More than 90 percent of America’s ten million people of African ancestry—Negroes, as polite people called them at the time—lived in the South in the first decades of the century, usually in segregated communities. They were obstructed from voting and placed in inferior schools. Their sewer service, their garbage pickup, their recreational facilities, their law enforcement operations, and their health-care facilities were inferior to those found in white communities. Between 1885 and 1930, more than four thousand Black people were lynched as part of the enforcement of racial segregation and
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