Jim Crow Era & Laws

In class, my group, the Women of Wisdom, was assigned to do a presentation on the Jim Crow Era and Laws. What the laws established was, a racial case system that existed between 1877 and the mid-1960's that made black citizens second-class citizens. All major societal institutions reflected and supported the oppression of blacks. Jim Crow was a system of a series of anti-black laws. For example, a few were, “It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other in any game of cards or dice, dominoes or checkers.” —Birmingham, Alabama, 1930. Another one is, “No colored barber shall serve as a barber to white women or girls.”—Atlanta, Georgia, 1926. The movie, “The Help” is based on a real story and gives great examples on the Jim Crow Law pertaining to promotion of equality. In the movie the help, the main characters of the movie were minorities who wanted to publish a book that had some aspects of bringing racial equality to the south. However, they were fearful of how society or the law could possibly punish them. Another example would be the public facilities law. Robert Brown in the movie, was severely beaten and punished for using a bathroom labeled, “white”. Gerrymandering is manipulating the boundaries of an electoral constituency so as to favor one party or class over another. Racial gerrymandering deprives black people of political power by packing, cracking, and stacking. The slides that I talked about during our presentation of the Jim Crow era were sundown towns, which I found very interesting. Sundown towns were all white neighborhoods in the United States that practice a form of segregation by enforcing restrictions excluding people of other races through some kind of combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, and violence. The term “sundown towns” came from signs that were posted stating that colored people had to leave the town by sundown. A documentary was filmed on the murder of Carol Jenkin’s. Carol Jenkin’s was a 21 year-old African American woman who was murdered in a sundown town. She had lost contact with her car-pool of co-workers who were selling some encyclopedias and ended up getting stuck in the town after dark and it costed her life. She ran to a white person’s house after being followed and harassed by 2 white men and they called the police to try and help her but the police didn’t seem to care about the men, they cared more about the fact that there was a black women in their town after sunset.