court to desegregate their schools by bringing nine black students into their all-white schools.
• [11:52] - Bringing in nine students of color created a considerable backlash from the community's Whites. At the last minute, the governor of Arkansas called the National Guard to prevent them from entering the school.
• [12:41] - Dr. Boyle explains why the Arkansas governor's actions caused a constitutional crisis and how the Little Rock Nine insisted on their rights to enter the school.
• [14:31] - Dr. Uffman points out that this problem lasted weeks, and the world witnessed America's contradictions.
• [15:57] - Eisenhower was known not to support desegregation, but Dr. Uffman points out that he pushed his own beliefs aside to uphold the law.
• [17:27] - Little Rock became infamous, but it was a local case. As courageous Blacks insisted on their right to attend desegregated schools, similar scenarios unfolded across the United States in the 1960s.
• [18:23] - Reminding us that Brown v. Board of Education only affected those states in which segregated schools were legal, Dr. Boyle explains how schools in states that were stalling this process were forced to make changes immediately when the Supreme Court clarified previously ambiguous language in their ruling.
• [19:03] - When Nixon came into office in 1969, he faces the situation of northern schools resisting desegregation directives as well.
• [19:40] - The problem states were now faced with was how to desegregate schools since neighborhoods remained segregated.
• [20:03] - The most common solution to this was busing, and as the federal government directed busing Blacks to formerly white schools and Whites to formerly black schools, parents hated it. 
• [21:44] - Dr. Boyle explains that busing was a critical and radical moment in the Civil Rights movement because it forced millions of Whites into having a personal stake in civil rights.
• [22:18] - Reminding us of the White flight they discussed in the previous episode, Dr. Boyle explains how the courts required these segregated suburbs to bus students to different schools as well.
• [23:40] - Dr. Boyle uses Detroit's example to illustrate cross-district busing as there were so few Whites in Detroit following White Flight.
• [24:18] - The Supreme Court ruled that cross-district busing was not constitutionally necessary, creating color lines between suburbs and cities. Once that ruling gets handed down in 1974, schools' integration stops and schools become increasingly segregated again.
• [26:16] - Dr. Uffman describes the limitations of American federalism starting in the Reconstruction era and the effects of said limitations during the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century.
• [28:34] - The federal government in the 60s and 70s made it clear that no state or local entity had the right to segregate. The government used Little Rock as an example of the federal government's will to use force, if necessary, to ensure the desegregation of schools.
• [29:22] - Dr. Boyle describes the attempts of enraged Whites across the nation to claim that they have rights to segregated schools.
• [30:20] - The fear of and anger at federal intervention still run deep in politics today. 
• [32:54] - Dr. Boyle explains what he thinks is the significant progress we are making in finally talking about the question of structural racism.
• [34:45] - Dr. Boyle shares his immigrant father's personal story building his career in a bank through hard work. He is very proud of this, but as a historian, he knows that there was not a single bank in 1953 when his father got his teller job that would hire Blacks. His anecdote illustrates how his father benefitted from structural racism.

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast

More from Dr. Kevin Boyle:

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

Today, I welcome back Dr. Kevin Boyle, who reminded us in the previous episode the important parts of our nation's struggle with racial justice, focusing on the first few decades of the 20th century. We will pick up where we left off and take a look at the start of the Civil Rights Movement.

Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the 20th century United States. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle has a long list of publications and honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others. 

Listen on to learn more about the federal government's role in segregation from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1950s. We need to understand our past so we can understand our present. And so we can act responsibly with the racial inequity of our present time.

1. When did the second Civil Rights movement begin and end? 
2. What are "civil rights" and for which of them were we struggling to provide all citizens during most of the twentieth century?
3. How did the Cold War impact the way our 20th-century struggle for civil rights played out?
4. The federal government, led by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, actively promoted the idea of a single-family dwelling as a way of creating segregated spaces outside of crowded urban areas. Hoover's American Dream was for white people only; whites were urged to buy their own homes outside of cities, while blacks faced a gauntlet of obstacles to ensure they dared not imagine the American dream was theirs to dream. Describe our story of housing inequities from the Supreme Court's decision in Buchanan vs Warley in 1917 to what persons of color returning from service in WWII would have encountered at the beginning of Truman's administration?  What was it like for persons of color, what de facto public policies did we sustain that distinguished what was possible for whites and persons of color in both the South and the North?
5. What is 'white flight'? How did that shape our cities and neighborhoods?

