The Condemnation Of Blackness Summary

“I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self-respect and a sense of ‘somebodiness’ that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best-known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible ‘devil’”.

In Chapter 9, “Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom,” of A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn takes about the slave rebellions, abolition movement, the Civil War, and these effects on African Americans. Zinn included this chapter to explain the life of African Americans before and after the Civil War and their treatment accordingly. Howard Zinn explains how the life of an African American remained cruel and taken advantage of through explaining the life of a slave before the War and then the mentality that whites were better than blacks that continued after, seen through the effects of the Klu Klux Klan.

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.

The American Civil War is still referred to by historians as one of the bloodiest stains on the nation’s sociopolitical landscape. From beginning to end, the normal fanfare of atrocities that any war brings such as poverty, starvation, and bloodshed were made more gruesome by the reality that neighbors were fighting neighbors and brothers raising arms against one another. Caught between both sides was an entire race of people; though there were many political ideologies involved, the issue of slavery and the rights of African Americans lit the fuse and kept the fire burning. Incidents involving the terrorizing of black Americans were numerous throughout the course of the Civil War, though none was more controversial than the Confederate

The legal system acted as a political oppression against African Americans in the south. As soon as blacks gained the right to vote, secret societies sprang up. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan, also known as the KKK, assaulted and murdered local republican leaders. This racial affect on the African American community took a century for “Black America” to

“Black bodies are considered dispensable within the “free world” but as a major source of profit in the prison world” (Davis 2003). This quote is the primary reason I registered for UTSA African-American Studies. In 2016, I wrote an essay for my Freshman Composition Course title, “The New Jim Crow: People of Color New Reality in 21st Century America”. The Angela Davis quote was so powerful it inspired me to continue filling in the blanks that I learned over the years about American History at the courtesy of White America’s educational system, which left me feeling disenfranchised as a young boy. I always wanted to learn American History sequentially with the inclusion of African-American History. From B.C. to A.D., I wanted to learn everything about our American

Racial stereotyping often crossed over into subjective decision – making processes such as the courts, and it often resulted in devastating consequences (Alexander 2012, 4). The courts would often fail to uphold the law and give whites and blacks unequal punishment. Many times African Americans would take whites to court to dispute situations but the courts often overturned their decision and ruled in favor of the white party. After refusing to move to the Jim Crow section on a train after paying full price for a ticket, Ida B. Wells was put off the train and walks home. Later she takes the train company to court where at first she won, but later the court overturned the ruling. Ida B. Wells responded by writing, “tell my people to flee, there is no justice here” (The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow 2002, Part 1). It was also the norm some crimes that were committed by one race “not to be punishable when committed by the other race. If s white man were found guilty of adultery or bigamy, he might have to serve from 3 – 10 years in the penitentiary, but authorities were apt to ignore such a crime when committed by a black person, dismissing it as a racial defect” (Litwack 1998, 259). A white man could also be convicted of a crime and receive a very light sentence and a black man who was convicted of the same crime would receive a very heavy and unjust sentence. It is only “possible for the white race to prove its own incontestable superiority by appointing both judge and jury and summoning its own witnesses” (Du Bois 1998, 32). During Jim Crow the court system often did this. This is why blacks could be convicted of the same crimes that whites committed and sentenced to jail for several years while the white man walked free. This eventually became better after African American activist Charles Hamilton Houston devised a strategy that forced the courts to uphold the law and

This philosophy rejected government intervention in order to weed out the weak and unfit (blacks) on the grounds that government assistance weakened the society by keeping the unfit alive, thereby preventing racial uplift. In the chapter: Writing crime into race: racial criminalization and the dawn of Jim crow, Muhammad unveils the connection between the black crime statistics and the beginning of discriminatory thinking. Fredrick L. Hoffman, the author of Race Traits and the Tendencies of the American Negro, through his work can be said to be the fuel behind prejudicial thinking in the 19th century. Hoffman’s “Vital Statistics of the Negro” was a means of justification as to why Blacks were inferior.

Race not only acted as the marker of exclusion, but it also acted as a death sentence for many Black people. For instance, Ida B. Wells pamphlet, “The Red Record” discusses the causes of lynching in the United States of America. Majority of the cases Ida. B Wells states, “the white man had no right to scourge the emancipated Negro, still less has he a right to kill him” (Wells 123/ 3).

African American’s have suffered through every point of history. They know the meaning of humiliation, criminalization, and the feeling of being degraded for no reason other than being born Black. They know that time have robbed them of their dignity, self-respect, and decency.

This assignment examines the African-American civil right movement in the USA, and the conditions of their life with focus on the period after the Second World War and the contemporary American society. It also gives an examination on how the civil right movement have developed and whether it has had an effect on the society. It also gives a chronological line to highlight the civil right movement extraction, and the causes and effects of the movement, which was a dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story.

Along with Martin Luther King Jr.’s extreme ideas, many history books leave out the incredible amount of violence that actually took place on behalf of the African-Americans as they begged and fought for civil rights. Quite frequently, history textbooks acknowledge the violence perpetrated by unjust white men and women on the helpless black community, but rarely does the focus shift to the violent protests and actions taken quite frequently by the black population in response. This skewed perspective of history teaches students that standing up for beliefs in a peaceful manner will resolve any conflicts without violence. By viewing the civil rights struggles as one of complete amity, the plight of the African-American people sounds more appealing and lends credence to their movement. This positive view of the black community’s struggle for equal rights is far more desirable that the harsh and unappealing truth of radical violence. This desirable portrayal has created a flawed memory for the modern generation in

While the formal abolition of slavery, on the 6th of December 1865 freed black Americans from their slave labour, they were still unequal to and discriminated by white Americans for the next century. This ‘freedom’, meant that black Americans ‘felt like a bird out of a cage’ , but this freedom from slavery did not equate to their complete liberty, rather they were kept in destitute through their economic, social, and political state.

Racism against African American peoples has been present in America, even before its founding, and it continues on to present day. To put it simply, racism is the belief that the race of a person determines their personality and what they are capable of. It is also the belief that because of these differences, certain races are better than others. The presence of racism can be seen in many different ways in present day America, through police violence, the existence of the Ku Klux Klan, the existence of white privilege, and the Black Lives Matter movement. All of these topics will be covered in this paper.

Moody published this book in 1968 and ended it in a way that left the readers with a sense that the future for blacks was bleak. In today’s society, while not perfect, it is easy to see just how far the civil rights movement has come; while racism still lingers in our society, racial inequality has been significantly reduced. However, in the period Moody wrote and published this book, many civil rights advocates were discouraged with the minimal progress that the civil rights movement was making; Moody had dedicated over a year of her life to the movement, suffered through beating after beating, jailing after jailing, and to her, at that moment, it seemed all in vain since blacks were no better off at that point than when she first joined the movement. When this book was published, Moody was unaware of the huge strides the