A historian describes my city in the 1950s

Like many emerging American cities at the time, Phoenix’s spectacular growth did not occur evenly. It largely took place on the city’s north side, a region that was nearly all Caucasian. In 1962, one local activist testified at a US Commission on Civil Rights hearing that of 31,000 homes that had recently sprung up in this neighborhood, not a single one had been sold to an African-American.[53] Phoenix’s African-American and Mexican-American communities remained largely sequestered on the south side of town. The color lines were so rigid that no one north of Van Buren Street would rent to the African-American baseball star Willie Mays, in town for spring training in the 1960s.[54] In 1964, a reporter from The New Republic wrote of segregation in these terms: “Apartheid is complete. The two cities look at each other across a golf course.”  (Needham, Andrew (2014). Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 87, quoted in Wikipedia article “Phoenix Arizona”)

Conservatives will deny this fact and research the historian to find he attended a campus protest in 1972 and so is a Communist. Intelligent people will use the information to guide them in constructing a sane policy that will correct the biases in our system. Oh, and since I see biases in our system, I should go back where I came from. Love it or leave it…. as “they ” say.

 

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