Support of Integration and Equality
According to Bobo, the slow progression from Jim Crow to laissez-faire racism can be measured in the trends for questions on racial principles. These polls can help to provide the most descriptive evidence in the changes in racial sentiment in the United States. Surveys and polls conducted in 1942 show a continuing increase among whites who support racial integration and equal rights. In 1942, 68 percent of white Americans approved of school segregation, while only 7 percent approved this same position in 1985. Additionally, 55 percent of whites surveyed in 1944 thought whites should receive preference over blacks in access to jobs, compared with only 3 percent of whites in 1972. These same progressive attitudes in whites were extended to areas of interracial marriage, equal housing rights, and access to political office—although racial ideals tended to vary greatly amongst whites depending on geographical location, educational levels, age, and other factors.
Read more about this topic: Laissez-faire Racism
Famous quotes containing the words support, integration and/or equality:
“Any relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)