Two Nations, Separate and Unequal

In 1967, Lyndon B. Johnson formed a commission to investigate the underlying causes of a series of race riots across the country. Brown v. Board had already long been debated in the Supreme Court. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act both already had Johnson’s signature. The President was seemingly baffled by the idea that African Americans were still unhappy with their place in American society.

The Kerner Commission spent seven months investigating urban areas across the country and found a country headed towards “two societies, one black and one white – separate and unequal.” The 400-page report singled out economic inequality as the prevailing frustration among African American communities, indeed even after they received expanded political rights. The report also gave a list of recommendations for moving forward towards a more stable union, including equal access to adequate housing and jobs in cities.

                                                   

Johnson, however, dismissed the report as fiction.

In 2018, the Hooks Institute for Social Change, in cooperation with the National Civil Rights Museum, released a new report. The central question in the report was how far African Americans have come in fifty years, judging by indicators of economic progress.

To put it simply, the report better answers the question not of how far black Memphians have come, but rather just how far they’ve economically regressed.

The report demonstrates that the childhood poverty rate for African American children is four times greater than that of white children. African Americans still earn less than half of white earners. Where the incarceration rate for white people fell slightly, that of African Americans has steadily increased.

There is little optimism in the new report, as there is very little to be found. African Americans still live in a society of economic and social segregation. While federal and state legislatures may not uphold Jim Crow laws in 2018, the past fifty years have seen a continuity in African American success, restricted by the legacy of segregation that has persisted into the twenty-first century.

We as a nation have to get away from the notion that just because we desegregated schools in 1954 does not mean that America did away with racial inequality. The underlying nature of segregation was far more pervasive.

Segregation was not simply a distinction between white schools and black schools or white lunch counters and black lunch counters. It was white jobs and black jobs. White neighborhoods and black neighborhoods. White thoughts and black thoughts. White prosperity and black poverty.

Jim Crow was not content with ensuring that black children did not ride the same school bus as white children. Jim Crow laws restricted everything from social status to economic mobility, and these are restrictions that even as of 2018 remain unaddressed.

Unfortunately, the Kerner nightmare, in many ways, came true. We have steadily moved in the direction a stratified nation, split along racial and economic lines. Until America can acknowledge the historical implications of segregation and address the inequalities that have only gotten worse as a consequence of segregation, we will continue to be two nations, separate and unequal.