Who Are We, What Do We Believe Racism has jumped to the forefront of conversation politically as well as socially recently. However, many fail to see the full extent of racism and the harmful effects it has had in American history. Post civil war brought a realization to the nation, that although now free, blacks, Indians and mixed descendants or mulatto’s were considered a lower class and Jim Crow Laws help cement them in this class of society. These laws, many referenced post Civil War, have origins dating pre Civil War as well. In 1835, “North Carolina passed a new constitution, which declared that ‘free Negroes, free mulattos, and free persons of mixed blood’ could not vote.” This de facto movement not only affected the lives of African Americans but also immigrants, Catholics, Jews and other groups of people. The Strange Career of Jim Crow, written by C. Vann Woodward, is a book that takes the reader back in time, through the period of the Jim Crow laws. These laws were in effect between …show more content…
Originally, Jim Crow laws were limited to cars on railroads. Then, in the year of 1898 anti-racism started to weaken. There were several court cases that gave way to more and more Jim Crow laws. One that is very popular is the 1896 Plessy V. Ferguson. The court put into effect the ‘separate but equal’ rule at the conclusion of this case. This made it difficult to have any real boundaries. The Nation adopted a Southern attitude of racism. One newspaper spokesman put this into perspective with an exaggeration that if there can be Jim Crow cars on the railroads then there should also be Jim Crow waiting saloons, eating houses, sections of the jury box, dock and witness stands, and even a Jim Crow Bible for ‘colored’ witnesses to kiss. Beginning in 1990, laws began to extend to more than just passenger aboard trains. “Whites only” and “Colored” signs were put
C. Vann Woodward, who died in 1999 at the age of 91, was America's most Southern historian and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, for Mary Chestnut's Civil War and he’s also a Bancroft Prize for The Origins of the New South. In honor to his long and adventurous career, Oxford is pleased to publish this special commemorative edition of Woodward's most influential work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. The book actually helped shape that historical curve of black liberation its not slowed movement it’s more like a rollercoaster. It says the book was published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools desegregated upon blacks and whites.
In Erik Gellman’s book Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights, he sets out with the argument that the National Negro Congress co-aligned with others organizations in order to not only start a militant black-led movement for equal rights, but also eventually as the author states they “launch the first successful industrial labor movement in the US and remake urban politics and culture in America”. The author drew attention to the wide collection of intellectuals from the black community, labor organizers, civil rights activists, and members of the communist party, to separate them from similar organization that might have been active at the time. These activists, he argues “remade the American labor movement into one that wielded powerful demands against industrialists, white supremacists, and the state as never before, positioning civil rights as an urgent necessity.” In Gellman’s study of the National Negro Congress, he is able to discuss how they were able to start a number of grassroots protest movements to disable Jim Crow, while unsuccessful in dealing a “death blow to Jim Crow”, they were able to affect the American labor movement.
Prior to the 1950s, very little research had been done on the history and nature of the United States’ policies toward and relationships with African Americans, particularly in the South. To most historians, white domination and unequal treatment of Negroes were assumed to be constants of the political and social landscapes since the nation’s conception. Prominent Southern historian C. Vann Woodward, however, permanently changed history’s naïve understanding of race in America through his book entitled The Strange Career of Jim Crow. His provocative thesis explored evidence that had previously been overlooked by historians and gave a fresh foundation for more research on the topic of racial policies of the United States.
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. "Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs: Racism in America Today."International Socialist Review Online November-December.32 (2003): n. pag.ISReview.org. International Socialist Organization. Web. 07 Dec. 2013. .
In the months following the Brown v. Board of Education decision C. Vann Woodward wrote a series of lectures that would provide the basis for one of the most historically significant pieces of nonfiction literature written in the 20th century. Originally, Woodward’s lectures were directed to a local and predominantly southern audience, but as his lectures matured into a comprehensive text they gained national recognition. In 1955 Woodward published the first version of The Strange Career of Jim Crow, a novel that would spark a fluid historical dialogue that would continue for the next twenty years. Woodward foresaw this possibility as he included in the first edition, “Since I am…dealing with a period of the past that has not been adequately investigated, and also with events of the present that have come too rapidly and recently to have been properly digested and understood, it is rather inevitable that I shall make some mistakes. I shall expect and hope to be corrected.” Over this time period Woodward released four separate editions, in chapter form, that modified, corrected, and responded to contemporary criticisms.
