African Americans in McMillen’s Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow

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Plight of the African Americans After Reconstruction in Neil McMillen’s Book, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow

Neil McMillen’s book, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow categorically examines the plight of African Americans living in Mississippi during the era of Jim Crow. McMillen, a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, describes the obstacles that African Americans dealt with in the fields of education, labor, mob violence, and politics. Supplementing each group with data tables, charts and excerpts from Southern newspapers of the day, McMillen saturates the reader with facts that help to understand the problems faced by black Mississippians in the years after Reconstruction.

McMillen begins by tracing the roots of segregation in Mississippi beginning with common law and later evolving into state sponsored apartheid with the Plessey v. Ferguson decision and the new state constitution of 1890. The need for separation between the races arose out of feelings of “negrophobia” that overcame the white citizens of the South during the period of Jim Crow. Negrophobia was an overwhelming fear by white males in the South that if the races were in close proximity of each other the savage black men would insult the heavenly virtues of Southern white women. As a result black boys in Mississippi learned at an early age that even smiling at a white woman could prove dangerous. Although segregation was vehemently opposed by Black leaders when it was first instituted, by the 1890’s leaders such as Booker T. Washington began to emphasize self-help over social equality. The fact that Mississippi’s institutions were segregated lead to them being inherently unequal, and without a...

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...ing the life of African Americans during the Jim Crow era into specific categories McMillen made it easier for the reader to understand how the Jim Crow laws governed every aspect of Blacks lives. I especially found the section on mob violence interesting. It is amazing to me how brutal and inhuman some whites could be only eighty years ago. The only criticism I had of Dark Journey was that McMillen did not discuss the strong religious convictions of many Black Mississippians and how they used their faith to help them deal with the trauma of Jim Crow. However in the end by examining the lives of blacks after reconstruction this book has amazed me by showing me how far the South and Mississippi has come in such a relatively short period of time.

Work Cited:

Neil R. McMillen. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow

Illini Books edition, 1990

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