After the brutal lynching of 14 year old Emmitt Till in Mississippi, his mother, Mamie Till-Mobly, went on a public tour across the United States showing pictures of his brutalized body and speaking to the horrors of lynching and its impact on the African American community.

During Nixon’s term, African Americans were subjugated to more than just racist drug laws. Using the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 as support, federal and state governments passed racist zoning and “redevelopment” laws that forced hundreds of thousands of African Americans from their city homes and into other equally marginalized neighborhoods or poorly constructed public housing. This mass displacement was enacted to make room for “beltways” around cities and freeways through urban centers, which were quickly being transformed from “blighted” black neighborhoods to profitable commercial centers, such as sports arenas.

The ongoing nationwide housing crisis for African Americans and other forms of systemic racism led to significant civil unrest in the 1950’s and beyond.

In 1964, as President Johnson prepared to sign the Voting Rights Act into law, he also signed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act. This Act represented a part of Johnson’s new “war on crime,” which aimed at cleaning up urban violence and stemming the tide of what some saw as a downward trend towards increased societal disintegration.

In 1967, growing tensions erupted into what came to be known as “the Long, Hot Summer of 1967.” Race uprisings—167 of them in large and small cities across America—began in Newark, New Jersey in response to housing and employment shortages and in response to the decreasing economic opportunities for African Americans.

With the launch of the “War on Drugs,” law enforcement profiling and violence against Black Americans intensified. At the same time, leaders such as Shirley Chisholm demonstrated faith and persistence in calling America to a more perfect union.

In the 1980s, the Black community emerged from the activism of the 1960s and 70s with a degree of hope for a new way of being. However, the “afterlife of slavery” was not so easily undone and the struggle for equality and dignity continued.

The HIV/AIDS crises divided Black communities and the war on crime incarcerated increasing numbers of Black men.

While Brown vs. Board of Education had ostensibly desegregated schools, the segregation existing in residential neighborhoods meant that educational institutions would, on the whole, remain disproportionately black or white. As reported by Bonilla-Silva (2018), researchers noted “a trend beginning in 1986 toward a resegregation of U.S. schools. As a consequence of resegregation during the decade of the 1990s, U.S. schools were more segregated in the 2000-2001 school year than in 1970.”

Throughout the 1980s, African American writers continued the tradition of incisive commentary of American life and what it meant to be Black in a White-dominated society. The “afterlife of slavery” often lived as a direct or indirect actor in their stories. Black female writers such as Toni Morrison and bell hooks continued the tradition of power through writing and brought to life the complex lives of Black Americans in the twentieth-century.

The 1990s had many contradictions. Heavy policing and imprisonment harmed Black communities, while mass media celebrated Black sitcoms and breakthrough artists like Michael Jackson, appealed to both White and Black audiences.