Impacts of black codes,Jim Crow Laws and segregation on african americans in the United States - Essay Example

? Impacts of Black s, Jim Crow Laws and Segregation on African Americans in the United s Impacts of Black s, Jim Crow Laws and Segregation on African Americans in the United States Introduction Racism was so much deep rooted in an American’s heart that the enactments of anti-slavery laws and the relevant amendments in the US Constitution were merely to redirect a racial mind to find alternatives of white superiority over the Black. Indeed the amended Constitution provided the legal safeguard to the Black, barring the practice of slavery at the state level as well as, to the extent the state could interfere into the public affairs. But it could do nothing to bring about the changes in the culture and the society that intrinsically nourished the racial hostility against their former slaves. Forced by the Constitution and laws, the Americans, especially the Southern States could not but embrace their former slaves, always whispering into their ears, “You are a black and you must feel it” (Haws 34). This act of reminding the Black that they were inferior to the White and subjects to the White Grace was being done perfectly by Black Codes, Segregation and the Jim Crow Laws. The “separate but equal” policy in the South is emblematic of the Whites’ failure to assimilate the minor black community into the mainstream of the society. Reconstruction: the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments The racial Segregation and the Jim Crow laws, in a single phrase the “separate policy” of the south was essentially the South’s reaction to the 13th, 14th and the 15th constitutional Amendments during the Reconstruction in the post Civil War Period. Reconstruction’s primary goals were to establish the Black rights by withering out Slavery and to reintegrate the South with the nation. But the Southerners took it as a Northern insult aggravating the injury of the Civil War. The Reconstruction started with President Lincoln’s affirmative actions for a race-blind, equal and reunited America. While Lincoln followed a more moderate course to establish black people’s right and to reunite the South, the Radical Republicans “opposed it on the ground that Lincoln reconstruction plan had freed the slaves without paying much attention to establishing their socio-political, economic and other rights” (Stampp 78). What the North feared the most was that the Government should play a more active role in introducing the people of races to the newly imposed freedom through educational, economic and other sector developments. As a result, by passing the Wade-Davis Bill in 1864 Republican dominated Congress declare that Southern States should be run by military governors and, Secession and Slavery would be outlawed with the consent of the fifty percent of a state’s voters. Eventually the Congress also passed “the 13th Amendment and established the Freedmen’s Bureau in order to provide the formers slaves and black communities with the opportunities of education, employment, medical service, and economic facilities” (Carter 67). With the reelection of the Democrats in 1968, the Oval Office under Johnson’s Presidency followed the same path that Lincoln started immediately after the Civil War. But President Johnson’s lack of foresight and wholeheartedness severely affected Reconstruction. Eventually, the Congress voted for the 14th Amendment of the US constitution to provide legal safeguard to Black people’s civil right in 1866 and the 15th Amendment to protect the black’s right to vote in 1870. But along the passage of time, the reconstruction zeal began to wane. Indeed the different political scandal, corruption of the reconstructed governments, economic aftermaths, etc aggravated the waning of Reconstruction. The South’s Response to the 13th Amendment: Black Codes To the North’s surprise, the South began to impose unofficial and legislative restrictions on the black’s rights. Both theoretically and legally by the 13th Amendment of the Constitution slavery was outlawed; empowered by the 14th Amendment, people of colors could enter into contracts, business, ownership, etc and by the 15th Amendment they earned the right to vote. But the reality was totally different from what the Northerners expected from the Amendments and their enactment, as Gerald Early says in this regard, “white southerners, inspired by the North's old Black Codes, instituted their own version…..in response to the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which ended slavery in the United States and emancipated over four million African-Americans” (Early). While before the 13th Amendment in the pre-Civil War period, the Southerners enjoyed unchallenged mastery over the Blacks and exploited the black labor to sustain the South’s plantation and other agriculture based economy, after the constitutional abolition of slavery the South sought to generate unofficial laws limiting the blacks’ civil rights, during the Johnson Presidency, with a view to manipulate black labor evading the Constitutional restrictions. Since the socioeconomic structure of the southern societies left no other choice for the pro-slavery southerners except to exploit the African-American labor, creating the race-based superiority of the whites to the blacks was the most convenient resort of the southerners to justify their cause for slavery. Remarking some groups of people as black was economically profitable in the South. Therefore, Black Codes were essentially the revival of antebellum Slave Codes in order to secure cheap by retraining the slaves’ racial inferiority. Indeed the Southerners’ strategy was to retain psychological inferiority of the Blacks so that the cheap black labor could easily be manipulated. Since slavery became an indispensable part of the colonizer’s economy and became socio-politically integrated into the early American society, it began to shift its basis from war to color after the 13th Amendment. Josef Healey (2010) says that “blackness” itself as an ideology was critical for the exploitation of the labor of the African blacks in early America, and it “provided the very source of whiteness and the heart of racism” (Healey, 2010, p. 288). This master-slave association greatly influences both the American’s view of the color-based racism. The African-Americans were not white by birth, they would not have any rights and they were not citizens. Therefore they were deprived of any citizen-rights such as education, health, good food, and other basic rights. This color-based racism is evident in the voice of a southern President, Andrew Johnson: “The black race of Africa [is] inferior to the white man in point of intellect -- better calculated in physical structure to undergo drudgery and hardship -- standing, as they do, many degrees lower in the scale of gradation that expresses the relative relation between God and all that he has created than the white man.” (Johnson 136) Shortly after the 13th