Dec 26, 2009

Elbow Room | Historical Context

Post Civil Rights

During the 1960s and 1970s, race relations in the United States changed more rapidly than they had since slavery was abolished during the Civil War. For the hundred years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the situation was firmly established particularly in the South to keep black Americans in conditions that were not much better than slavery had provided. In many southern states particularly, blacks were legally taken advantage of by a series of laws that have been dubbed collectively as the "Jim Crow laws," after an...