Let The Circle Be Unbroken

One of the central themes of Let the Circle Be Unbroken revolves around segregation. The historical precedent for this notion of separation goes back to the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in 1896. The Supreme Court found:

The object of the [Fourteenth] Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.

The court stated that the 14th Amendment guaranteeing legal equality to Black people was not violated as long as Black and white citizens received “separate but equal” treatment. This ruling amounted to government-sanctioned segregation, which would prevail until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

When segregation was legal, many state laws were passed in the South to maintain a strict separation between white and Black people. The legislation that upheld segregation came to be known as “Jim Crow laws.” The expression “Jim Crow” was coined in the early 19th century as a derogatory description of Black people. Facilities were mandated to be “equal” for both Black and white people, but Jim Crow laws ensured that Black people received inferior treatment compared to services for white people. The Black educational system was consistently underfunded, but school segregation didn’t end until Brown v. Board of Education ruled this practice illegal in 1954.

It would take another decade for the Supreme Court to overturn other comparable state legislation regarding education. Jim Crow laws were ultimately invalidated with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Let the Circle Be Unbroken contains many incidents related to these legal restrictions. One involves the mandate that hotels, businesses, transportation, and even public restrooms and drinking fountains be segregated. When Cassie and her brothers innocently use the courthouse bathroom facilities, their friend Jeremy hustles them to safety and lectures them about the dangers of using “white people” only facilities.

Aside from the aforementioned Jim Crow laws, Southern states also passed “anti-miscegenation” legislation prohibiting the marriage of white and Black people. Neither the Civil Rights Act nor the Voting Rights Act covered these prohibitions, so many marriage bans remained on the books. These were finally ruled unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia in 1967. The problems related to marriage are examined in the novel when a Logan cousin marries a white woman and arrives for a visit with his daughter, who has light skin.

Given the 1930s timeframe of Let the Circle Be Unbroken, the characters all live with legally sanctioned segregation that encourages them to maintain a world that is separate from the white inhabitants of the same county. Cassie and her siblings attend a Black school and a Black church. An attempt by an elderly Black woman to cross the “color line” and vote requires her to pass an examination. The exam questions are determined by the local registrar and are intended to fail Black voters. The very act of expressing a desire to vote results in the old woman being evicted from her land by the plantation owner. Despite advances in federal legislation, it would be another three decades before the Logan family could even consider living safely in the same world as their white neighbors.