In Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina 1896-1920, Glenda Gilmore exposed the benefits of adjusting our angle in studying the southern political narrative of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In studying elite, educated, black and white women, Gilmore found sources that voiced the opinions and views of these women. By placing educated black and white women at the center of her study, Gilmore revealed how the political activism and mutual cooperation by women of both races influenced southern progressivism. Gilmore remarked that her focus on educated female leaders slights the working class point of view, as other stories “remain to be told.” Wilmington’s working class females served…
Some critics say that C. V. Woodward’s novel “The Strange Career of Jim Crow” was simply a book about racism. Other critics also attack his style of writing in this very popular novel. However, I believe that Woodward’s novel is not just a book about racism. It is a book about history. I believe it is a book about race relations, not racism. Woodward shatters the stereotypical view of segregation through chronicling the history of America from reconstruction through the late 1960’s.…
Imagine yourself walking in the middle of the night, and suddenly, a person approaches you with a gun and threatens to rob you of all your possessions. Take a moment to focus on the robber’s physical appearance, what does the robber look like? Regardless of what the robber looks like, the physical characteristics of him or her have no actual significance. The purpose of this scenario is to show how visualizing and defining a criminal based on physical features is a form of active participation within the system of mass incarceration. The appearance of the theoretical robber was formed from hegemony and preconceived notions of what a robber, or any criminal, looks like. Similarly, during the War on Drugs from the 1980s to the early 2000s, law enforcement sought out possible drug offenders based on hegemonic beliefs of race and class that have developed over time. Consequently, this led to the disproportional incarceration of minority groups, especially African Americans, to the point where they represented over 80 to 90 percent of all arrested drug offenders (Alexander 64).…
The New Jim Crow, written by Michelle Alexander, gives a brief history recount of the past caste systems that have oppressed African-Americans and proposes that today there is a new caste system. She suggests that today’s caste system is created by the U.S. criminal justice system by targeting black men and incarcerating them. In other words, she says that today’s racial caste is based on the mass incarceration of African-Americans.…
Before reading the preface my view of “tough on crime” drug polices was that if drug offenders are charged for a drug crime it is considered a misdemeanor. I thought when offenders are release from prison they were mandatory to attend rehabilitation program to receive appropriate drug treatments. However, the “tough on crime” polices resulted in the large increase of federal and state prison for mass incarceration of black American in the war on drugs. My perspective on drug enforcement changed due to reading the preface of “The New Jim Crow”. I did not realize that drug war in ghetto communities was not because of where the violent offenders are located or people uses drugs. The drug war was focused was the increase of drug arrests on black…
The New Jim Crow describes how institutionalized racism has taken hold in the American Justice system. In the first chapter, Michelle Alexander runs through the history of racial castes in the United States, from the beginnings of slavery, to Jim crow and eventually the “law and order” rhetoric that developed into the system in place today. The book moves on to point out the server flaws in the justice system. These flaws, according to Alexander, are found within each step of the journey to jail or probation. Areas where racist acts can slip in virtually undetected, whether it be in the arrest, the accusation, or sentencing.…
Thomas D. Rice was a white man but was wearing black face makeup, in 1832; Thomas started performing “Jump Jim Crow”. The Jim Crow laws came to existence in 1877 when the whites regained power in the government in the South after the war and made it law. The Civil Rights act passed in 1964 ended discrimination by law and said no one may be discriminated against race, gender, or religious reasons. There were many court cases that helped fight the Jim Crow Laws. The Jim Crow Laws were the laws that people had to live by, it was racial segregation towards colored people and it separated the blacks from the whites in schools, busses, bathrooms, work, and many other places. The laws were to keep the African Americans out…
were southern blacks. Hundreds of other lynchings and acts of mob terror aimed at brutalizing…
The 19th and 20th century was the era of Jim Crow. The Jim Crow Laws were enacted, mainly in the southern states. The Jim Crow Laws were restrictions on everything from marriage to games. The Laws came after the emancipation of the slaves, but before complete desegregation. African Americans were seen as something to be treated like a dog, but not as lovable as the latter.…
After the slaves were freed the production of the South dropped because they were part of the economic production system. The production of the landowners decreased because the labors who worked on their crops were the African Americans but were freed. However, here is where the Jim Crow laws came in by charging African American for minor crimes and imprisoning them to continue their slave work legally but in jail. What Jim Crows laws of segregation where that the African American were put in a second-class status. Signs of where white and colored were put out throughout town legally letting the color people where they were allowed to step in.…
Through the Narrator’s constant failure to find success and happiness in Jim Crow America, Ellison argues that it impossible for a black man to discover who he is while in a preformative state because he is acting in a way intended to gain approval or acceptance within society, which only leads to delusional satisfaction and a false sense of…
The Jim Crow laws was established in 1877 under President Woodrow Wilson. The Jim Crow law was an anti-black laws it forbid African American from doing a lot of things.it was upheld racial segregation that African Americans could, once again, be punished for the most simple of acts, for example Blacks could be punished for walking down the street if they did not move out of the way quickly enough to accommodate White passerby, for talking to friends on a street corner, for speaking to someone White, and for making direct eye contact with someone white. (Chapter 3, the Jim Crow Segregation Statues section, para. 5). Black children couldn’t play with black children, all these are different ways that the white population downgraded…
This week’s readings discussed a concept called “The New Jim Crow” which is about how black people and Latino's are most likely to get more prison time than their counter-parts even when the crime committed is the same. The author goes on to talk about how people who are black and brown get stopped more and searched than any other race. Personally, I think the reason why people who are black and brown are most likely to be stopped and searched is because , in most cases they cannot afford a good lawyer who will stand up for their rights , There are public defenders but they have lot of cases to deal with and paper work with that being said if they can get someone to admit to the crime and do the time and get a shorter sentences they're work…
Black people who lived in southern and border-states between 1877 and the mid-1960s were forced to endure a series of basically ‘anti-black’ laws. These laws are referred to as The Jim Crow laws which described many rules and regulations that made black people second class citizens. The Jim Crow Laws were created to segregate people of color from whites in a racist post- civil war society. In the late 1870s, Southern state legislatures passed laws requiring the separation of whites from persons of color.…
The term Jim Crow has been in use for more than a century and still has relevance and meaning in the world today. Many people know the term describes the segregation laws that took place in the 1900’s, however that much is not the entire story. The term Jim Crow has roots in the deep south, and became so popular it was later used as a nickname to describe laws that dehumanized African Americans and striped them of their rights.…