The Color of a Lie

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.

This novel takes place in 1955, placing it near the beginning of the civil rights era, which ran from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s. The end of the civil rights movement also marked the end of a racial caste system called “Jim Crow.” Discriminatory, segregationist laws called “Jim Crow laws” began right after the end of the Civil War in 1865. These laws segregated Black and white communities. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling cemented segregation into practice, which dictated that segregation was constitutional under the “separate but equal” doctrine; this ruling upheld the state’s Jim Crow laws.

In practice, resources that Black facilities and communities received were never equal to those that white communities received anywhere in the United States. Lily draws her white principal’s attention to this when she tells him about the nurse’s office at her old school, housed in a closet with the cleaning supplies, and the state of their books. This non-equal reality would eventually lead to the passing of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The Browns, represented by Thurgood Marshall—a minor character in this novel—won their case in a unanimous decision in which the court declared that separate educational facilities were unequal by definition.

This early civil rights victory happened a year before the events of the novel. In practice, it took dozens of years for schools to desegregate. The last segregated school in the country did not achieve a desegregation ruling until 2016 (Domonoske, Camila. “After 50-Year Legal Struggle, Mississippi School District Ordered to Desegregate.” NPR, 17 May 2016). This is because there is a difference between de jure segregation—segregation as upheld by the law—and de facto segregation—segregation as it works in practice. De facto segregation can happen when other practices like housing, lending, and employment practices work together to keep communities segregated.

De jure Jim Crow laws were most prevalent in the South. For instance, when Calvin, Eugene, and Harry go to Virginia, they are worried about official Southern “sundown towns,” and Calvin is caught by surprise by a bathroom legally marked “whites only.” However, de facto Jim Crow laws widely affected the Northern United States, where factors like housing practices kept communities segregated. This nuance in the definition of segregation helps show that segregation and anti-Black racism were not exclusively Southern problems. Northern states also engaged in myriad discriminatory practices.

For instance, both the Northern and Southern United States had sundown towns, all-white towns in which Black people were not welcome after dark. Levittown is a sundown town, as is the Virginia town in which Calvin, Harry, and Eugene are arrested. These rules, whether upheld by law or custom, were often enforced with violence. Though less common, sundown towns still exist in the 21st century.