guarantee to dramatically expand White homeownership – and to build generational wealth among Whites. But the South’ s segregated colleges and the region’ s widespread redlining practices systematically denied Black veterans access to those key wealth-building tools – and enlarged the racial wealth gap that would haunt this nation for decades to come.
The United States entered World War II as the world’ s sleeping giant, but it emerged from that great conflict as the world’ s dominant superpower. Its possession and use of an atomic bomb gave the United States tremendous military muscle. And its program to rebuild wartorn Europe, called the Marshall Plan, won its namesake – Secretary of State George C. Marshall – the Nobel Peace Prize.
But while promoting democracy abroad, the United States began persecuting some of its own citizens.
They were the victims of the nation’ s“ Red Scare,” a paranoia driven by the emerging Cold War and a fear that the Soviet Union was plotting to take over this country with the help of American traitors.
People who were thought to have communist affiliations or sympathies were dragged before a congressional committee and subjected to taunting questions. One of the most outspoken advocates of this fear mongering was Mississippi congressman John Rankin, who believed that the civil rights movement was a communist plot.
Rankin left Congress in 1953, but the charge that the civil rights movement was inspired by communists bent on taking over the United States became a major argument of Southern resistance to the campaign for racial justice and equality that heated up in the 1950s.
Robeson was in the front ranks of that civil rights movement, which, over the next two decades, transformed Black life in the United States. Led by a confluence of Black preachers, college students, separatists, journalists, politicians, and social activists, it often encountered violent resistance that slowed down the movement – but failed to derail it.
In 1955, Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist preacher, led a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama to end segregated seating on the city’ s public transportation. Its success sparked a wave of protests and civil disobedience actions across the South that ushered in the passage of three major civil rights bills.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public places. The 1965 Voting Rights Act banned literacy tests, poll taxes, and other discriminatory voting practices. And the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made housing discrimination illegal.
Ironically, as Black people fought for civil rights at home, they were forced to bear an unequal share of the combat duties in a distant war.
About 300,000 Blacks served in the Vietnam War. While just 12 percent of the nation’ s population, in 1965 – as the U. S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict increased sharply – Blacks were 24 percent
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