Inside Iowa State

March 9, 2007

Evelyn Hu-DeHart. Photo by Josh Hale.

"The American Civil War ended the system of slavery really for only a few short decades. By the end of the 19th century, this country invented yet another system to continue to sort people out. This time, not on the basis of property so much, but more intentionally and deliberately on the basis of race. We have called it racial discrimination, legal segregation, in a very colorful way 'Jim Crow.'



"I and many others are beginning to prefer the term 'American apartheid.' We shouldn't think of apartheid as something only South Africans did and we all protested. Because, in fact, we probably gave the South Africans the idea in the first place about compulsive racial segregation - this period of American history that lasted into the 1960s."

- Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Brown University, during her keynote lecture at the 2007 ISCORE, March 2