I believe it is time we, as a nation, start speaking about the truth behind racism and the origin of one of the most aggressive proponents against one race in particular. Hatred and abhorrence of the African American race spawned the birth of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and many other racially charged groups. It all started in the 1870’s where Jim Crow laws were penned as bylaws that continued well through the 1920’s. With these bylaws in effect racially charged groups such as the fearsome KKK felt the need to strike fear into the hearts and minds of all African Americans in order to keep race separation.
Jim Crow was the name associated with the racial caste group. Which operated primarily, but not exclusively, in the southern and border states between 1877 and the mid-1960’s. The name was derived from a blackface character in a minstrel show. Jim Crow was a system of bylaws that was followed by millions. Whites were superior to blacks in all important ways like, intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior
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Joseph Simmons was the leader of the Klan. That didn’t last long , after a few months, there were more than 100 leaders. The KKK was the largest in the south. Many poor people thought that their wages would increase if they got rid of the black population. They thought this because black people earned a little less than a hard working white man because they had everything to lose. The KKK started terrorising the people they disliked. They used to march through the streets where black people lived and showed them what they could do by carrying blazing torches and crosses. The Ku Klux Klan went on for years doing the same thing over the the whole southern part of the United States. It finally subsided around 1960 when the Civil Rights Act started but it still goes on today. Unlike today there was a lot of lynching and unspeakable acts happening back
Jim Crow laws were a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. (Jim Crow Laws, PBS). Jim Crow laws had the same ideals that slave codes had. At this time slavery had been abolished, but because of Jim Crow, the newly freed black people were still looked at as inferior. One of the similarities between slave codes and Jim Crow laws was that both sets of laws did not allow equal education opportunities. The schools were separated, of course, which cause the white schools to be richer and more advanced in education than black schools. This relates to slave codes because slaves were not allowed to read which hindered their learning of when they were able to read and write. Another similarity is alcohol. In the Jim Crow era persons who sold beer or wine were not allowed to serve both white and colored people, so they had to sell to either one or the other. This is similar to slave codes because in most states slaves were not allowed to purchase whiskey at all, unless they had permission from their owners. Slaves did not eat with their white owners. In the Jim Crow era whites and blacks could not eat together at all, and if there was some odd circumstance that whites and blacks did eat together then the white person was served first and there was usually something in between them. This relates to slave codes because
Jim Crow, thought of as a name, however, is a term meaning “characterizing black people (Litwack). The term was originated from a white ministerial with the name of Thomas “Daddy” Rice. He would blacken his face with a burn core to resemble an african man. Then, he would beg, have an enormous smile, would dance and
The Jim Crow era was a racial status system used primarily in the south between the years of 1877 and the mid 1960’s. Jim Crow was a series of anti-black rules and conditions that were never right. The social conditions and legal discrimination of the Jim Crow era denied African Americans democratic rights and freedoms frequently. There were numerous ways in which African Americans were denied social and political equality under Jim Crow. Along with that, lynching occurred quite frequently, thousands being done over the era.
The term Jim Crow was a “colloquialism whites and blacks routinely used for the complex system of laws and customs separating races in the south” (Edmonds, Jim Crow: Shorthand for Separation). In other words, it was a set of laws and customs that people used that separated white people from the colored. The Jim Crow laws and practices deprived American citizens of the rights to vote, buses, and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” First, though, a little background on Jim Crow is in order.
Technology played an important role in the daily lives of Americans in the 1920s. Many inventions and new developments occurred during this time. A large number of items that are used today were invented by individuals and teams in research laboratories. This technology brought many conveniences such as electrical power and indoor plumbing into the home. Radios gave people access to the news and provided entertainment. Mass culture was also born and the automobile became the largest consumer product of the decade. By 1929, one in five Americans had an automobile on the road. America experienced a decade of economic growth due to the impact of technology in the 1920s.
Even though politicians and historians view political cartoons differently, historians can now look back and truly capture the minds of the American people during the 1920s. This political cartoon, “The Modern Devil Fish,” illustrated by Victor Hugo, was published in a 1925 issue of the Chicago Tribune. This specific cartoon was used as propaganda to promote the Prohibition Party and encourage the support of voters by addressing the usual arguments against the legal status of alcohol. It also was used as propaganda to show the far reaching effects of its use on American society, as demonstrated by the labels on each of the octopus’ tentacles, ranging from ‘partnership with thieves’ to ‘traffic in girls’ to ‘political corruption.’ The fight for prohibition had been an ongoing one, but it had become clear to those rallying to ban liquor that the power of the vote would be the only way to ‘slay’ the saloon monstrosity – pictured here as the knife labeled ‘votes,’ driven into the head of the creature by a hand bearing the name of the Prohibition Party. By destroying the center of the problem, saloons, the knife wielding political party is destroying all of the problems connected to it. In reality, the issues on each tentacle were far from solely the fault of alcohol consumption, but the Party was making an effort to get votes and inspire support, thus exaggerating the point of the prohibition issue. The hope of Hugo as he illustrated this cartoon was clear – that people who understood it would recognize the evils of a nation which does not prohibit saloons and the like subjects itself to by not utilizing the ‘knife’ of Prohibition Party votes. The cartoonist with his drawings could say more in one cartoon than could be said by a spee...
