The author explains in part the race riot in terms of “individuals as well as groups.” It focuses on relations in the urban north. He reveals the effects of migration, labor, and community police relations of both races. Tuttle covers in great detail the influx of rural Southern blacks and their ghetto nature, labor competition, the cynical policies of Chicago city leaders, and any social and economic factors that led to cross feelings between races.…
In the media, black people and black men in particular are villainized and portrayed as disturbed and violent individuals. Statistics of incarceration and crime rates are often cited in rhetoric debasing the black community. Yet in just a few pages, Ta-Nehisi Coates expertly dissects how America’s institutionalized racism and eagerness to turn a blind eye to social issues contributes to the hostile environment many black people occupy in his book Between the World and Me. In his book he talks about the difficulties of being raised in an impoverished and violent neighborhood and his realization that these conditions are remnants of America’s history - such as the over-policing of black Americans and police brutality, which breeds fear and feelings…
“I was not afraid of these lifeless bodies. I despised them and kicked them to flip them.” This is what Ishmael was saying at the end first war day they had. It had only been the first time when Ishmael and his friends went to war and by the end of it he had already shot someone. At the beginning when they started training he was afraid to hold the gun, and now that the day has come where he actually needed to shot, he had no problem with it. 2 of his friends died that day, Musa and Josiah.…
Eugene “Bull” Connor, Police Commissioner of Safety of Birmingham, Alabama, clearly failed in his own hate-driven campaign against desegregation. Coupled with this failure to extinguish a handful of peaceful protest marches, Bull Connor also failed to appropriate the South’s senselessly racist worldviews with that of the sensible reactionary precautions that would be more relatable to the mainstream media. Bull’s disregard for context and lacking desire to find a progressive solution to the problem exposed the weak-mindedness of those moderates in Birmingham calling for sympathy from the country. Subsequently, Eugene Connor became the catalyst for situational understanding in the region. The media’s freedom during these events allowed a narrative that reflected true human morality and the juxtaposition of tenured human beings with peaceful resistance training involved in positive civil rights reform and the dog-wielding, fire hose-wielding, power-wielding police force gave way for ethical reflection. Quite obviously, in hindsight, Eugene “Bull” Connor’s crusade on Birmingham’s weakest population seemed, to the national public, an atrocity conveying the true instability of desegregation. To characterize his response as anything but listlessly immoral would give credence to an unthinking way of living in which one’s own values have no basis in reality and therefore no respectable place in modern society. One could say Eugene “Bull” Connor was simply following the laws promoting segregation in his state and that that was just but, to the contrary, he was not. Eugene Connor and his police force weren’t even just in the eyes of the law. Eugene and the segregation laws he upheld were not protected by the Supreme Court. In the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case segregation in public schools was deemed unequal and unconstitutional. Eugene’s regime for keeping Alabama segregated went against the Supremacy Clause. This allowed his…
In Hanna Guthrie’s article, “Black History Month,” the UCI New University writer discusses the racism in America. In order for racism to be abolished, Guthrie accentuates racism is being spread through American Citizens self segregation. Though Hanna Guthrie article presents a clear claim and provides a small amount of factual evidence to support in itself, ultimately Guthrie article is unsuccessful because she fails to provide an adequate amount of logic-based information to support her primary claim, excessively dependent upon emotion-driven attacks on those who disagree with her, and frequently fails to present her augment in a approach that makes her creditable.…
Although this was written half a century ago in 1964, the relevancy to life in America today is uncanny, as day after day a new story breaks on police brutality. James Baldwin was the one of the first writers to openly report the truth during the civil rights era, as he wrote to inform readers that these were more than news clips, but actual occurrences involving real people. This article’s purpose is to give its readers a glimpse of what it felt like to be beaten for no reason other than the color of one’s skin. The irony is that although this was published fifty years ago, could have been written yesterday, as it appears in today’s society that racism never went away.…
