Question

Please discuss the specific components and initiatives that formed the Jim Crow laws and Black Disenfranchisement in the South. Compare these to the racial stratification in the West.

Answer 1

Answer:

1. Racial Segregation in the American South: Jim Crow Laws

Racism is the belief that the physical characteristics of a person or group determines their capabilities and that one group is naturally superior to other groups. Racism has been a major factor of society in the United States throughout its history. Racial prejudice has even been central to the development of American laws, basically legalizing white dominance over others.

1.1. The rise of Jim Crow

Slavery ended in 1865 with the South's defeat in the Civil War. However, the life of black Americans improved little. Three amendments were added to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing rights to freed slaves. Slavery, though outlawed, was merely replaced with racial discrimination and injustice that was upheld legally by Black Codes. The Black Codes denied freed slaves the right to vote, to possess any form of weapon, and to leave a job and move elsewhere. They were considered servants now instead of slaves. Disobeying a Black Code could lead to imprisonment. Efforts by the federal government to rebuild the South's economy and society in the 1870s, called Reconstruction, abolished the Black Codes though open racial prejudice and discrimination persisted. When Reconstruction ended in 1877, Southerners began passing new laws enforcing racial segregation known as Jim Crow laws. It was the Jim Crow laws through which the beliefs about the inferior nature of blacks were perpetuated throughout much of the twentieth century.

1.2. The inhumanity of Jim Crow

By 1915, all Southern states had some form of Jim Crow laws. Blacks could not eat in the same restaurants, drink out of the same water fountains, watch movies in the same theaters, play in the same parks, or go to the same schools as whites. Blacks had to sit in the back of buses and streetcars and give up their seats to whites when instructed to do so. Blacks could not nurse whites in hospitals. Signs reading "Colored Only" or "White Only" could be seen everywhere.

1.3 A long history of racism
Racism was prominent during the colonial period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the North American colonies were a part of the worldwide British Empire. Britons had traditionally associated dark skin color with negative behavioral traits such as evil and filth. Colonists brought this prejudice with them to North America when they crossed the ocean to settle in the seventeenth century.

By the late seventeenth century, race became the basis of slavery. Blacks did not come to the United States by choice but were brought to North America through an international slave trade. Forced into a life of slavery, they were captured by European slave traders and shipped to the New World in trade for sugar, rum, and various goods that were then shipped back to Europe. The colonists had severe labor shortages and an immediate and pressing need to clear the forests of the Eastern Seaboard from Georgia north through New England and plant crops. The Africans provided a large and free labor pool. They also provided a social group that to which the predominately white western European colonists could feel superior. Whites could gain social status by becoming planters and slave owners. The prejudice shaped colonial laws that banned intermarriage and considered slaves not as humans, but as property with no rights. Any child of mixed blood was considered black and forced to live as a slave, among slaves with few exceptions.