Jim Crow Laws Research Paper

Jim Crow Laws In The American South

Rampant racism in the American south is nothing new. We’ve all heard the stories of the civil war and of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. But we never truly hear how extensive racism in America was. Few white Americans get to know the full extent of race relations across the south and I believe the biggest example of this to be the Jim Crow era of America.

Furthermore, the Jim Crow laws were laws that enforced racial segregation in the South from the years 1877 until the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. They received their name in the early 1830s, the white actor Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice was brought to fame for performing minstrel routines as the fictional “Jim Crow,” a caricature

About 13% of Alabama’s population was comprised of African American individuals, most previous slaves. This trend persists even today, Alabama still holding the highest population of black and mixed race individuals in any American state. Despite the large population of black individuals, there were over 300 lynchings of black men and women were reported throughout the 1800’s and 1900’s. While there were white lynchings, most happened in the west, they were still very few and far between, the lynching of Mexican immigrants being a more popular practice. Black individuals in Alabama were also frequently arrested for simple faults that were usually not crimes, publicly humiliated, and attacked. They were prevented from voting, despite voting rights, through impossible literacy tests, poll taxes, and arresting black drivers when they got close to polling locations. These laws persisted due to southern congress largely ignoring the issues of African Americans, but were finally ended by the passage of voting rights in the south in 1965. These rights were obtained through the work of the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil RIghts movement was a decades long movement with the goal of giving black people the rights of white people in America. Big names of this movement included Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. Douglass, a freed slave who wrote an autobiography about his time a

These people included James Weldon Johnson, the founder of the NAACP, Homer Plessy, who was jailed for sitting in the white section of a train car, and A. Philip Randolph, who created the Fair Employment Committee. Another name is that of Ida B Wells, a black woman who was greatly affected by Jim Crow and worked to make a large impact. She was a journalist, abolitionist, and feminist who was alive from 1867 to 1931. Her decision to become a driving force of black rights was when Ida was forced into the “Jim Crow” section of the train despite paying for 1st class tickets. When she refused to move, the conductor grabbed her, and pulled her out of her seat. In response, Ida bit his hand and was then immediately removed from the train by other workers and later sued. After this incident, Ida began co-owning a black newspaper called “The Free Speech and Headlight” in her home state of Mississippi. She also went on to write countless works speaking out against the violence of lynching and defending victims of racism in the media at the time. Her most controversial work was an article she wrote after her three friends in Memphis, Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart, opened a grocery store that began to take business away from a local, white-owned store in the neighborhood. One night, Moss and the others guarded their store against an attack by the white store owner and his supporters and ended up