Segregation on its way out by 1945
In response to a leading question, Johnson notes that by 1945, segregation was crumbling "because so many little bites had been taken out" via civil rights litigation and progress in university desegregation.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Guy B. Johnson, July 22, 1990. Interview A-0345. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- JOHN EGERTON:
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In January of '45, Will Alexander wrote an article in Harpers in which he took great pains to look at segregation as sort of the stumbling block to southern process, and came down saying, "We've got to deal with it." So by the end of the war, by summer '45, there are all these signs out there, all across the southern landscape.
- GUY B. JOHNSON:
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Yeah, that it's crumbling, yeah, because so many little bites had been taken out, you know, Pullman travel, dining cars, certain situations involving interstate commerce and all that, and then the gradual inroads they were making on university segregation. There's a whole flock of cases there that were beginning to open up, oh, say, half of the southern universities.
