San Antonio Traction Company: Racism Justified

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San Antonio Traction Company: Racism Justified
San Antonio, Texas is no exception to the inherent racism and Jim Crow law that dictated African American lives soon after Reconstruction. However, one question needs to be asked when analyzing racism, what enables the justification of racism in society? By analyzing the San Antonio Traction Company Correspondence, one can view firsthand accounts of Jim Crow law enforcement and gain insight towards the reasons for the justification of racism. In the early 1940s, the San Antonio Traction Company enforced the racist Jim Crow laws rather than face the consequences of breaking a law, upsetting whites, and opposing the normalized racism in the south at the time.
The San Antonio Traction Company bus …show more content…

In 1943, a white passenger was an eyewitness for an altercation between a bus operator and a black passenger. The white passenger stated that the bus operator was “carrying out his duty” rather than intentionally being racist (“Letter”, Oct. 12). This altercation demonstrates that African Americans were willing to resist discriminatory laws, but faced obstacles from those who supported segregation laws. Aforementioned, with African Americans resisting Jim Crow laws and inevitably threatening whites’ power, there is backlash and a push for compliance towards the unequal and racist laws. Another possible reason for the normalization of racism was that Jim Crow law was believed to maintain the order of society by keeping African Americans in their subordinate place under whites. Then again, that type of thinking most likely derived from when African Americans were forcibly brought to America as slaves. As slaves, blacks were portrayed as subhuman savages and therefore, justified many whites to treat blacks as animals, not pay them, and keep them in abhorrent living conditions (Thomas 7). The rapid transformation of blacks from slaves to citizens may have had a great influence on many whites’ opinions of African Americans. First of all, slaves were considered property of many white southerners, but after the 13th amendment and later the 14th amendment, blacks were no longer slaves and gained citizenship. The southerners that owned the former slaves now had to hire and pay new workers rather than own slaves. One must imagine the difficulty many former slave owners had when trying to treat former slaves with respect and equality after having owned them and forcing them to work. It appears that many in the south in the 1940s still thought of African Americans as a lesser people due to their history as

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