Jackie Robinson became the first Black player in Major League Baseball when he took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, after years of Black players competing in segregated Negro Leagues. Robinson rejected the separatist view that Black players should stay apart, insisting that the goal was access to all of American life. Later in life he became more confrontational as his patient approach failed to deliver the change he wanted, and he held politically mixed loyalties, at one point supporting Richard Nixon.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.