C. Vann Woodward’s book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, has been hailed as a book which shaped our views of the history of the Civil Rights Movement and of the American South. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the book as “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.” The argument presented in The Strange Career of Jim Crow is that the Jim Crow laws were relatively new introductions to the South that occurred towards the turn of the century rather than immediately after the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Woodward examines personal accounts, opinions, and editorials from the eras as well as the laws in place at the times. He examines the political history behind the emergence of the Jim Crow laws. The Strange Career of Jim Crow gives a new insight into the history of the American South and the Civil Rights Movement.
[1] C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. (Oxford University Press: New York, 1955), 14.
Separate but Equal doctrine existed long before the Supreme Court accepted it into law, and on multiple occasions it arose as an issue before then. In 1865, southern states passed laws called “Black Codes,” which created restrictions on the freed African Americans in the South. This became the start of legal segregation as juries couldn’t have African Americans, public schools became segregated, and African Americans had restrictions on testifying against majorities. In 1887, Jim Crow Laws started to arise, and segregation becomes rooted into the way of life of southerners (“Timeline”). Then in 1890, Louisiana passed the “Separate Car Act.” This forced rail companies to provide separate rail cars for minorities and majorities. If a minority sat in the wrong car, it cost them $25 or 20 days in jail. Because of this, an enraged group of African American citizens had Homer Plessy, a man who only had one eighth African American heritage, purchase a ticket and sit in a “White only” c...
Some say, history is the process by which people recall, lay claim to, and strive to understand. On that day in May 1963, Mississippi’s lay claim: Racism. Between 1882 and 1952 Mississippi was the home to 534 reported lynchings’ more than any other state in the nation (Mills, 1992, p. 18). Jim Crow Laws or ‘Black Codes’ allowed for the legalization of racism and enforced a ‘black way’ of life. Throughout the deep-south, especially in rural communities, segregation prevailed.... ...
The latter 20th century saw a great increase of institutionalized racism and legal discrimination against citizens of African descent in the United States. Throughout this post-Civil War period, poll taxes, acts of terror such as lynching (often perpetrated by groups such as the reborn Ku Klux Klan, founded in the Reconstruction South) and discriminatory laws such as ‘grandfather clauses’ (which prevented poor and illiterate African American former slaves and their descendants from voting, but without denying poor and illiterate whites the right to vote) kept black Americans alienated, particularly in the Southern States.
Richard Wrights “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” provided me with an account of the daily struggles African American males faced during the time preceding the Civil War. Wright allowed the reader to travel with him as he was taught “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”. The theme of inferiority can be viewed in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” through oppression, demoralization, and survival.
While the Emancipation Proclamation marked the end of slavery in the U.S., it did little to address the racism that remained. Left unchecked, that racism, like a weed, grew and its roots permeated almost all sectors of American culture spreading from the southern white population throughout the local and state governments south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Jim Crow laws provided legal loopholes that skirted the spirit of the Emancipation Proclamation and they gave legal cover to those who longed for the pre-Civil War/Reconstruction era. The insidious nature of Jim Crow easily converted bigotry and intolerance from vile vices to prized virtues. Although Jim Crow laws were settled by the 1954 court case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, where all laws and public policy based on the theory of "separate but equal" were deemed unconstitutional; they were not fully eliminated until the mid 1960's, almost one hundred years after the end of U.S. Civil War and the beginning of Radical Reconstruction.
Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. In the book on page 196 it says, “ All passengers stations for waiting for the buses in the state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and ticket window for the white and colored races.” This Jim Crow law is saying that while people are waiting for the buses whites and blacks have to be separated. They can’t get tickets in the same stand or be in the same room. My next example is on page 197 and it states, “it shall be unlawful for colored people to frequent any parks owned or maintained by the city for the benefit, use and enjoyment of white persons… and unlawful for any white person to
Jim Crow Laws are laws that promote separation between black and white races. This separation caused the Jim Crow laws and it’s practices to deprive American citizens of their civil rights based on the significant difference in treatment between the two races and the laws built on separating said two races. Examples of the Jim Crow laws include separate waiting rooms, separate water fountains, separate bathrooms, etc. The Jim Crow laws also deal with educational rights, social freedoms, and voting rights, mainly (when it comes to treatment with the two races) treating black people like dirt, depriving them of their civil rights while white people get treated like how any normal human being should be treated.
Massive protests against racial segregation and discrimination broke out in the southern United States that came to national attention during the middle of the 1950’s. This movement started in centuries-long attempts by African slaves to resist slavery. After the Civil War American slaves were given basic civil rights. However, even though these rights were guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment they were not federally enforced. The struggle these African-Americans faced to have their rights ...