Category 1970s

A network of civil rights lawyers takes Southern cities to court for delivering inferior public services to Black neighborhoods.

Across the South in the 1970s, a consistent and well-documented pattern had taken hold in cities and counties: local governments provided dramatically inferior public services — paved roads, streetlights, sewage systems, garbage collection — to Black neighborhoods compared to white…

SEDFRE helps a new generation of Black elected officials govern in a South that had spent a century keeping them out of power.

The Scholarship, Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality (SEDFRE, Norman grantee 1966–1976) was founded in 1963 to provide legal defense, scholarships, and voter registration support to the Civil Rights Movement. By the early 1970s, the movement’s hard-won legislative victories…