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An earlier piece of mine. graboyes.substack.com/p…
"I grew up in small-town, Jim Crow-era Virginia. For my first 15 years, Virginia’s government was monomaniacally focused on “massive resistance” to racial integration and on denying full rights of citizenship to African Americans. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court had okayed the notion of “…
An earlier piece of mine. https://graboyes.substack.com/p/does-plessy-linger-still
"I grew up in small-town, Jim Crow-era Virginia. For my first 15 years, Virginia’s government was monomaniacally focused on “massive resistance” to racial integration and on denying full rights of citizenship to African Americans. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court had okayed the notion of “separate, but equal” in its infamous Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. In response, Virginia adopted a new constitution in 1902, designed specifically to disenfranchise and marginalize African Americans. The state government relentlessly pursued those goals until that constitution was replaced in 1971. It would be surprising if those discriminatory incentives had evaporated entirely, even half a century after purposeful racism dissipated. Conditions in my hometown today suggest to me that the damage done in those years has far from vanished."