Everything That Rises Must Converge | Historical Context

Everything That Rises Must Converge Historical Context

Southern Race Relations

The generation gap between Julian and his mother manifests itself through their disagreement over race relations, an issue that was a pressing part of public discourse in the early 1960s.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a series of "Jim Crow" laws had been instituted throughout the South; these laws enforced segregation of public places. In fact, for the first half of the twentieth century, blacks and whites used separate facilities: parks, restaurants, clubs, restrooms, and transportation.

In 1954 a landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Board of Education, deemed school segregation as inherently unequal. In the aftermath of this decision, African Americans won the right to share public transportation with whites in a number of Southern cities. In 1960 "sit-ins" at segregated lunch counters became a popular method of protesting against segregation. Such actions spurred the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, which would lead to important social...
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