Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass words talk about the aftermath of once having freedom now, what are we being treated equally? We was African Americans are still subjected to the un-equality between the different races. Finding that African Americans were free they actually celebrated knowing that they would not be at the white mans knees. Songs were sung the day of the Emancipation Proclamation: “Glory, glory, hallelujah to Jesus. Is free. Is free….De soul buyers can nebber (never) take my two chilluns lef [left] me. Nebber can takeem from me no mo.” After having this so called freedom, new laws were established so that the African American people lived amongst the whites but not like the whites. In 1828 Jim Crow laws were born.
“Jim Crow” origins were from the man himself Jim Crow, which was a stage name for a popular white minstrel actor, who made fun of African Americans by dressing up as a black man to amuse his black audience. The term Jim Crow had come to stand for the laws, rules, and customs that segregated blacks from the white society. The Jim Crow laws prohibited many if not all African Americans from transportation, public facilities, education, the right to vote, and public entertainment. African Americans had to endure verbal abuse, discrimination, and violence without consequences by white groups or individuals.
“Segregation refers to the separateness of two or more groups living within the same society. “Discrimination is prejudice in action. It is evident wherever the dominant group deprives a minority of the same rights and opportunities that they themselves enjoy.” The main purpose of Jim Crow Laws was to segregate blacks from whites and discriminate against African American people. Segregation occurs when a group or society feels dominant or superior to another. This explains the block between the white and black community during the times of Jim Crow. Since the south lost the Civil War African Americans would have a long uphill battle to gain equality that is sometimes not still obtained between different races today.
In the late 1890s, the last of Reconstruction were slowly disappearing, southern states began enforcing Jim Crow laws by separating facilities between the blacks and whites. Some examples of what the laws were in such states as Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Kentucky. In Alabama laws were even on healthcare advantages. No person shall require any white female nurse in rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which Negro men are placed. In Arizona the marriage of a white blood American with a Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu shall be null and void. Also in Kentucky laws were created so that the children of white and colored races will be kept entirely away from each other in an educational facility along with others. These types of laws dominated the southern way of life for most African Americans and not obeying would leave you with dangerous consequences usually ending with your life.
Witness to the act of segregation Pauli Murray was glad that her grandfather was not subjected to see the discriminatory signs that lay around them. As she speaks: “I saw the things which grandfather could not see- in fact had never seen- the signs which literally screamed at me from every side- on streetcars, over drinking fountains, on doorways: FOR WHITE ONLY, FOR COLORED ONLY, WHITE LADIES, COLORED WOMEN, WHITE, [and] COLORED. If I missed the signs, I had only to follow my nose to the dirtiest, smelliest, most neglected accommodations, or they were pointed out to me by heavily armed, invariably mountainous red- faced policeman who seemed more to me a signal of calamity than of protection.” Many others such as Pauli Murray endured the harsh reality of the world that she lives in.
Negros not welcomed. Colored go into another entrance. Negros banned were words often heard and seen on billboards, or signs in the southern community by the late 1890s.Was the south subjected to the worst of the violence to African Americans by Jim Crow? North also home to Jim Crow laws considered a safe heaven? The south holds the most notorious hate crimes towards African Americans then the north would ever know to have. Racism and discrimination was taking part in the north but the south showed and verbalized their efforts to degrade the African American people.
It was in the north that the first Jim Crow law was passed. The Jim Crow laws were said to have plagued the north and the south like the black plagued manifest in Europe, with the rules that were created by the white supremacy. As the Northern nation repealed some of the more discriminatory legislation against Jim Crow, socially, if not legally, it remained in effect. The Jim Crow laws were recognizable in the northern nation, but dominated the south with known accountants of brutal attacks and the development