Now available for the first time in paperback is distinguished
historian John Hope Franklin's eloquent and forceful meditation
on the persistent disparity between the goal of racial equality
in America and the facts of discrimination.
In a searing critique of Thomas Jefferson, Franklin shows that this
spokesman for democracy did not include African Americans
among those "created equal." Franklin chronicles the events of the
nineteenth century that solidified inequality in America and shows how
emancipation dealt only with slavery, not with inequality,
In the twentieth century, America finally confronted the fact that equality
is indivisible: it must not be divided so that it is extended to some at the
expense of others. Once this indivisibility is accepted, Franklin charges,
America faces the monumental task of overcoming its long heritage of
inequality.
Racial Equality in America is a powerful reminder that our history
is more than a record of idealized democratic traditions and institutions.
It is a dramatic message to all Ameicans, calling them to know their history
and themselves.
"The best, perhaps the best possible, encapsulation in so few
pages of the history of black-white
relations."--Choice
