For many years, Southern historian C. Vann Woodward once noted, this era was a "twilight zone" in American history.

Partly in response to that circumstance, scholars at Duke University and other schools initiated a major collaborative research venture, titled "Behind the Veil: African-American Responses to the Age of Segregation." Over five years, more than 50 graduate students conducted 1,200 interviews in 10 different Southern states, focusing on African-Americans who experienced and fought against the realities of segregation.

The effort's findings made it clear that the system of Jim Crow's controls and regulations was pervasive and multi-layered.

"They did everything they could to make you feel inferior," Kenneth Young of Tuskegee, Ala., noted.

The ultimate and most arbitrary reinforcement of the racial status quo consisted of physical force and terror.

Richard Wright, the renowned author, asked his mother why black people did not fight back when whites mistreated them. "Because the white men have guns and the black men don't," she responded. As another black Mississippian noted, "[whites] had to have a license to kill anything but a 'nigger.' We was always in season."

Virtually all those interviewed for the "Behind the Veil" project corroborated Wright's insight. Some experienced murder and lynching firsthand - a brother killed in the dead of night for not being sufficiently submissive to a white man; the pregnant wife of a black farmer who allegedly said something offensive to a white woman, who then had her womb slit open by Klan members, killing both the mother and the child; a young man dragged to his death behind a wagon.

Another circle of control was psychological - the insidious and pervasive social messages that sought to limit black aspirations and remind black Southerners that they were second-class citizens, with no right to pride or autonomy. The vehicles for such messages were myriad. Neil McMillen writes of postal authorities in Mississippi who systematically crossed out "Mr." or "Mrs." as prefixes before black names to whom mail was being delivered. A teacher near Charlotte went to get a prescription filled, and when she thanked the pharmacist after he handed her the package, he slapped her in the face for not saying, '¹Thank you, sir.

Yet what remains most striking is the degree to which African Americans - despite significant internal differences - crafted new opportunities, provided support for each other, and operated within the existing structure of rules and expectations to move, inch by inch, toward their collective goals. Some even resisted openly, and successfully. In sum, their story reflects the extraordinary strength of a people who refused to succumb, and instead gave substance and reality to the slogan of the National Association of Colored Women: "Lift as we climb."

As Booker Frederick noted about his life experience in rural Alabama, "We had a few black men [here] ... known as the men that didn't take anything [from whites]. The white folks would put on like they wasn't afraid of them, but they were."

Along the continuum of resistance, the most courageous, bold, and dangerous acts of protest consisted of black Americans defying white authority by force of arms. Often, the decision to use physical force to stand up for oneself or one's family meant a de facto decision to leave the local area in order to stay alive. Other times, however, the use of rifles and individual and collective self-defense registered a significant impact on whites, causing them to at least pause, if not back off, from their efforts to intimidate. In both cases, resistance suggested the importance of collective as well as individual action, and the importance of black institutions in making possible united action.

But all of this represented as much continuity as change. If a new openness of protest and self-expression had become possible, it was only because those who had gone before had struggled so valiantly to make such a moment possible. As Susie Jones, the dean of admissions for Bennett College, said in 1946, "The gods bring threads to webs begun."

Charles Jones, a young man growing up near Charlotte in the 1930s and '40s, had observed carefully the way his father, a minister, dealt with the racial circumstances that shaped their lives. Occasionally, the younger man was perplexed by the way his father adopted a deferential pose. Yet he also understood that his father was pursuing a means to a larger end. In his own life, Charles Jones became a far more open advocate of change, attending world youth festivals, joining the direct action civil rights movement. Yet as he encountered a different kind of politics, he also developed a new insight into what had occurred earlier in his life.

"I began to understand," he said, "my father's restraint, my father's wisdom - because it was more important to accomplish a common object with dignity than to challenge at every stage everything ... that white males were confronting us with. So we assumed the higher ground, took all the rhetoric that the Christian white church and the constitution had taught us, and beat the devil out of them with it."

Appropriately, the father and son went together to be the first African Americans to integrate the Rexall drugstore in downtown Charlotte in the summer of 1960.

"The gods bring threads to webs begun."