The histories of oppressed minorities in the United States have all begun very differently, but throughout the twentieth century they have developed as many similarities as differences. African Americans, for example, were brought to America against their will and forced into slavery where they were encouraged to increase in number because they were considered valuable 'property' essential to the economy of the Southern states. Native Americans, on the other hand, were forced off their own lands, robbed of their traditional means of survival, and systematically murdered any time they occupied lands the European Americans wanted. By the twentieth century, however, slavery and the wars against the Indians were over and, perpetuating the dominant group's racism, laws were invented to keep both groups out of the mainstream and confined to poverty, illiteracy, and fear--on federal Indian reservations or in urban ghettos. As the century progressed both groups gradually worked out strategies to overcome this treatment and began to claim their places in society. Autobiographies by Sioux activist Mary Crow Dog and African-American writer Richard Wright show the many similarities between the oppressive conditions endured by their people and the initiatives they used in the struggle for equality.
Both Wright and Crow Dog devote a considerable portion of their books to descriptions of their emerging awareness of racial discrimination. Both describe the prevailing attitudes of the white people in their regions, Wright in Mississippi and Tennessee and Crow Dog in South Dakota, and incidents ranging from everyday slights, insults, and constraints on freedom of action, speech and employment to murders that receive no justice. But some of the most harrowing aspects of their accounts are the realizations they reach about the general program of institutionalized racism that carries out its mission in the schools. Crow Dog, for example, des...