The Long Lines of Color

Abstract

Lynching stories and memories helped weave the color line through Grant County’s fabric to the end of the twentieth century. There was every reason to believe that W. E. B. Du Bois had been correct in predicting in 1903 that the color line would be the problem of the century. By 2000 the line was certainly more fluid and more ambiguous than at the century’s beginning. Some would still see a glass half empty, a color line still too sharp, still too tragic; others would see a glass more than half full, a line weakening to faintness as this ordinary place moved toward fulfilling America’s ideals. Few could deny that times had changed.