The Nadir of Race Relations by John Boles Article Analysis

How Bad It Gets The main idea of John Boles article that is entitled The Nadir of Race Relations is to depict the social, economic, and, to a lesser extent, the political conditions for African Americans in the Southern part of the United States from approximately 1870 to 1930. These dates are of fairly significant importance, since they signal the historical epoch after the end of Reconstruction in which several laws and were passed to help enfranchise African Americans throughout the country and in the South in particular and the start of the Great Depression, the latter of which created a global economic spiral that greatly reduced the needs and desires of Whites, Blacks, and all other nationalities to one. Essentially, this article is a historical chronicle of what the living and working conditions were for African Americans during this time frame. It may be successfully argued that the author spends more time depicting the events and details of the 20th century more so than those of the end of the 19th. Yet in both of these time periods, Boles emphasizes the immense challenges African Americans inherently endured in their attempts to live in the South. The author posits that the aforementioned historical epoch was the most disadvantageous to African Americans in the United States. He presents a number of statistics and literary evidence that indicates that incidents of violence were at their highest during this time period within the rural and urban South,