Jim Crow Laws

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The Hard Journey of Blacks in the South after the Civil War After the Civil War, about four million slaves were given freedom from slavery. (“A New Birth of Freedom: The Day of Jubilee”). Slavery was a cause of racial prejudice and led to white supremacy, which influenced southern states to pass the Jim Crow Laws. The Jim Crow Laws were laws that enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of the Reconstruction Era and the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. In the South, in the 1870s, the Republican Party wanted to establish political and economic equality for blacks but white supremacists did not want these policies to be established and they created an organization called the Ku Klux Klan. Life for blacks in the South after …show more content…

The laws were created to separate and treat blacks and whites equally, which unfortunately, in the practice of the laws, blacks were mistreated. These laws were just a legal way to continue discriminating blacks. Blacks were obligated to sit in the back of public transportation. Rosa Parks was a black woman who was “arrested, fingerprinted, and incarcerated”(“Jim Crow Laws)” for not obeying the Jim Crow Laws. She had sat in the front of a bus and had refused to give her seat to a white man. This act became celebrated because it was in the fight against the Jim Crow Laws. An American journalist by the name of Bob Beckel, speaks about why the Jim Crow Laws treated blacks with such hatred. He said “Jim Crow laws stripped blacks of basic rights. Despite landmark civil rights laws, many public schools were still segregated, blacks still faced barriers to voting, and violence by white racists continued. Such open racism is mostly gone in America, but covert racism is alive and well.” Beckel continues, the Jim Crow Laws mistreated blacks because of racism. White racists joined in on the hatred after they had seen blacks being mistreated by the government. Even after the Civil Right Laws were established, segregation and racism still …show more content…

They would mostly “intimidate black voters and white supporters of the Republican Party”(“Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction Era”) because of the policies the Republican Party was trying to establish for blacks. Charles B. Rangel, an American politician from 1971 to 2017, explains how the Ku Klux Klan used strategies to ruin the lives of black people, “The Klan had used fear, intimidation and murder to brutally oppress over African-Americans who sought justice and equality and it sought to respond to the young workers of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the same way.”(“Congressional Record”)The Ku Klux Klan used the fear blacks had to make themselves more powerful and above blacks: they tried to ruin the chances blacks had of freedom and equality in

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