Betsey Brown | Historical Context
Race Relations in the 1950s
Though Shange wrote Betsey Brown in 1985, she set the book in 1959, during the period of her own teenage years. The historical details of the novel are very significant, particularly as they relate to the issues of race relations and school desegregation.
In the 1950s African Americans lived in a society largely separate from whites. “Jim Crow” laws—in effect throughout the South and in other parts of the country as well—segregated public facilities, and blacks interacted with whites mostly as their workers or servants. One...
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