Segregation In The 1950's

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Segregation of the races has prevailed since the origin of birth of America. Later, Abraham Lincoln freed slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 in an attempt to alleviate tensions and weaken the rebelling South. However, the effects on racism were less remarkable than imagined. In the 1950s, Jim Crow laws were put into order. The Jim Crow laws stated that whites and blacks were to be kept separate with the notion that the races could be kept separate but equal. However, blacks were not treated as an equal. “They had different waiting rooms and whites were treated first no matter how bad the emergency was” (The Civil Rights Movement & the Segregation in the 1950's). Pruitt-Igoe, a large housing project, played a part in segregation in the city of St. Louis in the late 1950’s. St. Louis was has been an independent city with fixed boundaries. In 1953, St. Louis was accepted as an urban center of Missouri. There were massive transportation systems that gave it the upper hand. As part of a great American urban system, it was dependent on communications networks. Urban renewal programs and freeway construction led to the destruction of many buildings and entire neighborhoods. In the 1950s, downtown was where everything took place. Many …show more content…
“…St. Louis residents who called it home,” were middle class members (The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: An Urban History). Pruitt-Igoe was planned to have capacity for the growth of a manufacturing powerhouse city, which was already in a shade of its past. The project was a Modernist dream come true. It was an effort to replace St. Louis’ slums with new, clean affordable housing rising into the sky. It was influenced by Le Corbusier’s “radiant city” vision of Modernism. It had towers of glass surrounding landscaped parks and concrete lifting working people out of dark, near-shantytowns isolated from running water, electricity, and civilized urban
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