• [3:51] - There is some debate among historians about when the Civil Rights Movement started and ended and if it ended at all.
• [4:36] - Dr. Boyle states that most of us think of the Civil Rights Movement as starting in the 1950s and 1960s, but it had really begun earlier in the 20th century.
• [6:50] - Woodrow Wilson tried to remake America's place in the world by committing America to WWI. He stated that America's job was to promote and protect democracy in the world.
• [7:39] - Dr. Boyle also discusses America's aspirations in the years following Woodrow Wilson's presidency, specifically during WWII, and Franklin D. Roosevelt following in his footsteps.
• [8:17] - There is a direct correlation between the Cold War and Woodrow Wilson's goals laid out in 1917. This matters for the Civil Rights Movement because for Blacks, America's aspiration for true democracy was not true to them.
• [9:40] - As the United States Department of State is telling people of color emerging from colonization to side with America rather than the USSR, Blacks at home were saying that we can't make claims about the benefits of democracy if they aren't embracing those principles at home.
• [12:01] - Dr. Boyle explains that in 1917 not only did the United States enter into WWI, but the Russian Revolution was taking place which resulted in the world's first Communist state within Russia. 
• [13:00] - Leninists believed in the international revolution of the working class. They were committed to the idea of spreading the Communist revolution around the globe. This terrified Americans.
• [13:51] - The Russian Revolution deeply disturbed Americans even though there was no direct threat to it reaching the United States. 
• [14:18] - Dr. Boyle discusses the surge of anti-Communism that comes up every several years throughout history.
• [15:14] - Dr. Uffman describes the Truman Doctrine and why it is an important part of our racial history.
• [17:09] - Convict leasing is something that has come out of these eras that continued on even until the 1990s and 2000s. The United States was continuing to exploit Black labor.
• [18:14] - We have this idea that after the United States was no longer a slave society that anyone could sell their work for money. But what historians have pointed out is that there were many other ways that people were forced to work in coerced working systems.
• [19:57] - Dr. Boyle explains that while sharecropping was not slavery, it was a form of coerced labor and uses it to demonstrate that although slavery had ended, there were many ways to continue exploiting labor, particularly the labor of Blacks.
• [21:09] - Dr. Uffman brings up the fact that Herbert Hoover promoted the American dream of a single-family home. But what wasn't taught in history books was that this was designed to segregate neighborhoods based on race.
• [22:37] - In 1917, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for neighborhoods to be segregated by law. The law couldn't tell people where they could live.
• [23:17] - Once the Supreme Court ruled that, then Jim Crow couldn't legally segregate neighborhoods anymore. Instead, the forces of the marketplace did. Whites used private agreements to segregate, and the courts did not stop that practice for decades.
• [24:28] - During the Great Depression, the bottom fell out of the real estate market. When the Roosevelt administration came in they decided to underwrite the entire real estate industry by insuring mortgages.
• [25:14] - As this happened, the federal government took all the private restrictions of the real estate marketplace and wrote them into federal regulations. Dr. Boyle describes redlining and how the government used it to divide cities and prohibit mortgages to redlined neighborhoods.
• [26:57] - Dr. Boyle shares that he taught a course to freshmen on redlining and explains how poor white neighborhoods would get redlined if just one black person was living there.
• [27:45] - Because of these federal regulations, those in redlined neighborhoods were blocked from access to the federal government's protection in keeping their homes. It became very hard to get a mortgage.