Before September 15th, 1963 life in the South was harsh if you were colored, more so in Birmingham, Alabama than others. Many people of color were shot during this time and not all were for a just cause. Back then, “The Birmingham Police shot a lot of people, the city was like a shooting gallery” (Norris 71). As if being shot by the police wasn’t enough, colored people also had to worry about the Ku Klux Klan and their malicious ways. But being shot at wasn’t their only problem. Everywhere people went there was segregation. Bathrooms, drinking fountains, schools, theatres, and many other public areas were all segregated. Was it really so bad that a colored person went to the same school as a white person? Segregation was supported by the legal system and the police. For quite some time colored people couldn’t even do anything about it because they had no voice, no right to vote. Finally on January 12th, 1946 members of the Alabama Democratic Executive Committee announced “that ‘qualified negroes’ would be allowed to vote” (Norris 116). Though their voting right was restricted it was a start, and the colored people of Alabama were not about to let it go. But as time went on people all over the country…
References: Chidley, J. (1995, October). The Simpson jury faces the race factor. Maclean’s. 108(41), 69-70. Retrieved April 4, 2006 from ProQuest database. Fairfield, C. (1997 May/June). Rage and denial: The media and the O.J. trials. The Humanist. 57(3), 24-26. Retrieved February 23, 2006 from ProQuest database. Holmes, R. (1995 November 2). Million man march’s success: The message or the messenger? Black political leadership divided. Black Issues of Higher Education. 12(18), 41. Retrieved April 9, 2006 from ProQuest database. Lamb, C. (1994). The popularity of O.J. Simpson jokes: The more we know, the more we laugh. Journal of Popular Culture. 28(1), 223,228. Retrieved April 9, 2006 from ProQuest database. Penial, J. (1995). “Black” reconstructed: White supremacy in post civil rights America. The Black Scholar, 25(4), 52. Retrieved April 4, 2006 from ProQuest database. Pratt, A. (n.d.). Retrieved Apr. 10, 2006, from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Web site: http://www.iep.utm.edu/n/nihilism.htm. Samad, A. (1995 September 7). Between the lines: Fuhrman tapes; LAPD’s dreadful truth or one man’s God complex? Sentinel. p.p. A7. Retrieved April 9, 2006 from ProQuest database. Scafidi, F. (1991, April 04). The Rodney King case through police eyes. The Washington Post, pp. A23. Retrieved April 9, 2006 from ProQuest database.…
Negroland, written by Margo Jefferson, is a memoir about her life, as wells as others in 1947 Chicago. In the book, Negroland residents acquire “provisional privilege” and aim to live their life’s away from the shadows of their poorer, darker counterpart. What particularly stood out to me the most about Negroland was their black skin, but despite the racially charged era, Negroland members utilized the freedom of opportunities allowed that other African Americans were not afforded. Nevertheless, the privilege they acquired were restricted every time they grabbed those opportunities, and further detained black elites from supporting their middle to lower class African Americans.…
On July 27, 1919, an African-American teenager drowned in Lake Michigan after violating the unofficial segregation of Chicago’s beaches and being stoned by a group of white youths. His death, and the police’s refusal to arrest the white man whom eyewitnesses identified as causing it, sparked a week of rioting between gangs of black and white Chicagoans, concentrated on the South Side neighborhood surrounding the stockyards. When the riots ended on August 3, 15 whites and 23 blacks had been killed and more than 500 people injured; an additional 1,000 black families had lost their homes when they were torched by rioters.…
I had intended on going to the vigil Wednesday night (2/8) but much to my dismay, there was no vigil (or I missed it). So instead of attending a diversity event for this paper, I watched a documentary on Netflix called 13th. This film discusses the issue of racism in the United States criminal justice system; specifically relating to how the 13th amendment transformed the view of African Americans from slaves to criminals.…
Document 22-5 page 138, “An African American Responds to the Chicago Race Riot.” This document describes how race riots exploded in the summer of 1919 in almost two dozen American cities. White mobs were attacking African Americans by beating, shooting, and lynching them. After a gory riot in Chicago, Stanley B. Norvell, an African American man from Chicago wrote to the editor of the Chicago Daily News, Victor F. Lawson. In the letter Norvell described the whites’ ignorance of blacks, pointing out that a “new Negro” had been shaped by the involvements of World War I and the non-stop inequalities of white racism.…
The dismissal and brushing off of injustices faced by minorities, more specifically African Americans, is a gesture of complacency and and willingness to coexist with racism within one’s society.In their day to day lives, people of color come face to face with a multitude of micro aggressions. Often times, fueled by deeply rooted racism. Thus preventing advancement of people of color’s communities. In present times, racism is viewed as an ideology of the past. Which gives birth to the harmful mindset of dismissing and brushing off injustices faced by minorities. Although racism was at it’s most extreme and brutal form during the years of slavery, it has morphed into a more toxic and shifty form over the years. The murdering of African American men, women and children at the hands of predominantly white police officers.…
References: Blakeney, B. (2007). The race issue. Charleston City Paper. Retrieved on December 2, 2007, from http://charleston.gyrosite.com…
Jacob, Herbert. (1971). “Black and White Perceptions of Justice in the City.” Law and Society Review 6:69–90.…