The Legacy Of The Jim Crow Era

The Jim Crow laws were local and state laws that were supposedly “separate but equal,” but instead blacks were inferior to the whites due that to the social, educational, and economical disadvantages that they caused. In Woodward’s greatly influential book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, he shows supporters of segregation that this was not the way that it had always been, but instead segregation took time to develop after the Civil war and that the acceptance of the Jim Crow laws was not just because of race, but also included politic aspects. Woodward proves his thesis by showing how the state between the two races was right after the race the war and how slavery required interaction between blacks and whites. Woodward continues to

Let me start by explaining what the Jim Crow Law is, under the Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that whites were the Chosen people, blacks were cursed to be servants, and God

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander develops a compelling analogy on how mass incarceration is similar to the Jim Crow era, and is a “race-making institution.” She begins her work with the question, “Where have all the black men gone?” (Alexander, 178) She demonstrates how the media and Obama have failed to give an honest answer to this question, that the large majority of them or in prison. She argues that in order to address this problem, we must be honest about the fact that this is happening, and the discrimination with the African American communities that is putting them there.

Before there were players such as Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Barry Bonds, Major League Baseball was strictly white players only. The color line of Major League Baseball excluded black players until the late 40’s. This didn’t stop the colored men of America from playing the beloved American sport. The creation of the Negro Leagues in 1920 by Rube Foster gave colored men a chance to play in their own professional league, similar to the Major Leagues, but for African-American men. The creation of the Negro Leagues was a result of the Jim Crow Laws, state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. Enacted after the Reconstruction period in the U.S., these laws continued in force until 1965. These laws created

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2010.

The whole Jim Crow Law rules were based on the separate but equal properties. Any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the south between the end of reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Jim crow laws affected public places such as schools, housing jobs, parks, cemeteries, and public gathering places. Ohio was one of the first to ban interracial marriage. There was forms of segregation before the laws came into place. For instance some people had the mentality that they could work with a slave as long as the slave knew his or her place. Brown vs. Board of Education is an example of a Jim Crow law being put into action. After the supreme court unanimously held that racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause.

This “war on drugs,” which all subsequent presidents have embraced, has created a behemoth of courts, jails, and prisons that have done little to decrease the use of drugs while doing much to create confusion and hardship in families of color and urban communities.1,2Since 1972, the number of people incarcerated has increased 5-fold without a comparable decrease in crime or drug use.1,3 In fact, the decreased costs of opiates and stimulants and the increased potency of cannabis might lead one to an opposing conclusion.4 Given the politics of the war on drugs, skyrocketing incarceration rates are deemed a sign of success, not failure. I don’t totally agree with the book (I think linking crime and black struggle is even older than she does, for instance) but I think The New Jim Crow pursues the right line of questioning. “The prison boom is not the main cause of inequality between blacks and whites in America, but it did foreclose upward mobility

Jim Crow sets the guidelines for a violent mindset that will fabricate deadly culture norms. The Jim Crow laws did not directly address that a person of color like Emmett could not go into Bryants' store and supposedly "flirt" with her. It was not the law of division that allowed Carolyn's husband and brother-in-law to beat young Emmett to death, burn in his body and throw him in the river. It was the self-entitlement that white lives mattered more than blacks derived from Jim Crow laws saying the contradiction of separate but equal that allowed the killing of a 14-year-old boy on false accusations without legal implications for the murderers. There were unspoken rules and social standings that would not be tolerated anymore.

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness goes into great detail on race related issues that were specific to black males, the mass incarceration, and how that lead to the development of institutionalized racism in the United States. She compares the Jim Crow with recent phenomenon of mass incarceration and points out that the mass incarceration is a network of laws, policies, customs and institutions that have been working together to warrant the subordinating status of black males. In this paper I will go into a brief examination of the range of issues that she mentions in her book that are surrounding the mass incarceration of black male populations.

In 1896, the court case of Plessy vs. Ferguson ruled that the states had the right to legally segregate public facilities. This court ruling fueled the fire of Southerners in regards to race relations, leading to the Jim Crow laws. These laws went as far as to say blacks could not cut a white person’s hair, drink from the same water fountain as a white person, and established a test for blacks to take prior to getting a ballot.

The New Jim Crow is a book that discusses how legal practices and the American justice system are harming the African American community as a whole, and it argues that racism, though hidden, is still alive and well in our society because of these practices. In the book, Michelle Alexander, author and legal scholar, argues that legal policies against offenders have kept and continue to keep black men from becoming first class citizens, and she writes that by labeling them as “criminals,” the justice system and society in general is able to act with prejudice against them and subordinate black Americans who were previously incarcerated, on probation, or on parole, by limiting their access to services as a result of their ‘criminal status’ and therefore, further degrading their quality of life. The New Jim Crow urges readers to acknowledge the injustice and racial disparity of our criminal justice system so that this new, more covert form of racism in society can be stopped.

In the book “Uncle Tom’s Children” by Richard Wright, many topics are covered through it’s different stories, such as racism, prejudice, law and order, etc. The topic of Child Psychology is highly displayed in the two of the stories, which are “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” and “Big Boy Leaves Home”. Child Psychology is a branch of Psychology that focuses on the study of the mental and social developments of children. As the events of the stories unfold, we are able to see how the main characters’ personalities and mental states change, which involves beliefs, attitude, actions, change of heart, etc. In the stories, the personalities of the main characters change due to the experiences they go through and the situations that they are

The Help takes place in Jackson, Mississippi during the early 1960s, the era of Jim Crow Laws, segregation and racial prejudice. The movie features three main characters which drive the action of the movie— Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter.

“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”

In the first three chapters of Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, she discusses the mass incarceration of African Americans through drug crimes. In each of the three chapters she explores the unjust criminal justice system and it’s racial bias towards African Americans. Chapter one is about the history of racial segregation and bias towards African Americans. In this chapter she argues that there will always be a racial caste system, which happens to be mass incarceration, today. Alexander uses a timeline of events to lead up to this claim. She starts with slavery, the death of slavery, the birth of Jim Crow, the death of Jim Crow, and then ends with mass incarceration. I think this progression helps to strengthen her argument, since all of the timeline events are about a racial caste system, and there’s one today, so it shows how it’s still prevalent. In chapter two, she argues about the War on Drugs and the discriminatory techniques that our police officers are allowed to use. She talks about the unfair ways police can stop and arrest people, and the tactics they use to incarcerate them. I think the tactics she provides that law enforcement are able to do is very unreasonable, like arresting someone because they didn’t consent to having their car searched, or a SWAT team breaking into a house based off of a tip from someone accusing a person of a drug offense. I think this is fraudulent and shady for law enforcement to be able to do this. It allows racial