• [29:40] - The theory behind redlining was that they were assessing the market risk in different areas.
• [30:10] - During the Great Depression and WWII, there was virtually no new construction of homes. But when soldiers came home from their WWII deployment, they received government mortgages but there were no houses to buy.
• [31:07] - The Levitt construction company had the idea to mass-produce houses. They bought land and put up quick, inexpensive homes to buy with VA and FHA mortgages.
• [31:39] - But, because of the assumption that market values would be unstable if their subdivisions were integrated racially, the Levitt company did not want Blacks purchasing their houses and living in those neighborhoods, so they wrote restrictions into the deeds of the homes, and the FHA and VA wrote similar covenants in their financing deals.
• [32:22] - The vast majority of American suburbs that are built right after World War II to meet the massive housing demand are racially restricted. African Americans simply can't get into them because they can't get mortgages. The developers won't sell to them because their white neighbors get really angry and threaten them.
• [33:14] - Dr. Boyle describes the effect of racially segregated neighborhoods on economics and employment.
• [34:14] - When talking about the landscape of racial inequality, these points made by Dr. Uffman and Dr. Boyle all illustrate the role that the federal government played.
• [35:34] - Restrictive covenants on the deeds to houses were ruled unenforceable in 1948 but not illegal.
• [36:20] - The federal government's housing laws - the redlining practices - don't say anything about race. They use the word risk. The effect is racial because then these restrictive covenants are legal ways that Whites restricting where Blacks could live.
• [37:03] - Legally, private groups have every right to discriminate. It was only when the government is involved that discrimination became illegal. Redlining created  segregated cities throughout the United States. 
• [38:43] - Dr. Boyle explains contract selling and how it worked. It eliminated the middle man of the bank. Instead of getting a loan, buyers pay the seller every month for the mortgage.
• [40:07] - The tricky part about a contract sale is that the seller keeps the deed to the house until the final payment from the buyer. If a month is missed, the buyer could be kicked out of the house and lose all the money they've already paid.
• [41:10] - Contract selling became one of the ways Blacks would buy a house since they could not get a loan from the bank. With predictable frequency, they would lose the home and their money in the process, and Whites speculating on their default would reap huge profits.
• [42:01] - Sellers would count on the fact that they would miss a payment and then repeat the process multiple times on the same house with different buyers. This is another form of exploitation seen in this time.
• [43:11] - Once the connection was made between property values and race, and now that houses were more readily available to buy, Whites began leaving neighborhoods in mass numbers if Blacks moved in. 
• [44:22] - This phenomenon is called White Flight. Nine of the ten largest cities in the 1950s lost population.
• [45:22] - An entire neighborhood would go from being entirely White to entirely Black in a year because when one Black family moved in, Whites would leave en masse. This caused jobs to move to the suburbs as well.
• [47:31] - When jobs moved to the suburbs, it also caused a problem with transportation for Blacks and poor Whites in the city center. Dr. Boyle shares a story from his hometown of Detroit.
• [50:01] - When Whites moved to suburbs, the federal government subsidized factories and other employment opportunities for those areas. This wasn't illegal segregation, but Dr. Boyle demonstrates how the effect was racial inequity.
• [51:38] - In the next episode with Dr. Boyle, we will have the opportunity to talk about segregation in the American education system.

