| Abstract: | Summary At a time when, despite Affirmative Action Goals, we still have great difficulty in making employers accountable before the
law for overt acts of discrimination, it is well to recall the doughty struggle of the state’s Blacks versus employers. At
a time when health services for inner-city residents continue to be worse than provisions for other citizens, it is well to
remember that even in the last century “the conditions of sickness and mortality” were “not the same for the white and for
the colored races,” and destitution among Blacks in New York City accounted for some 37 percent of the illnesses among Blacks
in that area. At a time when realtors and boards of education still effectively put up barriers to ordinary social relations
between whites and Blacks it is well to remember that even after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment Blacks were powerless
to cause any major breach in public constraints to their mobility. Blacks have been powerless for a long time to make legislated
freedom subserve their economic and social goals, and this is an important reminder to those who would reapply the methods
of the past in attempts to fulfill today the normal economic expectations of citizens of the Republic. |
