Blacks in Tennessee: Past and Present

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From page one of the book: "Black Tennesseans knew achievement and degradation, fairness and discrimination, success and failure over the course of the twentieth century. Their experience was as varied as the Volunteer State's landscape, but there were certain things as constant as the hot sun in Memphis in the summertime: Their race set them apart from, and usually beneath, the privileged whites in society; and they faced discrimination and separation with a commitment to struggle that rarely flagged or failed them, even if their efforts did not always yield change. They began their struggle at what the historian Rayford Logan called 'the nadir' of race relations in America, his assessment of conditions at the start of twentieth century. Indeed it was the low point. But 100 years later, African Americans in Tennessee had risen to a much higher place, in their own estimation, and that of their white neighbors. To be sure, not every problem had been overcome, and the past of discrimination and separation still weighed heavily on twenty-first century black Tennesseans. But by most indicators their climb had been upward, out of a strict caste system, to a position of reachable, if not fully achieved, equality."