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast

More from Dr. Kevin Boyle

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

The last episode helped us understand the beginnings of Jim Crow in the south. Today we pick up where we left off, tracing pivotal moments that led similar racial tensions in the north. Welcoming back Dr. Kevin Boyle for this episode of Race on the Rocks, we dive deeper into the genesis of the Jim Crow era. How did the racial tensions of the south follow Blacks to the north and how did segregation become a nationwide way of life? 

Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the 20th century United States. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle has a long list of publications and honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others. 

Our conversation today is immensely impactful as Dr. Boyle illustrates how northern cities became segregated and how the basis of hatred led to mob violence and the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.

1. What were the most pernicious ways of systemizing hierarchy in the North?
2. Describe the rebirth of the KKK. How did the second KKK use violence and intimidation to shape our laws and politics?
3. What grounds of hope in spite in the realities of an entrenched Jim Crow system in the North?

• [2:07] - When we paused the conversation, Dr. Boyle had just discussed the racial hierarchies in the South and his book Arc of Justice.
• [2:59] - Dr. Boyle illustrates how as Blacks moved away from the south, parts of the Jim Crow system followed them. The legal segregation of schools, for example, followed them to other states they moved to.
• [3:51] - Some states did not legally require schools to be segregated from the beginning, including Illinois and Michigan. But other forms of segregation followed Blacks there, such as employment segregation.
• [5:03] - Dr. Boyle shares how jobs were segregated in all fields of employment, including in factories, and this was consistent in states like Illinois and Michigan that were prohibiting segregation in other areas.
• [5:29] - The fundamental and foundational segregation of the north is the segregation of neighborhoods. As a result, schools, hospitals, and police departments become segregated.
• [7:23] - Dr. Uffman discusses the economic pressure that came from segregation as well. Dr. Boyle uses Detroit as an example of employment competition and the stresses put on living spaces and communities.
• [8:52] - Although communities were not legally segregated, Dr. Boyle explains how neighborhood segregation was enforced.
• [10:12] - African American migration starts to come north and what Whites begin to say is, 'I don't want an African American living next door to me.'
• [10:56] - Racism alone can't segregate a city due to the simple fact that not all Whites were racist. Those who were could not impose their racism on another White to enforce segregated neighborhoods, so they sought help.
• [11:31] - Real estate markets began to use this rising tide of racism to form segregated neighborhoods and Dr. Boyle shares how this worked in Detroit beginning in 1923.
• [12:40] - This led other businesses to formally segregate as banks would not give mortgages to Blacks for homes in white neighborhoods and restrictive covenants were specifically written in the deeds of properties that they would never be sold to Blacks.
• [13:21] - The distinction is that this wasn't the state legally segregating neighborhoods. These were private agreements.
• [14:28] - Once that system was in place it created immense pressure on white homeowners to make sure those restrictions were never broken. The fear was that, If Blacks moved into their neighborhood, property values would decline. Financial system policies helped make this a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• [15:31] - For Whites who were not racist, they now had an immense economic incentive to keep that structure in place.
