The civil rights movement and Black Power In fact, the majority of black families in the 1970s included both a husband and a wife. However, this type of breakup was far from always the case. Jobs were scarce and often menial, a situation that, combined with the substandard housing, contributed to the breakup of the black family unit.
Throughout black urban areas the infant mortality rate was twice as high as for white infants. Schools had few materials, including textbooks, and often there was not even enough room for students to sit.
In the early 1970s, nearly half of black America lived in segregated city ghettos in dangerous, rundown buildings with constantly interrupted water and heating services. Urban blacks felt this especially keenly. Despite the victories of the civil rights movement, many blacks still resided in segregated areas with a far lower standard of living and more limited life options than whites. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 legally abolished segregation and discrimination, but “legal equality in principle did not make for justice in practice” (Pinkney, p. The gains made by African Americans as a result of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s lay mostly in the realm of their status as citizens. Events in History at the Time of the Novel Urban blacks in the early 1970s
Some of the era’s young people, as shown in A Hero Ain’t Nothin but a Sandwich, escaped from its harsh pressures by turning to heroin. Furthermore, opportunities for African Americans were still severely limited by racism. Living conditions, however, remained just as squalid in Harlem and other urban areas of the United States as they had been before the movement. By the early 1970s, when Childress’s novel takes place, the civil rights movement had improved the political situation of African Americans. A novel set in Ihe Harlem section of New York City in the early 1970s published 1973.Īn African American teenager is drawn to use heroin because of the pressures of being black and living in poverty in urban United States.Įvents in History at the Time of the NovelĪlice Childress was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but grew up in the racially segregated Harlem district of New York City in the 1920s and 1930s.
0 kommentar(er)
