This remarkable oral history project was undertaken by Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies from 1993 to 1995. The project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and its primary purpose was to record and preserve the living memory of African American life during the age of legal segregation in the American South from the 1890s to the 1950s. It is the largest single...

This September 2020 report, directed by Dana M. Peterson (then a Global Economist with Citi Research and currently Chief Economist at The Conference Board) with insight from Catherine L. Mann (Global Chief Economist at Citigroup), quantified the economic impact of racial inequality in the United States. Measuring a 20 year period, the research found a staggering 16 trillion dollar loss to the...

For the first time, the Census 2000 questionnaire allowed persons to identify with more than one racial group. As a result, demographers had the opportunity to examine segregation indices between mixed raced groups and persons who identify with a single race. Written by William H. Frey of the University of Michigan and Dowell Myers of the University of Southern California, "Neighborhood...

The NPR blog, Code Switch, is a mashup in the best sense of the word. Code Switch combines different types of media - audio, video, text and images - with content based on lots of loosely-related topics and perspectives in a way that inspires the visitor to see things differently. Blog host Gene Demby says, "We're hop-scotching between different cultural and linguistic spaces and different parts...

Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch released a new report, Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs. Supporting its case with a plethora of Justice department data from the 1996 national Corrections Reporting Program (the latest version available), the report finds that drug penalties are disproportionately applied on the basis of race. In fact, "relative to population,...

This week, a report from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University noted that many public schools around the United States (particularly in the South) were becoming more segregated, a fact that the researchers attribute to several key Supreme Court decisions, such as the 1991 ruling in the case Oklahoma City v. Dowell. The study also noted that, because resegregation in the South had been...

Presented by the National Academy Press, this in-depth report examines healthcare disparities between racial minorities and whites. Although those categorized as minorities make up more than half the US population, they still receive a lower quality of healthcare than whites even when insurance status and income are compatible. According to the report, sources of this incongruence is rooted in...