• [16:17] - Dr. Boyle uses Dr. Sweet, who Dr. Boyle's book Arc of Justice focuses on, as an example of this system. He managed to move into a home in a white neighborhood and a mob tried to drive him out.
• [18:37] - In Dr. Sweet's case, which is one reason it is unusual, he knew going in there would be trouble. He and his family armed themselves in their new home because they feared the mob. In defense, they opened fire and killed a member of the mob.
• [19:20] - Dr. Sweet's case is unusual, and Dr. Boyle explains that what normally would happen is that Blacks were in fact driven out of these neighborhoods through mob violence.
• [20:56] - Dr. Boyle illustrates how segregated suburbs surrounding large cities ensured the segregation of schools through the restrictive covenants of the neighborhood development.
• [22:12] - For most of Detroit's existence, 8 Mile Road was a dividing line between Blacks and Whites. 
• [23:09] - There were a number of Ku Klux Klans across this time period, and Dr. Boyle describes the second. It launched in the early part of the 20th century.
• [23:50] - After the film Birth of a Nation, many businessmen decided to form the Klan again. They form it as a money-making venture to sell membership.
• [24:50] - What the second Klan did differently was that they made hatred the basis of their organization. They supported driving out those who were different: Blacks, Jews, and Catholics specifically.
• [25:55] - The appeal of the Klan's pitch for "All-Americanism," described as male dominated Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, spread very quickly in the south.
• [26:38] - The KKK grew to have many thousands of members in each large city and they had huge political power. At their height, they controlled the state government of Indiana, for example, and Dr. Boyle lists several of the places they were in power.
• [27:42] - Dr. Boyle describes the difference between the mob violence of Dr. Sweet's story and Klan violence. The members of the mob in Dr. Sweet's case were not Klansmen. 
• [28:39] - Dr. Uffman compares the mindset of Whites participating and accepting mob violence to those who were not members of the Communist party but who tolerated Communist rhetoric in later years.
• [29:20] - The rhetoric of the Klan was the vision of being "All-American." This vision was threatened by those who were different, and the Klan pitched that Blacks and immigrants would destroy American values because they were not true Americans.
• [30:26] - The Ku Klux Klan saw other groups of people as incapable in some way or another of being true Americans because there is something that prevented them from understanding and embracing the values that defined this country as the Klan understood them.
• [31:37] - At this time there were competing visions of America and both of them claimed to be patriotic. America was built on a fundamental promise.
• [32:53] - One version of patriotism is to embrace the fundamental promise that all were created equal. 
• [33:12] - The competing version of patriotism is the Klan vision of the 1920's. They believed that we were not all created equal and those who are superior need to hold on to power even if it means embracing violence.
• [34:27] - Dr. Uffman discusses the name of Dr. Boyle's book and breaks apart the word "Arc" to demonstrate the progress being made and stories of hope.
• [35:15] - In his experience, Dr. Boyle explains that nothing will get you in bigger trouble than to suggest to older African Americans that nothing has been accomplished in the racial front in the United States. Not to say things are perfect, but things certainly have changed.
• [36:00] - Something that struck Dr. Boyle as he was writing his book was just how blatant and widespread racism was during the early 20th century. 
• [36:58] - Dr. Boyle describes the changes that have been made because of the courage of ordinary African Americans who risked it all to see change.
• [37:58] - Using a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Boyle illustrates how Blacks have always demanded what was put on paper as a promise to all Americans.