The Jim Crow system was a post-Reconstruction series of legislation that established legally authorized racial segregation of the African American population of the South soon after the Civil War. The Jim Crow system ended in the 1950s with the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. As Hewitt and Lawson note, “these new statutes denied African Americans equal access to public facilities and ensured that blacks lived apart from whites.”
White Southerners who hated blacks started the Ku Klux Klan in 1866. It was also called the KKK. They tried to stop black people from voting and having other civil rights. They would wear white sheets and masks with pointed hoods. They would beat up blacks and public officials. They would burn crosses by the houses of people they wanted to scare. The KKK was declared illegal in 1...
Jim Crow was the name of the system of laws that stripped African Americans of their personal rights. These laws started in the 1870s with the general aim to deprive any African American of his or her personal rights. The southern and border states were the primary followers of Jim Crow (What Was Jim Crow?). According to USA History, “The name Jim Crow derived from a comic and sketch show character played by Thomas Dartmouth Rice in 1904.” Before the character, there was a song often referred to as “Jumpin’ Jim Crow.” The actors would paint their faces black to make fun of African Americans. Jim Crow was portrayed to be lazy, naïve, and confused. Even though there are clues that the term Jim Crow was used before T.D. Rice, this was the first documented use (USA History). Jim Crow laws were not only a set of rules, but also a set way of life.
The laws known as “Jim Crow” were laws presented to basically establish racial apartheid in the United States. These laws were more than in effect for “for three centuries of a century beginning in the 1800s” according to a Jim Crow Law article on PBS. Many try to say these laws didn’t have that big of an effect on African American lives but in affected almost everything in their daily life from segregation of things: such as schools, parks, restrooms, libraries, bus seatings, and also restaurants. The government got away with this because of the legal theory “separate but equal” but none of the blacks establishments were to the same standards of the whites. Signs that read “Whites Only” and “Colored” were seen at places all arounds cities.
The KKK or Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee by former Confederate Soldiers. Some of the founders of this organization consisted of; Captain John Lester, Major James Crowe, and Richard Reed to name a few. Their main target at the time was blacks and any white person that stood with them. The Ku Klux Klan was the head of the racism movement in America. Being a hate group among minorities, they made them live in terror day in and day out. The KKK was the most feared group of people in the 1860’s.
Jim Crow, a series of laws put into place after slavery by rich white Americans used in order to continue to subordinate African-Americans has existed for many years and continues to exist today in a different form, mass incarceration. Jim Crow laws when initially implemented were a series of anti-black laws that help segregate blacks from whites and kept blacks in a lower social, political, and economic status. In modern day, the term Jim Crow is used as a way to explain the mass incarcerations of blacks since Jim Crow laws were retracted. Through mass incarceration, blacks are continuously disenfranchised and subordinated by factors such as not being able to obtain housing, stoppage of income, and many other factors. Both generations of Jim Crow have been implemented through legal laws or ways that the government which helps to justify the implementation of this unjust treatment of blacks.
Originally the first klan was around in the late 1880s and 1890s but toward the end of those years, it became very weak and lost many members. However after World War I, it came back into a large popular group once more. This was due to Americans targeting Germans because they were blamed for causing the war. Also in 1915 a movie Birth of a Nation was released which brought back the fear of black equality. The film triggered the rebirth of the KKK. William J. Simmons was inspired and him along with 13 other white men, started the second klan by burning a cross. In the US, citizens joined the KKK to target all people causing our country to struggle economically and
The Jim Crow system in the United States compared to the apartheid system in South Africa were very similar to each other. The Jim Crow system was just another way for white people to control the blacks. Blacks were no longer in slavery but were dependent on their former owners because they were not given any resources to start a new life on their own. The Jim Crow system is when segregation between blacks and whites legally began; it was as if they were in two separate worlds for two different types of human beings. The Jim Crow laws required separate but equal opportunities for the black people. The black people were not allowed to use the same facilities as the whites; the bathrooms were separate, the drinking fountains, their designated
“The ‘Jim Crow’ laws got their name from one of the stock characters in the minstrel shows that were a mainstay of popular entertainment throughout the nineteenth century. Such shows popularized and reinforced the pervasive stereotypes of blacks as lazy, stupid, somehow less human, and inferior to whites” (Annenberg, 2014). These laws exalted the superiority of the whites over the blacks. Although equally created, and affirmed by the Supreme Court, and because of the Civil War officially free, African Americans were still treated with less respect than many household pets. The notorious Jim Crow laws mandated segregation and provided for severe legal retribution for consortium between races (National, 2014). Richard Wright writes about this, his life.