In September 1946, Albert Einstein called racism America’s “worst disease.” Earlier that year, he told students and faculty at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the oldest black college in the Western world, that racial segregation was “not a disease of colored people, but a disease of white people,” adding, “I will not remain silent about it.” 1
Disease? A skeptical reader may wonder if Einstein was overstating the case. To appreciate his choice of the word requires examining specific symptoms of the segregation sickness so widespread in America some fourscore years after the abolition of slavery. Black soldiers—a million of whom took part in the war to defeat Nazism—when allowed into combat at all, fought only in segregated units under white officers.
Racial segregation was the rule in most of 1946 America, with separate and decidedly unequal public and private facilities, from housing and schools to buses and beaches, throughout the...