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman:

• The Way of Love
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• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast

More from Dr. Kevin Boyle

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

When Reconstruction collapsed, Jim Crow was born. Virulent racism peaked in the American South in the early 1900s and about twenty years later in the north. In today's episode, we will remember why and how Jim Crow developed as a formal system of segregation and repression. Our guest is Dr. Kevin Boyle.

Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the 20th century United States. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle has a long list of publications and honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others. 

The conversation we have in this episode of the Race on the Rocks Podcast was eye-opening for me as we discuss the racial hierarchy, not only in the American south, but the northern states as well. How did it come to this? Thanks to our guest, we are reminded and remember well the stories that shaped our racial landscape and the tensions we struggle with today.

1. When did the South and North reach apogees in terms of "virulent racism"? 
2. What were the intellectual, political, economic, and other factors that combined to create the environment where such virulent racism could flourish?
3. Why did we create Jim Crow laws, why were we able to sustain them so long, and how did they systemize our ideas of racial hierarchy with Anglo-Saxons at the top?
4. Can you remind us of some of our most pernicious ways of systemizing hierarchy in the North?
5. Describe the rise of the KKK, and especially the violence and intimidation it used to shape our laws and politics?

• [2:41] - Dr. Uffman highly recommends Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age and says that he could not put it down. By reading it, he formed questions for Dr. Boyle for today's interview.
• [3:36] - The peak of racism in the north is tied directly to the peak of racism in the south.
• [4:01] - In the twenty year period after the end of slavery, the formal system of segregation (Jim Crow) was given its final form. This political process was driven by the desire of southern Whites to reassert their control over southern politics.
• [5:02] - Jim Crow had two pieces. One piece was to take away the ability of Blacks to vote.
• [5:24] - A problem with this was that the 15th Amendment gave black men the right to vote and southern states had to find a way around that with restrictions that didn't specifically say anything about race.
• [6:15] - In addition to restrictions, like a poll tax, Dr. Boyle also describes the hyperextension of segregation. While schools were already segregated, now petty things like drinking fountains and bus seating were included.
• [7:23] - What Jim Crow was meant to do was to make sure that any time Blacks did one of these ordinary things, they would be reminded of their legal inferiority. Any time Whites did these things, they would be reminded of their superiority.
• [8:03] - White southern democrats fed the greatest racial fear of white Americans and that is sexualized fear. This triggered the frenzy of lynching in the American South.
• [8:41] - In the twenty years between 1890 and 1910, lynching in the American South was at its worst and Blacks were lynched, on average, once every two days.
• [9:18] - As this was happening more often, Blacks began migrating to the north. This brought the problem of White Supremacy to the forefront in the north, too. The northern peak of racism ran from about 1910 to 1930.
• [10:08] - Dr. Uffman shares that he was always taught that racism was a southern problem and expresses his unawareness of the peak of racism in the north.
• [10:49] - Dr. Uffman makes a comparison between repeated practices and the repetition of Blacks being reminded of their place in society.
• [12:40] - Dr. Boyle goes back to Reconstruction to explain why there was a need of political disenfranchisement of the African American vote. At its heart, Reconstruction was to reconfigure southern society.
• [13:28] - The 14th and 15th Amendments were written to give Blacks equal rights. This was revolutionary as many other countries also abolished slavery but did not give former slaves equal rights as quickly as the United States.
• [14:08] - Blacks were now holding office and voting which completely disrupted the old political patterns. The alliances Blacks were making in the south were with poorer Whites and that was detrimental to the southern Democratic party which was dedicated to White Supremacy.
• [15:21] - Dr. Boyle discusses the movement of Populism in the 1880s that was a huge movement in the south. Alliances were springing up among black and white farmers and this spurred the Democrats to do something drastic by constructing the Jim Crow system.
• [17:03] - Another implication of the Jim Crow system is that if you take away people's access to the political system, they can't influence the vote. Dr. Boyle shares the story of Dr. Sweet, who is also written about in his book, Arc of Justice.
• [18:31] - Jim Crow was explicitly designed to block opportunities, humiliate, disempower, and to make sure that Blacks could not push their way past it.
• [20:41] - In regards to the hierarchy of Jim Crow in the north, Dr. Boyle explains that there are two pieces to how it manifested. One being the side of white immigrants and the other Blacks moving north.
• [21:56] - Similar to the idea of the Age of Enlightenment, Dr. Boyle explains that there was a push for categorizing people into distinct categories.
• [23:03] - There is a symbolism attached to the words "black" and "white" to describe race since skin colors are not literally black and white. Dr. Boyle explains the symbolic meanings.
• [24:10] - Dr. Boyle shares a personal story of a cousin from Ireland visiting him in Detroit and her perception of the first black mayor on TV.
• [26:57] - Throughout history there have been many famous and intellectual people in support of White Supremacy. Dr. Uffman and Dr. Boyle list some, including Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt.
• [28:27] - Continuing the conversation in the next episode, Dr. Boyle will discuss how the racial topographies of northern cities developed the way they did and impacted our racial tensions today.

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman

• The Way of Love
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• Craig's Messages Along the Way Podcast

More from Dr. Kevin Boyle

• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

We learned a lot from Dr. Kate Masur about the soaring hopes of Reconstruction after the Civil War and, in particular, constitutional amendments aimed at protecting the basic freedoms of those formerly enslaved. But today, we remember how we fell from the height of these hopes to the darkness of our Jim Crow era.

Dr. Masur is the perfect conversation partner on this topic, and I welcome her back to the Race on the Rocks Podcast today. Dr. Masur is a history professor at Northwestern University. Most of her research investigates how Americans, north and south, grappled with the end of slavery and associated questions of racial equality. Her most recent book is Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction, which can be pre-ordered now.

1. How did the practices of peonage and sharecropping and black codes functioned to limit black economic mobility and ensured cheap labor for the plantation economy after the war?
2. What was the original Ku Klux Klan and what did it do? 
3. Why didn't Reconstruction work out? Who tried to subvert it, and why/how were they successful? 
4. How did the Supreme Court play a role in enabling the rise of Jim Crow laws?
5. How did the practice of using convict labor in the post-Civil War south serve as a means of repression and intimidation? 

