Dark Sky Rising by Henry Louis Gates Jr

Author:Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2018-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

DEROGATORY DISPLAY: (Left) An 1847 sheet music cover. COSTUMED ACTOR: (Right) Jim Crow was a character who appeared in stage shows. His persona made fun of African Americans.

“We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” wrote Justice Henry Billings Brown in the majority opinion in the Plessy decision. “If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

“Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” said the lone dissenter. Just as when the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, that dissenter was Justice John Marshall Harlan. “In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case,” said Harlan. He foresaw that the Plessy decision “will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat” the intent, the purposes of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments.

Separate schools, parks, libraries, hospitals, hotels, restaurants, restrooms, water fountains, waiting rooms, cemeteries …

Separate entrances to theaters, courthouses, and other buildings …

Separate seating on trolley cars …

The US Supreme Court held that there was nothing unconstitutional about racially separate but “equal” facilities. However, in reality, under Jim Crow, facilities for black people were rarely equal to those for white people.

Whereas a town’s white children might attend a finely built brick school, its black children might be consigned to a tar-paper shack.

Whereas white people could travel in well-appointed railroad cars—roomy and with upholstered seats—black passengers on their way to a wedding, a funeral, a vacation, or traveling for work, often had to sit on benches in filthy baggage cars, which often doubled as the smoking cars.

Justice Brown was dead wrong. Jim Crow most definitely tried to stamp a badge of inferiority permanently on black people, despite all the progress they had made since the end of slavery. It clawed, gouged, hammered at their self-esteem, it cut away at their dignity. At the same time, it reinforced the absurd notion that white people were superior to black people.

Jim Crow had millions of African Americans joining Ida B. Wells’s lament: “O God, is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us?”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.