Landscapes of Exclusion - State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South (Bookzcity)

Further Details About This Book:

This project began a decade ago in the reading room of the State Archives of Florida in Tallahassee.
I was researching issues of race and environment in the Everglades when I came across a photocopy of an intriguing article titled “State Parks for Negroes—New Tests of Equality.” It was published in 1954 in the magazine New South, the public voice of the Southern Regional Council, an Atlanta-based interracial group that advocated for better treatment of African Americans living under Jim Crow. By the early 1950s, the Southern Regional Council had joined the growing movement for desegregation, and the article described the extraordinary deprivations regarding park access,
making the case that segregation in the South’s state parks was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme
Court affirmed this assertion in a 1955 ruling, though another decade passed before ongoing civil rights activism and federal legislation forced park desegregation in all southern states.