• [3:12] - We begin this episode with the groups that sprung up trying to prevent African Americans from executing their newfound rights. Dr. Masur describes the Ku Klux Klan as a vigilante movement opposing the changes happening as a result of the end of slavery.
• [4:33] - Even before black men were given the right to vote, the Ku Klux Klan was formed around 1866.
• [4:51] - The Ku Klux Klan primarily victimized African Americans but also white Republicans, elected officials, and those in interracial relationships.
• [5:30] - They committed various acts of violence and Dr. Masur lists several of the ways they tried to, in their view, put people in their place.
• [6:04] - The image that we have of the Ku Klux Klan in the white robes and pointy hats mostly comes from the Klan of the 1920s and wasn't popularized until the film A Birth of a Nation in 1915. The Klan of Reconstruction did not have this costume, but still wore disguises.
• [6:42] - The actions of the Ku Klux Klan were illegal and, in 1870 and 1871, the federal government attempted to crack down on them and many were arrested.
• [7:30] - The Grant Administration actually cooled down on this, however, because they were worried about their chance of re-election. This resulted in a resurgence of white supremacy in the south.
• [8:01] - The Ku Klux Klan does not fully encompass this because by 1873 and 1874, other organizations were established and were openly terrorizing people without disguise. 
• [9:01] - The election of 1876 took place after the federal refusal to step in and intervene. Much of the end of Reconstruction had already unfolded before that contested election in 1877.
• [9:42] - Dr. Uffman points out that people had "civil rights fatigue" and compares it to the same fatigue and economic recession in the 1970s.
• [10:43] - Dr. Masur also notes the backlash in the 1970s regarding civil rights.
• [11:23] - Shifting back to the late 1800s, Dr. Masur explains that white southerners made the cost of enforcement so high and they were able to get away with more.
• [12:57] - There was a dramatically contested election in 1876 that had everything to do with the issues of Reconstruction. Because of the violence, lawlessness, and terrorism in some southern states, the election was perceived as being very close.
• [13:40] - An election commission was created to settle the election and Hayes, the Republican candidate, was awarded the presidency after months of instability and threats of civil war and violence.
• [15:11] - This landmark election is arguably the end of Reconstruction. Moving forward into the 1880s, Dr. Masur points out the play in the system of coalitions being built between black and white southerners.
• [16:15] - The Supreme Court was very unhelpful to foreseeing the new constitutional amendments. The court interpreted the amendments very narrowly.
• [17:12] - Dr. Masur and Dr. Uffman discuss the Enforcement Act, the Cruikshank Decision, and the growing problem of private violence. The Supreme Court put the responsibility on state governments and in some southern states, specifically Louisiana, the state government supported the Ku Klux Klan.
• [18:34] - By the end of the 19th century, states were writing new constitutions with poll taxes and clauses that were designed to disenfranchise primarily African Americans, but they did not use racial language.
• [21:38] - Convict leasing rose as a way to maintain a business's supply of labor. Dr. Uffman points out that law enforcement officers were even paid more to arrest more individuals and typically they were people of color.
• [22:59] - Dr. Masur explains that authorities used laws to criminalize the behavior of poor people across the board but especially targeted African Americans. It was very easy to get arrested.
• [23:58] - There was an over-incarceration of African Americans who were then leased out to private corporations and private businessmen. The convicts would provide labor and the businessmen would pay the prison per laborer which was less than hiring a worker.
• [24:38] - Dr. Masur describes the similarities between the system of convict leasing and slavery and the working conditions African Americans were subjected to.
• [26:09] - As a white male from the south, Dr. Uffman shares his experience of getting his driver's license. Through this discussion with Dr. Masur, Dr. Uffman better understands the difference between his experiences and those of people of color.
• [27:39] - Dr. Masur explains that a white person in trouble with the law would be able to get a lawyer and work themselves out of trouble. But for a black person, they had no reason to believe that justice would be served.
• [28:43] - When things like police killings come to light now or injustices and mass incarcerations, for African Americans, it is a story they have known well and for many white folks it is eye-opening that that's other people's experiences.
• [30:07] - One of the grounds of hope during Reconstruction, according to Dr. Masur and others, was the fuse that started people thinking along the lines of making the world a better place.
• [31:42] - A positive change from the Reconstruction era is the surge of people towards education and the education of African Americans.
• [33:03] - In our next episode, we will begin our conversation on the early 20th century with our guest, Dr. Kevin Boyle.

Connect with Dr. Craig Uffman

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More from Dr. Kate Masur

• About Kate Masur - Northwestern University
• Kate Masur on Twitter
• Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement From Revolution to Reconstruction by Kate Masur
• More books authored by Kate Masur
• "Yes, Wednesday's attempted insurrection is who we are" Washington Post article by Kate Masur and Gregory Downs