The national amnesia concerning early protests leaves most Americans with the impression that African Americans complied for decades with Jim Crow’s outrages and theft of rights, even as it hides the continual remaking of the racist regime that whites built and rebuilt to enforce them during the decades that Jim Crow lasted. Moreover, the omission of protest history also makes it seem that when the evil of segregation became apparent to white people in 1955, the federal government quickly solved it with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
