In the five short years before it disbanded, the SNCC's Arkansas Project played a pivotal part in transforming the state, yet this fascinating branch of the national organization has barely garnered a footnote in the history of the civil rights movement. Thanks in large part to SNCC's bold initiatives, most of Little Rock's public and private facilities were desegregated by 1963, and in the years that followed many more SNCC volunteers rushed to the state to set up projects across the Arkansas Delta to help empower local people to take a stand against racial discrimination. SNCC efforts began with Bill Hansen, a young white Ohioan-already an early veteran of the civil rights movement-who traveled to Little Rock in the early sixties to help stimulate student sit-in movements promoting desegregation.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) arrived in Arkansas in October 1962 at the request of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations, the state affiliate of the Southern Regional Council. Expand DescriptionĪrsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas This book is a sober challenge to those who argue that race is of declining significance in the United States today. As ghetto residents adapt to this increasingly harsh environment under a climate of racial isolation, they evolve attitudes, behaviors, and practices that further marginalize their neighborhoods and undermine their chances of success in mainstream American society. Under conditions of extreme segregation, any increase in the overall rate of black poverty yields a marked increase in the geographic concentration of indigence and the deterioration of social and economic conditions in black communities. The authors demonstrate that this systematic segregation of African Americans leads inexorably to the creation of underclass communities during periods of economic downturn.

In some urban areas the degree of black segregation is so intense and occurs in so many dimensions simultaneously that it amounts to 'hypersegregation.' It goes on to show that, despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregation is perpetuated today through an interlocking set of individual actions, institutional practices, and governmental policies. This powerful and disturbing book clearly links persistent poverty among blacks in the United States to the unparalleled degree of deliberate segregation they experience in American cities.Īmerican Apartheid shows how the black ghetto was created by whites during the first half of the twentieth century in order to isolate growing urban black populations.

Arsnick by Jennifer Jensen Wallach