They were centers for community actions and helped organize protests from civil rights.
American Protestants were afraid of the increased catholic immigration since <u>they felt threatened by the idea of America becoming a Catholic country. </u>
- On the one hand, Catholics believed a different Christianity than Protestants. Protestants, as opposed to the Catholic church, thought the following:
- Less hierarchy in church structure.
- The Bible and, not the sacraments, as source of revelation from God
- Jesus as the only necessary intercessor with God.
- There was an prejudice from anti-catholics that has to do with social class or status of the inmigrants. <u>Protestants from upper classes</u>, believed that the inmigrants were poor, therefore, they associated them with crime, danger and laziness.
- The fear from the American protestants created by the massive flow of catholic inmigrants, was so big that even a popular national organization, the <u>American Protective Association</u>, was founded to promote anti-Catholicism.
In this quote, Thurgood Marshall is talking about the time between the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation (which was supposed to free slaves in the Confederacy) to the Brown vs. Board case which ruled that "separate but equal" is unconstitutional.
The reason he brings up these two events is because it shows how little progress American society has changed in these 90 years. Even though African-Americans were supposed to be free citizens after the Emancipation Proclamation, they were still treated as second class citizens in the US. They were constantly targets of voter discrimination, violence, and prejudice.
The Democratic Party lost popularity and the 1952 election because of U.S. involvement in Korea. The heavy cost of the war in terms of money and American lives and the failure to win the war were partial reasons for the loss.
