Jim Crow Digital History

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow digital history website explores the events, organizations, and lives of those present during the era when the Jim Crow laws existed. Jim Crow refers to the set of laws sanctioned by the government that allowed racial oppression and segregation in the United States from the Reconstruction era until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s (The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow). This website provides personal narratives, photographs, original documents, a timeline of events, student activities, and lesson plans for teachers that give insight to what it was like to live during this time. The struggle against Jim Crow is presented in a simple and interactive way creating an easy and memorable learning experience that one
The Jim Crow Laws tab consists of five categories: education, hospitals & prisons, miscegenation, public accommodations, and transportation, along with the map of the United States. A student can scroll over each state while selecting one of the categories and learn about how the Jim Crow laws affected the state in that category. The Population & Migration and Lynching & Riots tabs are similar in that a student can scroll over the states and see statistics on how many white and black men migrated to the South, how many were lynched, and how many riots occurred over 20 year intervals from 1870 to 1960. This tool proves useful in educating students who are fact and statistically driven and provides information that may not be as commonly known about the Jim Crow
The one undesirable characteristic of the website is the choice in video and sound player. Students may not have access to the flash 5 real player plug-in that is required in order to view and listen to the video and audio clips. These clips add an extra element of emotion that is important in learning about this topic. Hearing first-hand what it was like to live during this painful and troubling time creates a more realistic and in depth learning experience that may not be received just through literature. However, this one negative quality of the website is outshone by its positive qualities. For example, one interactive tool gives the student the experience of the struggle African Americans who were so called “free” had to go through in order to cast a ballot. The first page shows a picture of an African American man hanged by the neck with a sign taped to his chest reading “This Nigger Voted.” Each page of this activity gives two choices: Stay at Home or Try to Vote. The safe choice is to stay at home, however this does nothing to improve the disfranchisement for African Americans (Tools and Activities). The following page provides a link to the literary test taken by men who wanted to vote. It explains that the official giving the test gave the overall ruling of whether a person passed or not, regardless of the score. Next, even if an African American was given a