The Gold Cadillac

While the year is unspecified, it can be assumed that The Gold Cadillac takes place in the United States in the 1950s. The story itself revolves around the difference in laws in southern and northern states, as ’lois learns about racism through a trip to Mississippi from Ohio. After the end of slavery in the United States through the late 1960s, Southern states enacted laws that limited Black Americans’ rights to participate equally in society. Known as “Jim Crow laws” (named after a character from a minstrel show), these statutes “marginalize[d] African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education or other opportunities” (“Jim Crow Laws.” History.com, 23 April 2023). Such laws also encoded racism in the form of “white only” public amenities, businesses, and schools. Northern states enacted their own forms of Jim Crow laws, and some neighborhoods and businesses were segregated.

Though the North grappled with racism, often that racism was in practice, rather than in policy. After World War II, the American civil rights movement heralded important nationwide milestones such as racial integration of the military (1948), the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ending racial segregation in schools (1954), and the signing of the Civil Rights Act (1964).

In addition to being subject to restrictive laws in the late 19th through mid-20th centuries, Black Americans, particularly in the South, lived with the threat of lynching by white people who used this type of fear and violence as a means to “terrorize and control” them (“History of Lynching in America.” NAACP.org). Black people were lynched for reasons that ranged from being suspected of a crime to “violating social customs or racial expectations, such as speaking to white people with less respect than what white people believed they were owed” (“History of Lynching in America.”). According to the NAACP, there were 4743 lynchings between 1868 and 1968 in the United States, and Mississippi held the national record with 581. Between 1920 and 1950, 100,000 Mississippians fled to the North to escape the threat of violence and poverty that resulted from white supremacy (Cobb, Cicely Denean. “The Day That Daddy’s Baby Girl Is Forced to Grow Up: The Development of Adolescent Female Subjectivity in Mildred D. Taylor’s The Gold Cadillac.” ALAN Review, 2007). Mildred D. Taylor’s father, Wilbert Taylor, was one of those 100,000.