Content Warning: This section references systemic racism, including racial segregation in the Jim Crow South and acts of white supremacist violence.

The American civil rights movement of the 1960s had its roots in World War II and its aftermath. Black resistance to systemic racism existed prior to the war, but war made change more urgent. For example, the GI Bill, passed in 1944, provided returning soldiers with mortgage loans and educational assistance to attend colleges and universities. Black veterans benefitted from the bill’s passage, but white supremacists implemented methods to restrict their gains. The Veteran’s Administration pushed Black veterans into technical training programs or historically Black institutions rather than allowing them into elite white colleges and universities, and real estate moguls refused to sell to Black veterans. Moreover, as Black families bought homes in cities during the Second Great Migration, urban white people retreated to the suburbs in a phenomenon known as white flight. The federal government, in conjunction with the real estate industry, started giving “scores” to residential areas that determined whether inhabitants were eligible for mortgages, with Black neighborhoods downgraded (or “redlined”). Davis was introduced to these problems at a young age when friends of her mother couldn’t find housing in New York because of their interracial marriage.