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Introduction: The Problem Of The Color Line, Elizabeth Clark-Lewis
Introduction: The Problem Of The Color Line, Elizabeth Clark-Lewis
History Department Faculty Publications
"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." Fifty years after Dr. W. E. B. DuBois wrote these words in The Souls of Black Folk, the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education case dramatized them. This legal action forced the United States to confront the explicit racial caste system imposed on African Americans prior to the constitutional protections guaranteed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Brown decision also highlighted how politics, wedded to the maintenance of white supremacy, supported the well-organized de Jure terror system common …
Duty And "Fast Living": The Diary Of Mary Johnson Sprow, Domestic Worker, Elizabeth Clark-Lewis
Duty And "Fast Living": The Diary Of Mary Johnson Sprow, Domestic Worker, Elizabeth Clark-Lewis
History Department Faculty Publications
In the fall of 1979 my great-aunt Mary Johnson Sprow found a diary she had written while working as a domestic servant more than 60 years before. For more than seven years I had conducted interviews with her, her three other siblings, and their spouses; finally, I would touch the paper on which she so tenderly placed her thoughts as a young live-in servant from rural Virginia. The diary and oral history interviews helped me flesh out the history of young women who migrated to Washington from the rural South before and during the "Great Migration." This research became the …