How do the Jim Crow laws like affect us today? Is it ethical? “We cannot run society for the privileged and allow a significant proportion of the population to be marginalized. It impacts the quality of life for all of us if we have ‘throw away’ people. A justice system which tolerates injustice is doomed to collapse.” These words of Leonard Noisette, former director, of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, New York. “Now our struggle is for genuine equality which means economic equality. For we know now, that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t have the money to buy a hamburger?” These words from Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee, March 1968, at a rally …show more content…
It is almost 50 years later, and individuals are struggling to gain economic growth and wage equality. We have to look at the federal minimum wage, which is only $7.27, and in Massachusetts the minimum wage is $11.00 as of January 2017. How can a family live on this? They cannot. Where is the equality, the wage gap widens? I am led to say that the Jim Crow laws are still here today, and people are feeling the effects in many aspects of their daily lives such as in their finances and education. There are also people who are being discriminated against because of their sexual orientation and a criminal record. In addition, Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the age of Colorblindness highlights that many gains from the Civil Rights Movement have been undermined by