Examples Of Discrimination In Huck Finn

Throughout American history, minorities have been discriminated against for numerous things relating to race, gender, religion, etc. One group that was discriminated around the time of the Civil War were the Blacks. Throughout American history, they were thought of as inferior to whites and treated like animals. After the Civil War, laws started to change in favor of Blacks, things like making it illegal to enslave them, making them citizens and giving them the right to vote. These laws didn’t eliminate discrimination, though, and failed to change the opinion of what most thought of the Blacks. In Huck Finn there is one prime example of where free slaves are thought of or treated as less than whites. In the book, Pap says, “here was a free nigger there from Ohio. They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out.

Fergusson was a court case that basically said it was ok to treat Blacks like they were less than whites. This all started on June 7, 1892, when Homer Plessy purchased a first-class train ticket for the white train car (McBride, Alex). Now, on the surface he looked like any other white person, but genetically, he was one-eighth black (Bagwell, Jason). This made it illegal for him to ride on the white train car, courtesy of a Louisiana law passed in 1890 (McBride, Alex). Plessy was arrested and then brought in front of a jury, where he plead guilty for violating that law (McBride, Alex). Plessy then took this case to the Supreme Court, where their ruling set up a distinction between the Blacks and the White, who were supposedly equal (Bagwell, Jason). The Supreme Court ruled that even though the Fourteenth Amendment said that the two races were equal, those rights only went so far, and even went further on to say that the Fourteenth Amendment only applied to slavery (McBride,