The Struggle for Balck Equality is an aresting history of the
civil-rights movement--from the path-breaking Supreme Court decision of 1954,
Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka, Kansas, through the growth of strife and conflict in the 1960s to the major issues of the 1990s. Harvard Sitkoff offers not only a brilliant interpretation of the personalities and dynamics of the civil-rights organization--SNCC, CORE,
NAACP, SCLC, and others--but a superb study of the continuing problems plaguing the African-American population: the future that in 1980 seemed to hold much promise for a better way of life has by the early 1990s hardly lived up to expectations. Jim Crow has gone, but, forty years after Brown, poverty, big-city slums, white backlash, politically and socially conservative policies, and prolonged recession have made economic progress for the vast majority of blacks an elusive, perhaps ever more distant goal.
All Americans who strove and suffered to make democracy real come vividly to life in these compelling pages.
Click for the original review.
Background Information
The civil rights movement, which aimed to deliver the rights assured black Americans in the post-Civil-War amendments, reached its peak of activity in the 1960's. The principle of "separate but equal" education, a mainstay of segregation in the Deep South, was overturned by the Supreme court in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has been in the forefront of civil rights activity for a century.
