The Problem with the Color-Line Paper

Robert A. Powell

HIS 204

Ms. Katie Filbeck

November 10, 2012

The Problem with the Color-Line Paper

Arguably, race has been the most endemic division in American politics and policy. Although class is the essential construct in understanding American economic life and the workplace, Americans often think of themselves as workers, managers, and owners. Class remains the elusive little secret in American political life. Indeed few, if any, important political conjunctures in American history have crystallized around American workers acting as a class-conscious political force. I will briefly inform you on the state and national policies that entrenched the color-line through the First World War. I will conclude my paper by talking about how racial ideas played into the acceptance of immigrants within U.S. culture and as a justification for U.S. imperialism into the 1920s. The first couple of decades in the twentieth century were some of the low points for

African Americans since the end of the Civil War. America was always viewed as a role model

for democracy to the rest of the world. Little did they know about the problems that were hidden

from the public. America was battling racial and gender equality. Women had long been battling issues such as the right to vote in the political system and the types of jobs they were able to hold. Our text stated that “a typical life path for a woman of this era was marriage and family, where her responsibility was tending to a home and caring for the needs her children and spouse” (Bowles, 2011, p.20). On the other hand, African Americans were battling separation and segregation. The Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 legalized racism and proposed that separate but equal facilities were fair and just at that time.