‘Segregation’s Constant Gardeners’: How white women kept Jim Crow alive
Last Wednesday, we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. On the same day, we witnessed the killing of Saheed Vassell, another unarmed black man, this time by New York City cops.
This week marks 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which bars housing discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, or sex.
But residential segregation is still very much alive: In Chicago, where I live, 23 neighborhoods clustered on the city’s South and West sides are more than 80 percent black, even though black people make up just a third of the city’s population. Where residential segregation persists, so does educational segregation.