Alice 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. By the early 1970s, when Childress's novel takes place, the civil rights movement had improved the political situation of African Americans. Living conditions, however, remained just as squalid in Harlem and other urban areas of the United States as they had been before the movement. Furthermore, opportunities for African Americans were still severely limited by racism. 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.
Urban blacks in the early 1970s. 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. 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. 62). 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.
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