Author: Noria Doyle

For generations, the United States has used federal policy not only to distribute land, property, and wealth, but to do so along racial lines. While the narrative of American meritocracy champions hard work and self-reliance, the historical record tells a different story: White Americans were repeatedly granted free or subsidized land, monetary benefits, and structural advantages through government action, often at the direct expense of Indigenous, Black, Mexican, and Asian communities. The economic divide that persists today is not the result of personal failure. It is the predictable outcome of decades of legalized racial preference. Long before the founding...

In the summer of 1896, African American communities across the United States mounted a broad and determined response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, handed down weeks earlier in May. While the decision effectively legalized racial segregation under the doctrine of “separate but equal,” it also triggered the earliest wave of coordinated Black civic resistance following the end of Reconstruction. Often overshadowed by later national civil rights efforts, the post-Plessy mobilizations that began in Northern cities such as Milwaukee, Chicago, and Boston represented a decisive turn toward organized protest against the consolidation of Jim Crow laws....