The Warmth Of Other Suns Summary

From the book The Warmth of Other Suns, the author Isabel Wilkerson writes of the economic disparity and the abject poverty suffered by African Americans during the reconstruction. “Sharecropping, slavery’s replacement, kept them in debt and still bound to whatever plantation they worked. But one thing had changed. The federal government had taken over the affairs of the South, during a period known as Reconstruction, and the newly freed men were able to exercise rights previously denied them. They could vote, marry, or go to school…even college set-up by northern philanthropists, open businesses, and run for office under the protection of northern troops.”
Claiming their rights to citizenship created strained

“The Bureau encouraged former major planters to rebuild their plantations and urged freed blacks to return to work for them, kept an eye on contracts between the newly free laborers and planters, and pushed whites and blacks to work together as employers and employees rather than as masters and slaves.”
By 1872, Congress abruptly abandoned the program, effectively shutting down the Bureau and of course, once the Freedman’s Bureau ceased operation in the area, these contracts were voided and planters/farmers went back to the old way of doing things. A rigid paternalistic society continued once the bureau was disbanded. Exploitation of these freedmen again reappeared in the form of reduction of wages, cost of the crop to market, lodging (quarters/shack), and subsistence crops. The property owner would now deduct what he said was owed from the salary and announce that this pay period was a break-even

A few blacks challenged the system of legal discrimination. In New Orleans, a man named Homer Plessy deliberately defied the Louisiana State law requiring separate rail cars accommodations for blacks and whites. He was arrested and jailed. But the incident led eventually to the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson.
Plessy argued that the law infringed on his 14th amendment right to equal protection. But, most of Justices disagreed. The court’s opinion read, in part: Supreme Court of The United States (SCOTUS): "Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts, or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences… if one race is inferior to the other socially, the constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane (1896).”
This was a landmark constitutional law case of the US Supreme Court. It upheld state racial segregation laws for public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but