The Problem of the Color Line: Segregation, Politics, and Historical Writing

Abstract

Tr he legal mechanisms of race hierarchy in United States which would come to define twentieth-century segregationism were one aspect of what Ellis Hawley has described as the search for a modern order commonly associated with Progressive state-making project (1). But if laws and Supreme Court rulings such as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) permitted race separation to substitute for equality under Constitution, it was newly transformed cultural and intellectual marketplaces that translated segregation into social practice. As African American poet Langston Hughes described emergence of public segregation in Cleveland in 1918 in his autobiography, on Armistice Day,