African Americans in the 1950's

What state are you talking about? Segregation laws varied from state to state.

Rural Louisiana. It's a small fictional town, about 100 miles from New Orleans.

I'm not famaliar with Louisiana, however this link may help

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/civilrightstimeline1.html#events-1967.

Thanks for the link! It was really informative as far as the important events that occurred and actually caused me to change the time setting from 1957 to '53.

But does anyone have any insight on day-to-day life? The little mundane things we don't even think about?

Hmm.. I'm not sure if I can be of any help of not. I am writing a fic (not my nanovel) that takes place in 1939, where black's are segregated and still treated like dirt, sadly.

However, I have no idea if my own writing is correct, seeing as Google has really failed me also. You’d think it would be filled to the top with information about something as big as black slavery and things such as that, but obviously not. It’s very hard to find helpful information.

In my story, they do use racist terms in regard to the black population and are very distrustful of them (seeing as one of the black characters made the mistake of telling the secret about my two white main characters!), so I think it would still be the same in the 1950s.

I’m not quite sure if they still used black workers as house slaves and yard slaves, etc in the 1950s, seeing as the website Ursed linked says that in 1948, there would be no segregation in the armed forces. I watched a film the other day called The Tuskegee Airmen, which was about coloured men fighting in planes during WWII. In the film, they did get a lot of stick for their colour, most of the white soldiers not willing to believe that they could fly as good. A court case went on during the film, where they debated whether they should still allow the coloured folk to fly (I think they were giving it a ‘test-run’ as so to speak). One of their reasons for not letting them fly was that apparently black people were a lot stupider than white people, even though all the cadets scored highest marks, even after being tested twice (maybe this could help in your novel, with your character being smart?)

Other than that, I don’t really have much else to say. I think he might have a white friend or two. Have you seen the film ‘A time to kill’. (I was 14 when I watched it and couldn’t stop crying). If not, you should try and get your hands on it. I’m not quite sure when it’s set, but it is later than the 1930s and 40s. In that movie, there is a scene where two white men and a black man are driving in a car. They seem pretty friendly with each other (They get killed for being friends with a coloured man. I think, unless I’m thinking about the wrong film), so I think it would be quite possible for your character to have white friends, though I think it will be quite frowned upon.

I hope this helped!

*Sorry if I’m a little blunt with the word ‘black’ or anything. I thought it’s best to apologise now, because who knows what you can say these days!

I'm not really going to be much help, since I'm neither Black nor old enough to remember 1957 (or 53), but I think some of it really depends on where you were living. Rural Louisiana, I think he would have grown up being pretty careful around White people. One of James Michener's books described the upbringing of a character like yours, maybe in "Chesapeake"? Sorry, can't remember, but there was a whole set of rules his family had for keeping themselves safe.

Anyway, his family might have taught him to "sir" and "ma'am" White people, to speak only when spoken to, to not look directly at any White woman, to not draw attention to himself. I think there would have been a lot of rules for Blacks then that White people didn't know about. It might have felt like living in a box, or maybe it would feel normal until people (like MLK) started to question the status quo.

I'm sure many Black people did own their homes and businesses, especially if the business had a Black clientele. Mothers probably would have worked, either in the family business or for White families. I read or saw somewhere that during MLK's bus boycott, White women would pick up and drop off their Black maids, who weren't taking the bus to their employers' homes anymore.

I think a Black kid could certainly study Physics, especially if the teacher was sympathetic to him. He probably would have been harrassed with ugly racial slurs, but he might also have White friends: kids who didn't believe in segregation, who were bending over backwards to show that they weren't bigoted, or maybe they were friends with him just to piss off their parents. It happens. :)

Your best bet would probably be wikipedia, oh, the Civil Rights Movement page has dates right at the top.

I'd like to think segregation doesn't exist anymore, even if it probably does. At least there aren't laws enforcing it these days.

Good luck!

I answered these questions based off the region of rural Louisiana. Most of this knowledge comes from the fact that I'm black, my family is black, and many of them came from the South (I was born in the south as well) and I actually listened when my grandparents told stories, unlike my cousins (hahahaha) :

