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Jim Crow Dbq

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In the United States, the racial status of African-Americans post-slavery was not just about to mark them as full, equal people under the same rights as whites. Even so, after the Civil War, which purpose was to free the slaves and reunite the Union, it did not guarantee the so-called “freedom” and “equality” between blacks and whites. Ironically, after the war, an extreme example of blacks’ hopes and dreams being crushed is when conservative, white ex-slaveholders took control of local politics in the South after the Civil War, thus making life even harder for the former slaves who thought that they would be truly free; but it turned out to be the complete opposite. With unfair Jim Crow laws and many other vengeful threats, including the racist …show more content…

Bringing into consideration the fact that the printing press was one of the world’s greatest inventions and breakthroughs, allowing many people to have newfound access to information and many other types of entertainment that could be printed onto paper. Many people were now at the forefront of an audience that the writer could simply command to consume the material that they composed, exposing many people to their new viewpoints. It is stated in Source A that “In hottest summer and coldest winter, I was kept almost in a state of nudity; no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trowsers [sic]; nothing but coarse sackcloth or tow-linen…” and “I was the most unlucky of any, for Aunt Katy had no good feeling for me; and if I pushed any of the other children, or if they told her anything unfavorable of me, she always believed the worst, and was sure to whip me.” Fredrick Douglass, a former slave who happened to be a loquacious orator, composed a memoir about his numerous experiences and anecdotes under slavery. In these writings, he fully expressed in detail how he lived his life as a slave, and some parts were considered shocking to some people. When he used the benefit of publishing his works in book form for all to read, he was busy reaching an even larger audience than if he …show more content…

These laws were named after a traveling minstrel show character, and basically set up the law to be biased against African-Americans, deciding many issues in favor of whites. In Source C, it says, “By 1914 every Southern state had passed laws that created two separate societies- one black, the other white. This artificial structure was maintained by denying the franchise to blacks through the use of devices such as grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and literacy tests. It was further strengthened by the creation of separate facilities in every part of society, including schools, restaurants, streetcars, health-care institutions, and cemeteries.” By reading this, you start to find out that even after the Civil War, blacks were not truly free. The risk of them starting to run out of opportunity and hope was rapidly rising as their chances of being truly equal faded away. Public spaces, in addition to many other things, were now lone in the hands of whites who used it to their advantage to disenfranchise the poor people who had struggled for so long, through four hundred years of the cruel practice of slavery and being stripped of their rights and dignity, degraded to a level of mere property. For four hundred years they had been hoping and praying that they could lead a better life, a better chance at survival, and

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