Racialized Thinking In The 19th Century

When the Plessy case was heard, all the southern states had passed laws that required segregation on at least some of their railroads. The Facilities assigned to blacks were inferior to those that were set aside for the whites. The motivating force behind the Jim Crow Laws was white supremacy. Jim Crow Laws were rigidly enforced to keep blacks in a position of inferiority. African Americans who broke or tried to break the laws faced the possibility of arrest, lynching, and public punishment at the hands of the

After all male, regardless to race, were guaranteed the right to vote by the 15th Amendment, white Southerners started to create ways in which they could oppress blacks and disempower their newly found privileges. The disfranchisement of blacks started with literacy tests, poll taxes and the grandfather clause. In other words, the ability to read or pay taxes has to be proven before people could vote. However, most black people grew up without a good educational background and were therefore excluded from the voting system. In 1877, when the Reconstruction era ended, inequality and injustice towards black people was present more than ever.

According to www.history.com/topics/charles-sumner ”He saw Reconstruction as the opportunity to establish civil rights for blacks, first in the South where Congress had explicit authority and gradually in the North. In 1865 he insisted that suffrage be granted to all black males. At the time of his death, Sumner was still vainly agitating for federal legislation repealing all discriminatory laws.” Finally, there was President Andrew Johnson. After Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, just as the South surrendered in April 1865, and then Andrew Johnson inherited the problem of Reconstruction.

Some Segregated railroads, some required school segregation, others outlawed miscegenation, other ones requiring segregation for public accommodations, and also some that mandated segregation for streetcars. An example is the one in 1870 which had to do with education. Whites and colored students would have to be separated. Also, there was separate buildings for whites and black patients in hospitals.

Because of the abolishing of slavery, it created for a lot of discrimination and racism against people of color. In some southern and northern states did not agree with slaves begin freed especially Johnson. Because he did not agree it created for “moderates and radicals” to come together to pass black only laws. These black only laws returned some “freed slaves back to servitude”.

If the Freedmen’s Bureau had continued, African Americans and poor whites would have continued to receive support from the government as well as from other volunteers, such as carpetbaggers and scalawags. Over time, Southerners would begin to realize that former slaves were becoming equals to them, and slowly begin to accept it, especially since blacks would have the resources and people to enforce this idea. This would lead to America being the just and equal society citizens had wanted since the

Although African Americans were free, they were treated as less than a white U.S Citizen. Up until 1870, black people were unable to vote. Ulysses S. Grant despised these injustices and made it his presidential goal to fight for civil rights. On February 3, the 15th Amendment was passed giving African Americans the right to vote. This empowered a new collective of people to voice their opinions.

Meanwhile, the United States fails to commemorate its victims of slavery

Rosa Parks The Civil Right Movement was the African-American way of fighting for equality to the whites and it was supposed to be a nonviolent way to protest. Khan academy stated that “After the Civil War, during the period known as Reconstruction, the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments established a legal foundation for the political equality of African Americans. Despite the abolition of slavery and legal gains for African Americans, racial segregation known as Jim Crow arose in the South”. Jim Crow law meant that African American could not be at the same place as the white people.

In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld the policy of segregation by legalizing” separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites. But substance of racial segregation is a kind of racial discrimination. Segregation means, the division of the people’s rights is based on their ethic background. At that time, the blacks won’t go to the white-shop, and the blacks won’t went to the white-school.

The word segregation means to separate. When they separated the blacks from the whites that was segregation. Black and white Americans have always been separated until they were forced to go to school together. The segregation led from the 1800s to the 1960s. In the 1960s they decided to force black and whites to go to school together.

Following the Civil War (1861-1865), a trio of constitutional amendments abolished slavery, making the former slaves citizens and gave all men the right to vote regardless of race. Nonetheless, many states particularly in the South, used poll taxes, literacy tests and other similar measures to keep their Black neighbors practically broke. They also enforced strict segregation through “Jim Crow” laws and condoned violence from white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, or national origin.

The segregation of the northern and southern states subdued the United States from growing in to the nation we see today. African Americans of the south were subject to the brutal white supremacy that was accepted by the white citizens, so change was a futile notion. Many regions in the Deep South were not fixed on allowing African Americans equal rights in any way possible. These states expressed their beliefs through the enactment of Jim Crow Laws throughout the region. Unlike its counterparts of the Antebellum South, Pensacola, Florida became desegregated in a way unlike many of those states in the 20th century.

What is the purpose of racism? In Theorizing Nationalism, Day and Thompson discuss how racism and nationalism are precisely the same. Racism has the ability to help build nationalism, especially in our young country. LeMay and Barkan in U.S. Immigration & Naturalization Laws & Issues talk about how this racism is used during a specific time period, 1880 to 1920, in the United States of America. Both of these articles argue that when the United States was in a time of peril, they used racism as a unifying factor to bring the country together and as a way to put a group of people lower than themselves to bring their status to a higher point in society.

This was my third time watching the 13th Documentary, I have watched it for my Justice Theory class, Protest Justice Law and Media class, and now Immigration Education and the Family. However, with that being said, this is still an excellent documentary and each time I watch it I learn something new and different aspects pop out to me based on what particular class I have watched it for. When it comes to this class, I focused on the nuances and who was being targeted. To begin, the documentary is in reference to the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and how it had the ability to end slavery for African Americans, however, this end of slavery led to a mass incarceration of individuals, predominantly people who are African American.