Adult males in rural south were much less likely to own or run a business. I'm not saying it's impossible, just highly unlikely. You have to remember that a majority of white people would not want to do business with them. So, even if they ran a store that sold primarily to black folks, they'd also need to BUY all of their inventory, which would (being large factories and companies) come primarily from white-owned business. There again, not impossible, but unlikely. If they had figured out something clever, like some sort of mail-order business or some way of getting inventory without the necessary face-to-face with a sales representative (remember, this is back in the '50s... even business done over the telephone was a little unusual) it would be a bit more believable. Maybe they even hired a white guy to be the "face" of the company (although this person would probably have to be significantly poor, because in most cases it would be very embarassing for a white person to have a black boss).
Primary means of income in rural locations in the fifties was still farming. That's why they were rural. If they were a farmer, they were much more likely to be a sharecropper rather than own their own land. However, if they owned their own land and times were favorable, they might be relatively successful, (perhaps even approaching the "gentleman farmer" status so much appreciated by the Victorians) especially if the land had been in their families for a few generations and they had managed to hold onto it, (note that many black slaves, when freed, were given some recompense in land. However, they were usually cheated out of their land or went into debt/had to sell it and became sharecroppers on what used to be their own land. )
Basing off what my mom has told me (she was born in 54, so she was a teenager in the lates 60s/70s) high school physics itself wasn't all that common until much more recently. She took biology and chemistry and "Earth science". She said that vocational classes (like typing, shorthand, home ec, tailoring, engineering, shop, auto/garage mechanics) were given much greater emphasis as part of the regular curriculum than now, where the focus is much more academic in preparation for college.

Classrooms as a whole were not yet integrated. Although segregation was ruled against in 54, (See: Brown vs Board of Education), the Supreme Court has limited means of enforcing it's rulings, and that was really clear especially with desegregation which took more than ten years to really take hold. The most famous case was Arkansas which in fifty SEVEN, three years after the ruling, they decided to "comply" with the ruling on a sort of trial basis, which shook the whole country (See: Little Rock Nine) So, I would find it highly unlikely for your black MC to be integrating in the same year, unless he was one of the few black families in the town, which might be possible, especially if the town was so tiny that they couldn't reasonably HAVE a separate school. Because Jim Crow was supposed to be "separate but equal" but never was, it would be feasible that if there were just a very small number of blacks that the black and white students went to school in the same building, but maybe black students were restricted to a few classrooms or a maybe a little add-on building on the side or something. After desegregation, maybe they allowed the black students the run of the building, or maybe they were still segregated but used the library for studying after school....?

He would probably have been harassed at least sometimes for his race. If the school was recently desegregated, he might harassed A LOT.

Bicycles were very common for boys and young men back in the day, (even my mom and all her sisters had bicycles) so it's reasonable for him to have owned one. Whether he might ride it to school for fear of vandalization is another story.

For important events around that time, look up "Brown vs Board of Education" and "Little Rock Nine"

Depending on the situation, some public places were never segregated in the first place, due to money. Public libraries, for example, were often not segregated. Some parks and open spaces. Some restaurants were less strict about segregation too. For example, they might have an "unofficial" segregation of black people eating on the left side and whites on the right. As you'll find from Civil Rights research, some were VERY strict with their segregation, only allowing black customers to buy takeout, not letting them sit at the lunch counter, etc.

Often times, I find that even today, racist people (people of ALL races that hate other races) have no good or even logical reasons. They often hate others because they are raised that way. For example, I live and work in South Korea now. South Koreans hate the Japanese. Hate, hate, HATE the Japanese. However, they have no real reasons for this hatred, except for the Japanese occupation of Korea a long time ago. But the CHILDREN that hate the Japanese don't have reasons at ALL. If you ask them why they hate Japanese, they will inevitably reply, "Because Koreans hate Japanese." My friend (who also teaches here) had her students read a book by a Japanese author, about a Japanese kid doing something or other. After they read it, she got book reports back along the likes of "I never knew Japanese were people too, but now I know!" This is the same sort of mentality that you see in white races. Their minds are often full of stereotypical images of black people ("They're stupid, they're lazy, they're gangsters with baggy pants and gold teeth and they all have guns, they're all welfare moms living off the gov't and taking our tax dollars, they're all dragging down the GPA of our good schools, etc.") Even if they have black "friends", they mentally count their black friends as being "special" or "exceptional" rather than the norm. For a long time, my mother was a lobbyist in Washington DC. When I was in high school, she would often take me to parties or formal dress functions so that I could network, meet people, etc. What I heard most often? "How articulate you are!" or "You speak so well!" with a strong note of surprise. This might be alright for a teenager, because even white teenagers are often portrayed as being completely unintelligible in media, but my *mother* was often commented on in this same way, which was downright insulting to her. My mother, a grown woman, *speaks* for a living, made her money as a lobbyist, but of course, it was still a surprise that black people could speak well.

I would say that if your character had a white friend, that friend would often still have many questions about black people. ("Why is your hair like that?" is one I STILL get asked sometimes today, hah. "Do black people really do XYZ?" "Why are black people poor/stupid/lazy?" is another) They might be too shy or well-mannered to ask. But they may also have misconceptions that they erroneously apply to others in a well-meaning way. There's a short story that I read once about a white girl bringing home her new black friend (this was in the 50s or 60s, so it applied very well, but I'm having a devil of a time finding it). Her mother thinks it's great, but throughout the story, she continuously acts on assumptions of her daughter's new black friend. She makes a comment about her father, because the girl has said her father works in a factory. Turns out her father is the foreman. She tries to give the girl some leftovers to take home, the girl mentions they've got plenty of food. She tries to give her some clothes that were going to the Salvation Army--"Surely your mother can alter them or cut them down to fit!" The girl mentions her mother doesn't know how to sew because they buy all of their clothes from shops. In the end, the mom's mind does a 'reset' and she labels her daughter's new friend as the 'exception' not the rule. Basically, their white friend might be all "I'm color blind, black is fine," but continue to work off racist information because that's all they know about black people.

