Affirmative Action and a Legislated End To Segregation

rowan tree describes his travels in 1951, including a stop in Columbia, Tennessee, which had been the scene of race riots in 1946, and to Birmingham which, in the time before the Freedom Marches, Rowan found to be the most racist city of them all. On page after page, we read about the slights, humiliation, and outright nasty bigotry he encountered. Rowan was already not only well-educated with a degree from Oberlin College, but had a good newspaper job. Yet, he was treated as if he were an illiterate farm-hand. The color of his peel mattered. Still locations changed some things. As Rowan points out, "?it is impossible to conclude about the South. A Negro can do things in one town that he would be killed for seventy-five miles outside(a)" (p. 53).

Yet, even Washington, the nation's capital was unfriendly to blacks then (and, to some degree, clam up today). Rowan calls Washington "the beginning and the end of democracy as the Western world knows it" (p. 59). As Rowan continues his journey through and through the segregated South, he comments on the lack of medical assistance, and ab

out the lucky blacks that had a recreate or nurse nearby. Perhaps one of the worst commentaries on the situation in the Nineteen Fifties came from Negroes themselves, especially the cured ones who were used to sequestration and counseled patience on the younger generation.

nearly pointed with pride to the situation on Columbus Georgia, where "the Negro is sitting pretty. His homes are equal in some cases to anything the whites have" (p. 199). Rowan acknowledges that some of the legislation in Southern states have alter schools and education, but clearly not on a equating with white schools or the promise of higher education which many an(prenominal) blacks in the South could neither afford nor pass commensurate tests (skewed against them) to be enrolled. Little Rock was still a yr away when Rowan took his journey. Perhaps one of the most affright comments in the book is that many Southern blacks felt that "if segregation were wiped out, Southern Negroes lack the capital and training to compete successfully in the white man's world" (p. 199). It is obvious, therefore, that there was hopelessness disunited throughout the South- a fear of being ma
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