Preface

• Author: Milton M. Gordon
• Published date: 01 March 1981
• Date: 01 March 1981
• DOI: 10.1177/000271628145400101
• Subject Matter: Articles

PREFACE
When I contributed my first article on race relations to a volume of
THE ANNALS, it was 1956 and not quite two years after the momentous
Brown decision of the United States Supreme Court reversed the &dquo;separate
but equal&dquo; interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution
which had ruled American race relations for half a century. Many of the
articles in that volume, entitled Racial Desegregation and Integration,
reflected the then-current concern with the newly emergent prospects for
eliminating racial discrimination from government and government-related
activities, such as public education, and for promoting integration and non-
discriminatory practices in such areas as employment, public accommoda-
tions, and housing. The primary emphasis in those articles was on relations
between Whites and-in the accepted nomenclature of the time-Negroes,
with some limited and residual attention devoted to other racial minorities.
This new volume, America as a Multicultural Society, appears exactly
25 years later after a period of portentous events, shattering upheavals,
and significant developments which have rendered many of the previous
formulations and conceptions in the racial and ethnic field partially, though
hardly completely, inoperative, and which have produced contending and
passionately held interpretations of the meaning and implications of these
pregnant events and developments of the past quarter of a century. The
dramatic &dquo;marches&dquo; and &dquo;sit-ins&dquo; of the Civil Rights movement-responses
to the delaying tactics in implementing the Brown decision; the rise of black
militancy and black cultural nationalism in the late 1960s and 1970s; the
assassinations of Malcolm X
and Martin Luther King; the racial riots in many
of America’s cities, stemming from the despair and frustration of the black
residents of America’s urban &dquo;ghettos&dquo;; the emergence of court-ordered
busing to effect school integration and the...