The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

In 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into the law. The next year, the Voting Rights Act passed, and in 1968 the Fair Housing Act became law. Legalized segregation in the form of Jim Crow was now officially banned. Given these shifts, one might be tempted to declare that systemic or legal racism in America had ended, and that aside from a few backwards thinking people—the real racists—the progress of the civil rights movement indicated that the nation had largely overcome its racist past. Such an optimistic assessment would be wrong. Though it was necessary to enact civil rights legislation, you cannot erase four hundred years of race-based oppression by passing a few laws. From the earliest years of slavery in the 1600s, through the legal end of Jim Crow in 1954, and in the numerous and varied ways in which racism is still enacted in law and culture today, the United States has had more than 300 years of race-based discrimination. A few short decades of legal freedom have not corrected the damage done by centuries of racism.