6/7 Then and Now
The Color-Line: Democracy and the Past
In Atlanta, educator and social activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote some of his best-known works, including The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. Seven years earlier, he had accepted a faculty position at Atlanta University to establish a sociology program.
During his nearly 13 years in Atlanta, he wrote extensively on issues of racial discrimination and the realities of life for Black Georgia residents. Du Bois returned to Atlanta University in 1934 and for a decade wrote of the social and political conditions—as well as the contributions to democracy—of African Americans in the South.
Decades later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, far reaching in their scope and impact, were important milestones in securing the rights of African American citizens and improving the state of democracy in the United States.
Both were achieved in large measure by the determined efforts of student activists, including those of the Atlanta Student Movement.
They did not, however, achieve the end of the color line.
Header Image: Martin Luther King Jr. casts his ballot in Atlanta in 1964, while his wife, Coretta Scott King. Bettman /Getty
And here is a land where, in the higher walks of life, in all the higher striving for the good and noble and true, the color-line comes to separate natural friends and coworkers. … The white man, as well as the Negro, is bound and barred by the color-line, and many a scheme of friendliness and philanthropy, of broad-minded sympathy and generous fellowship between the two has dropped still-born because some busybody has forced the color-question to the front and brought the tremendous force of unwritten law against the innovators.
