“African Americans wanted to participate in all the recreation cities had to offer, and they wished to protect their children from white violence. Violence perpetrated by whites, however, has not been widely recognized as a major factor in maintaining segregation.7 Popular memories of mid-twentieth-century urban amusements are replete with nostalgia and rarely contain references to segregation. This erasure of white violence has led many to blame the decline of urban recreation on “deviant” behavior by African Americans in newly desegregated amusements.“
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