Description
Book SynopsisA history of racism and segregation in twentieth-century Houston and beyond.
Through the 1950s and beyond, the Supreme Court issued decisions that appeared to provide immediate civil rights protections to racial minorities as it relegated Jim Crow to the past. For black Houstonians who had been hoping and actively fighting for what they called a “raceless democracy,” these postwar decades were often seen as decades of promise. In Houston and the Permanence of Segregation, David Ponton argues that these were instead “decades of capture”: times in which people were captured and constrained by gender and race, by faith in the law, by antiblack violence, and even by the narrative structures of conventional histories. Bringing the insights of Black studies and Afropessimism to the field of urban history, Ponton explores how gender roles constrained thought in black freedom movements, how the “rule of law” compelled black Houst
Table of Contents
- Introduction: Decades of Capture
- Captured by Gender Roles: Christia Adair’s Fight for Inclusion
- Captured by the Rule of Law: Johnnie Lee Morris’s Trouble on the Bus
- Captured in the Impossible American Dream: Dorothy and Jack Caesar Buy a Home
- Captured by the Role of Gender: Carter Wesley’s “Frustrating Compromises” and the Establishment of Texas Southern University
- Captured by Blackness: Prior Tortures and Law Enforcement’s Reign of Terror at Texas Southern University
- Notes
- Index
