African Americans in McMillen’s Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow

The constraints create common ground for many of the Negro community while further separating those against it. Lastly, the exigence of this piece of text clearly defines the problems of social injustice many Negros face either in the state of Alabama or in surrounding states. It is perceived as a problem because the injustices are gradually growing larger, to a point where the Negro community must not let the problem go on any longer.

In this paper I will inform you with a few of these events and topics such as the Civil war, slavery, as well as facts of the state. I hope my readers walk away with a new respect and outlook of Mississippi and learn how the past can affect the future, as well as the beauty.

The United States first began to deal with the issue of voter suppression during the Reconstruction. During Reconstruction freed slaves earned their right to vote and hold office through the fifteenth amendment in 1870. In 1877, Democrats, known as Dixiecrats, began to impose laws that were designed to suppress the African American vote or better known as Jim Crow Laws. The Jim Crow voting laws required the freedmen to pass literacy tests that they were unable to pass because of no formal education because of their status of slaves. Many states created poll taxes, which many poor Americans, white and black, were unable to pay. Many precincts made their voting precincts “white only” so that blacks would have nowhere to cast their votes. The Jim Crow voter suppression tactics were so successful that only three percent of African Americans in the south were registered to vote in 1940. Although African American males were given the right to vote in

The first segment is about the "old" South and the plantations, slavery, supported by law, church, schools, and press. The second is the new order of Reconstruction, occupation and a changed federal Constitution. The third one is the third regime, following Reconstruction, which was the longest, characterized by the regime of "Jim Crow.” The last segment is the newest phase, comprising the demise of Jim Crow and the renewed intense devotion of the federal government and civil rights leaders to establish racial equality. This segments of Southern history has been involved to the relationship between the white and black race, specifically the legal and social status of blacks, and this work is essentially a study of the third segment - the rise and entrenchment of Jim

Let’s examine the reality of violence during the Reconstruction Era. In the document, “Southern Horrors- Lynch Laws in All its Phases, by Ida B. Wells-Barnett we see countless examples of the continued violence in the south against African-Americans. The slogan “This is white man’s country and the

The discriminating social stratification in 1950’s developed a set of servile behavior on the blacks. They were thought to be inferior to whites, and were treated accordingly. Moreover, different parts of the country had various ranges of sensitivities while dealing with the blacks. For example, in Mississippi things were particularly tense after the Parker lynch case. No black man would dare look into any white man’s eyes in fear of the repercussions. On the bus, a man warned Griffin to watch himself closely until he caught onto Mississippi’s ways. In an extreme case like this, it was vital to learn about their roles and behave accordingly.

In Kevin Boyle’s Arc of Justice: A saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, the author creates a way to describe the discrimination and horrible racial treatment inflicted on the African American community following the civil war and continuing into the 1900’s by following a black doctor’s life and his controversy in equality. The author sets the scene in the booming city of Detroit, a place many blacks ventured to when trying to escape the cruelty Jim Crow Laws forced upon many African Americans. The great migration of blacks fleeing to Detroit in search of a new life brought an increase of over seventy thousand people in just the short span of fifteen years. This sudden unwanted abundance of people, still disliked even in the North, lead to a city full of racial prejudices and unjust discrimination.

C. Vann Woodward’s book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, has been hailed as a book which shaped our views of the history of the Civil Rights Movement and of the American South. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the book as “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.” The argument presented in The Strange Career of Jim Crow is that the Jim Crow laws were relatively new introductions to the South that occurred towards the turn of the century rather than immediately after the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Woodward examines personal accounts, opinions, and editorials from the eras as well as the laws in place at the times. He examines the political history behind the emergence of

Prior to the 1950s, very little research had been done on the history and nature of the United States’ policies toward and relationships with African Americans, particularly in the South. To most historians, white domination and unequal treatment of Negroes were assumed to be constants of the political and social landscapes since the nation’s conception. Prominent Southern historian C. Vann Woodward, however, permanently changed history’s naïve understanding of race in America through his book entitled The Strange Career of Jim Crow. His provocative thesis explored evidence that had previously been overlooked by historians and gave a fresh foundation for more research on the topic of

The lack of education was an issue regarding black people because of their race. In Florida the Jim Crow Laws state, “The schools for white children and the schools for negro children shall be conducted separately” (“Jim Crow Laws-Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site”). Due to the separation of the black and white school much of the money sent towards the school went to the white only school. This shows that the state did not want interracial schools and refers back to the thought “separate but equal” but not really equal. Although the thought was “separate but equal”, it doesn’t exactly mean people will follow that thought. In Concord, North Carolina, a black woman named Mary McLeod Bethune wanted to spread education for other black children. McLeod opened a school with any money she had and borrowed, for an all black girl institute in Daytona Beach. When other people discovered what she did, the Ku Klux Klan threatened to burn down the school, but never followed through. In 1929, the all girls’ school merged with an all men’s school (“The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow”). “It is our pledge to make a lasting contribution to all that is finest and best in America, to cherish and enrich her heritage of freedom

When ex-slaves demanded a formal public schooling, they were really asking the South to develop and embrace a relatively new philosophy of education. Effectively, they were having white southerners pay for the education of people they once “owned” as property, and had the right to receive what most whites in the region hadn’t had available previously.

The Strange Career of Jim Crow is a book that opens reader’s eyes to obstacles that black people faced during this period of time. Van Woodward does an excellent job in this book illustrating history. He provides factual and vivid examples of the racism that blacks faced in their fight for equality. It is obvious that this is a well written book in that it is still being published

The Strange Career of Jim Crow is a non-fiction book written in 1955 by a scholar named C. Vann Woodward. Vann Woodward was born in 1908 and died at the age of ninety-one, and his philosophies are known to be the most influential in American history in the post-World War II era. He is remembered for leading the way to demolish the deeply rooted mythology instilled in white Americans views of race relations from the end of reconstruction. In this paper, we will be reviewing his book titled The Strange Career of Jim Crow by pointing out some of the key aspects of the book as well as pointing out the critic.

In the Jim Crow South as depicted by Richard Wright and Eudora Welty, race is a matter of visibility. For black southerners, forever under the looming threat of white surveillance, to be seen is to be to be in danger. While Welty and Wright existed on opposite sides of the white gaze, the authors make contact as they explore and critique the barrier it created between white and black southerners, and the violence that resulted from this divide. In Welty’s “A Curtain of Green” and Wright’s “Down by the Riverside,” the surveyors become the surveyed, and a new perspective is born that resists the dominance of the white point of view.

This is the starting point of my discussion of the South. If argued further this notion boils down to two things: Firstly, Mississippians clearly consider themselves different from the rest of America and secondly they are still hanging on to a past that has certainly evolved into something new. Does that mean Mississippi is different because of its entity (when compared to the rest of America) or different even amongst other Southern states? Although the trajectory to unravel this Southern question is filled with many uncertainties yet a way to confront it is by reimagining certain historical notions and challenge public and private dilemmas associated with them.