Essay On The Jim Crow Era

The symbol of diversity and the epitome of cultural amalgamation, the United States had been a country in which racial discrimination and segregation were the norms of the day. The African Americans and myriads of people of color had faced terrible hardships in the country’s south during the period of the prevalence of the Jim Crow customs and laws. The Jim Crow era was an era in which the blacks were considered everything but human beings deserving equal treatment within the society and before the law. It was a period when the non-whites were considered sub-humans by the whites and starting from the social institutions to the political arenas the blacks were discriminated on the basis of skin color, race, and ethnicity. Going through the narratives

Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens” (“What was Jim Crow”, n.d.). As a matter of fact, “Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism” (“What was Jim Crow”, n.d.). From the accounts of two different individuals from two different states of the United States the myriad facets of the sufferings experienced during the Jim Crow era by the blacks can be known. From the narrative of Edward Gamble, Sr., an octogenarian from Moultrie, Georgia, the agonies of the blacks in the Jim Crow south can be ascertained. One of the pivotal facts that can be learned from Gamble’s narration is that, the economic segregation was, just like the racial segregation, quite acute during the Jim Crow era in the south. In Florida, where Edward Gamble spent his youth, only some typical jobs were meant for the blacks and to be precise, those jobs were menial and not sophisticated at