Jim Crow As The Nadir Of Black America Analysis

Jim Crow as the “Nadir of Black America”
As Reconstruction collapsed, white supremacist values reemerged to counteract the threat of black advancement in a white society. Violence against blacks was condoned by social and legal forces alike, creating a detrimental environment for black Americans. The Jim Crow system effectively reestablished African Americans as “second-class citizens” in all aspects of life. With the exception of slavery, I agree with Loewen’s assessment of the Jim Crow era as the “nadir of black America” because the reactionary nature of Jim Crow caused for a more active/aggressive suppression of blacks that resulted in a complete retrogression of race relations.
The Jim Crow era was essentially the “nadir of black America”
In Jim Crow race riots, “the police force… was invariably involved as a precipitating cause or a perpetuating factor in the riots… The police sided with the attackers” (The Nadir of Black America). Police failing to stop race riots sent a message that discrimination, including violent acts, was acceptable and offered almost no consequence to the perpetrator. This prejudiced legal system allowed national hostility to become even more deeply entrenched in American society. Furthermore, in support of Jim Crow, the Supreme Court stripped the Fourteenth Amendment of its significance when ruling that “private acts of racial discrimination were simply private wrongs that the national government was powerless to correct” (The Nadir of Black America). The Supreme Court essentially offered no legal protection to blacks, impeding any escape from racial discrimination. Along with this, the “separate but equal” doctrine was condoned by the Supreme Court despite the fact that black facilities were generally “grossly inferior” to those of whites. The legal system ignored their “constitutional obligations” to black citizens both at a state and federal level. However, a corrupt legal system was merely a foundation of the Jim Crow system; racially motivated violence was instrumental to the preservation of
Violence was a means of social control even more threatening than that of law because of the moral corruption and hostility; violence held none of the claimed reason/justice of the legal system and blacks were left wholly unprotected against it. For example, lynch mobs were not content with killing one or even a few blacks, but the mobs “went into Black communities and destroyed additional lives and property” (The Nadir of Black America) to intimidate black Americans. In particular, the Red Summer (1919) exemplifies the pervasive violence of Jim Crow, in which “white mobs killed 77 black Americans… betray[ing] white anxiety over new levels of black prosperity and social power” (Onion). Under a white supremacist legal system, racial violence did not act against the law but instead enforced it, protecting the racial hierarchy in which blacks were forced into lives of fear. In the Tulsa race riot of 1921, 300 blacks were killed and over 10,000 were left homeless after blacks tried to defend a falsely accused lynching victim, demonstrating the excessive violence to extinguish any black resistance. Just as Ida B Wells discovered, “even innocent middle-class black people could be targets” (The fight against Jim Crow), meaning that no black American was safe from the aggressive defense of white supremacy in