>>Also, what sort of segregation still exists, or has in the past few years? I've heard about some schools in the south having segregated proms, and my own high school had a prom-queen-type election exclusively for black students until just a few years ago. Basically, what kind of organized prejudice has been in place over the past 10 or so years?<<

I'd say not segregation, but rather a form of visual discrimination still exists especially in the media. You might think that the number of famous black actors is equal to the number of famous white actors (and both are probably greater than the number of famous Asian or Hispanic actors, at least in America) but watch a slew of movies from different genres (excluding those with the dubious, nonverbal "ethnic" label on them, such as the Tyler Perry movies) and then count how many black people actually show up, especially when taking places in places like New York, Washington, Chicago, LA... if you go to any of those large cities, walk around in a daily routine of coffee, work, lunch, work, home, grocery shopping, maybe the gym or something, and count how many people you actually see in REAL LIFE, the numbers just don't add up. [As an aside, South Koreans love American tv. They get almost all of the American movies that are released in theatres in their theatres as well. My middle school kids think that black people in America are EXCEEDINGLY RARE because of the ration of black people to white people that they see in American movies/tv]

Surprisingly, the increasing number of black people in television (any number is greater than zero it started out with) has also resulted in what someone called "Virtual Integration" where older white adults feel that they have a more diverse social life in terms of socializing with other races. It turns out, through polling and counting, that some have ZERO non-white friends or aquaintences, but they FEEL like they do because they now see so many on tv/in movies, when there were none before. So it's a weird sort of paradox, too much for some, not enough for others!

As for segregated proms (prom court, anyway, I don't think the entire dance needs to be separated) , and beauty contests, I'm not completely sure it's a bad thing. Statistics say that white people still tend to choose other white people when measuring beauty and black people will often ALSO pick white people because their standards of beauty have been skewed to what they see as "conventional". There was a test done on babies, and they found that babies pick out faces they like based on a series of proportions, and not limited to skin color. Fast forward to teenagers, and then adults, they also pick out "beauty" based on proportions, but heavily limited to white people, even when they had black photo samples that matched in proportion. Mostly this is because of the saturation of "white beauty" in media. Pick you your latest copy of Elle, Vogue or even Glamour and count the number of white models vs black models. Or not even necessarily models--just pictures! This sort of thing really sticks in young people's heads. In comparing them to teenagers that more often watched BET (Black Entertainment Television) and read JET or BET Magazine, someone found that THOSE teenagers preferred black beauty (because those teenagers considered that to be "conventional"). So in some cases, I feel that having two separate contests is only fair as some of the participants in a single competition will receive a large advantage solely based on race.

Anyway, I've typed way too much here. I hope this was all helpful. :D

Chloe, ML for Busan, South Korea!

2009: The Gatekeeper [hoping for 65k]
2008: The Rose and Pearl [WIN! 56k]
2007: The Steamwitch [BOMB! 6k]
2006: Blaireshire [Oh so close! 45k]

There would definitely be no literal slaves in the 1950s. You might call them such metaphorically, ie; "Mr. Doughman worked his gardeners like slaves." But slavery had been abolished since the Civil War. ;)

Also, 'black' or 'African-American' (if the person in question IS actually an American descended from Africa, and not just any black person) is appropriate. 'Colored' is really not.

Chloe, ML for Busan, South Korea!

2009: The Gatekeeper [hoping for 65k]
2008: The Rose and Pearl [WIN! 56k]
2007: The Steamwitch [BOMB! 6k]
2006: Blaireshire [Oh so close! 45k]

Thanks for clearing that up :) I’m never too sure, but it won’t let me edit my comment now D; Thanks for all that information though! It’s really helpful for my writing too

DoubleKross, thank you SO MUCH for the insight! That was exactly what I was looking for. You also brought up a lot of really interesting things I never knew about, like the beauty thing.

I decided to just write and worry about accuracy later, but I think I'm going to change the father's profession. I had him written as the owner of a laundromat in the black neighborhood, but now that I think of it, I don't think the white principal would have frequented his shop. Instead, I think I'm going to have the father work as a sharecropper on some farm land that the principal owns.

I have the school set up as a 'separate but equal' facility, with the regular classes and one "Negro" class. I actually switched the setting to a real town in Alabama (for reasons that will play in to the plot later), and I found out that there are only about 1600 people in that particular town, so I think it would be believable to just have one school at that time.