Summary Of Jim Crow Laws

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Michelle Alexander starts by talking about a guy named Jarvis Cotton’s who father, father's father, and fathers father father didnt couldn't vote because of Klu Klux Klan intimidation and poll taxes. Cotton couldn't vote either because of a felony conviction. Our country coerced African-American males as a key to the original union; even at this period in time black males aren't still able to vote due to their criminal backgrounds. They are faced with prejudices not just in the criminal system but also in housing, employment, voting, food stamps, jury service much like what blacks were faced with when the Jim Crow laws were enacted. Alexander was delighted when we got our first black president Barack Obama and thought of Jim Crow as being a thing of the past. Alexander hadn't noticed a new racist social system, and when she began working for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) she seen that there was racism in the criminal justice system but that was it.However she found more like the War on Drugs that a lot of people think got started during the epidemic crack in the eighties and nineties, but then president Ronald Reagan actually declared it before the drug got all over the news. Also surprisingly the so-called War on Drugs began when the country was seeing a decrease in illegal drug usage.The war made the United States incarceration rate higher than anywhere else.

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