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The Argument Against Jim Crow Laws

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Jim Crow is a term that came to be a derogatory epithet for African Americans. It is unknown who Jim Crow was or where the name came from but in the 1930s an actor named Thomas Dartmouth Rice would do a minstrel routine called “Jumping Jim Crow”. He wore blackface and mocked a crippled Black man that reinforced the idea that Blacks were inferior to whites. People liked this term and eventually used it as a designation for the laws that segregated Blacks (Wilkerson 41). Jim Crow became to be a racial case system exclusively in the South that enforced laws of racial segregation. These laws went against the U.S. Constitution that granted Blacks citizenships and equal rights. Jim Crow laws were horrifying because it gave whites the right to lynch Blacks at any given moment for any reason (Wilkerson 38). These laws reinforced a racial hierarchy that strengthens white supremacy.
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He was accused of raping and killing a white woman, with whom he grew up with. Neal was arrested and allegedly confessed to the murder. The police tried to protect Neal by moving him to several jails; one of those jails being out of state, but that did not stop a group of white men who referred to themselves as the “committee of six” from capturing Neal (Wilkerson 60). The committee of six dismembered Neal’s body; they tortured him for hours and mutilated his body they eventually they killed him. After killing him, they tied his body onto the back of a car and dragged him to the white woman’s house who he allegedly killed; men, women, and children continue to stab his corpse. “People reportedly displayed Neal’s fingers and toes as souvenirs. Postcards of his dismembered body went for fifty cents each” (Wilkerson 61). The men and women who tortured, mutilated, and dismembered his body thought of themselves as perfectly normal human beings. All for the sake to preserve racial

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