sing aloud Big Bill Broonzy’s “If You’re Black, Get Back!” cannot but
understand the plight of a people envisioning a narrowing of their options. No
book can convey the depths of the black experience without including material
from the oppressed group. Yet not one textbook in my original sample let
African Americans speak for themselves about the conditions they faced.
It is also crucial that students realize that the discrimination confronting
African Americans during the nadir (and afterward) was national, not just
Southern. Few textbooks point this out. Therefore, most of my first-year
college students have no idea that in many locales until after World War II, the
North, too, was segregated: that blacks could not buy houses in communities
around Minneapolis, could not work in the construction trades in Philadelphia,
would not be hired as department store clerks in Chicago, and so on. As late as
the 1990s and 2000s, some Northern suburbs still effectively barred African
Americans. So did hundreds of independent run-down towns more than half a
century after the Brown decision.
Even The American Adventure forgets its own good coverage of the nadir
and elsewhere offers this simplistic view of the period: “The years 1880-1910
seemed full of contradictions.... During Reconstruction many people tried
hard to help the black people in the South. Then, for years, most white
Americans paid little attention to the blacks. Little by little, however, there
grew a new concern for them.” The trouble is, many white high school
graduates share this worldview. Even if white concern for blacks has been
only sporadic, they would argue, why haven’t African Americans shaped up in
the hundred-plus years since Reconstruction ended? After all, immigrant
groups didn’t have everything handed to them on a platter, either.