The Color Line provides a concise history of the role of race and ethnicity in the US, from the early colonial period to the present, to reveal the public policies and private actions that have enabled racial subordination and the actors who have fought against it.
Focusing on Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latino Americans, it explores how racial subordination developed in the region, how it has been resisted and opposed, and how it has been sustained through independence, the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, and subsequent reforms. The text also considers the position of European immigrants to the US, interrogates relevant moral issues, and identifies persistent problems of public policy, arguing that all four centuries of racial subordination are relevant to understanding contemporary America and some of its most urgent issues.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of American history, the history of race and ethnicity, and other related courses in the humanities and social sciences.
Table of Contents
1. The Color Line. 2. Pre-contact North America and European Colonization 3. Early Virginia 4. A Slave System is Established 5. Beyond Virginia 6. The Founding 7. King Cotton 8. More Land and Labor 9. Sectional Conflicts and the Color Line 10. Civil War and Reconstruction 11. Redemption and Jim Crow 12. Western Indians 13. Closing the Door 14. An American Empire 15. The Great Migration 16. Surviving and Defying Jim Crow 17. The Second Reconstruction 18. The Civil Rights Movement 19. Black Separatism, Armed Self-Defense and Urban Disorders 20. The Wider Civil Rights Movement 21. End of the Second Reconstruction 22. The Persistence of the Color Line 23. Where Do We Go From Here—and How Do We Get There?
David Lyons is Professor Emeritus at Boston University, Massachusetts, USA. He previously taught at Cornell University in New York from 1964 to 1995. Focusing on moral and political theory, his previous books range from Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism (1965) to Confronting Injustice (2013).