The Chasm Between Racial Optimism and Reality
Five decades after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., equality, for many, remains a distant dream.
In 1868, the abolitionist and orator Anna E. Dickinson published , a novel that explored, in a manner revolutionary for its time, the subject of interracial marriage. assigned its assistant editor, William Dean Howells, to review the book. Howells, who would later become the magazine’s editor in chief, was, in the years following the Civil War, something of a racial optimist. He opened his review by recounting a story told to’s most important contributors:
