Even progressive White scholars of 1954 understated state support for racial caste.

Evidence

In the first quote given above from Allport’s chapter 20, published in the year of the watershed Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision, Allport seems oddly naive about America’s racial situation, describing discrimination as “unofficial” and even “illegal.” The continuing support, both passive and aggressive, for legalized discrimination and segregation by governments at all levels was a harsh reality of his day. To be sure, elsewhere in the book he acknowledges the complicity of legal and political authorities in maintaining the racial caste system, such as in the mob lynchings of Blacks, and in the Supreme Court’s extraordinarily narrow interpretations of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments and in its precedent-setting Plessy v. Ferguson decision. However devoted White Americans of his day were to the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, they largely acquiesced to a government-supported racial caste system. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2164

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how legal/institutional structures quietly sustain hierarchy — parallels the law merchant sources on informal institutions, here showing the reverse: formal legal support for caste, later retracted.