Amendment, the common southerners’ response to their formerly slaves, now freeman was terrible in term of level of torture and humiliation. Before the enactment of the Wade-Davis Bill 1864 to rule the South under military governorship, the white social terrorism against the Black swept over the southern states. Ku Klux Klan, Knights of White Camellia and other organized white bands overtly started to commit murders and torture those blacks who were the possible voters of the Republicans. The radical white racists’ target was to keep the black away from applying their voting right, and other civil rights that the whites were enjoying alone. Since the 13th Amendment did not speak anything specifically about the black suffrage and their civil rights, the South applied every possible tool to restrict their rights. Jim Crow Laws: The South’s Response to the 14th and 15th Amendments If Black Codes are considered as the moderate versions of the Slave Codes of the pre-Civil War period, the Jim Crow Laws are the South’s more restrictive and legislative response to the 14th and 15th Amendments. Also Jim Crow Laws can be considered as the South’s mode of response to the equality of the Black, established by the 14th and 15th Amendments. Racial segregation started in its true sense in the 1876. In 1868 the 14th Amendment was voted for to oppose the "black codes", declaring that “[No state] shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the United States... [Or] deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, [or] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (The US Constitution) After the enactment of the 14th and the 15th Amendment the southern state governments and the southern commoners responded to the Amendments in different ways. Since the states were bound to abide by the 18(c) passage of the Constitution, they could not but ensure equal rights for the Blacks in the South. Indeed it was, for the Southern Governors, more of a political commitment than a wholehearted embrace of the issue. This part of political responsibility was evident in then President Andrew Johnson’s voice: “This is a country for the white man and by God, as long as I am President; it shall remain a government by the white man. Though we should do our best to improve the conditions of blacks, we must at the same time keep them in check.” (137) Impacts of Jim Crow Laws on the Life Standards of the Black The impacts of the Jim Crow laws on the lives of the blacks were such that living as a freeman was somewhat better than living a slave’s life. It was because the Jim Crows Laws were imposed in every possible ways, not going into conflict with the constitution, to worsen the lives of the Blacks. Now the former slaves were freed and forced to retreat to the farthest corner of society without any supply of the basic needs of human life. The slaves, since they were not familiar with traditional life supporting jobs, had no other ways but either to suffer from extreme poverty or to involve in crime and even to accept their slavery under their ex-masters. Consequently, poverty and crime began to spread side by side. Also black labor became as cheap as it was in the pre-Civil War Period. But the most devastating impact of the Jim Crow Laws was the psychological one. The new generation of the former slaves was being increasingly vulnerable to criminal activities and violently reactive to the white hostility, while the older generation was not able to surpass the fear of their ex-white masters, as Gerald Early Notes: Crime increased dramatically in the South in these years, particularly black crimes. So did lynchings. Many of these crimes committed by blacks were real enough, but not infrequently, blacks were falsely accused of crimes for a variety of reasons, particularly if the person accused was some threat to the power structure. (Early) Though on March 3, 1865, Congress set up the Freedmen’s Bureau in order to make the Freedom from slavery meaningful for them, its initiatives were not sufficient enough to cover the whole South. Rather the programs induced by the Freedman Bureau were able to cover only the urban areas of the south. The bureau’s chief focus was to provide food, medical care, help with resettlement, administer justice, manage abandoned and confiscated property, regulate labor, and establish schools. Over 1,000 schools were built, teacher-training institutions were created, and several black colleges were founded and financed with the help of the bureau. But with the waning in the Reconstructive zeal in 1875, the white southerners having their dominance in the White House began to be revived, while failingly attempting to recapture their ex-slaves. It rather gave birth to more hostility and animosity between the white and the black. Because of the stalemate between the Democrats and the Republicans in the Election 1877, the Republicans were forced to come to a compromise and lost their dominance over the South. Inspired by the victory of the Democrats after the Election of 1877, the southern states began to taking away black rights more overtly. Though they did not reinstate the old institution, they did attempt to take away the blacks’ right in many different ways: there were laws enforcing the separation of blacks and whites, keeping the blacks economically dependent on whites through the sharecropping system, and growing disenfranchisement of blacks. From the beginning of the 1980s, the blacks in the South began to experience the revamped white terror and hostility increasingly. These were the years of massive segregationist legislation, declining legal support for blacks’ right, white Southerners increasing denial against black suffrage, evading the Constitution by disfranchising the blacks on other basis instead of race, enactment of laws in order to make more difficult for the blacks to vote, etc. In the years between 1890 and 1910 all Southern states “passed laws imposing requirements for voting that were used to prevent blacks from voting, in spite of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States” (Stampp 132). In the 1890s, the disfranchisements of the blacks were often followed by lynching the disfranchised person. Ceremonial and ritualized mob violence, white terrorism against southern blacks, racial riots became everyday affair during the 1900s, since the young generation of the blacks was more familiar with their free lives and more challenging to the white supremacy, as Derrick Ward says, The violent, racial confrontations in which mobs of whites and blacks battled each other in U.S. towns and cities during the Jim Crow era were triggered by some of the same forces driving legalized segregation, disfranchisement, and the lynching of thousands of African Americans. (Ward) Impacts of Jim Crow on African American Culture The impacts of Jim Crow on the black culture were huge. Since the most of the black lived in the south, the mainstream black culture was affected by it greatly. During the Jim Crow era, the black were forced to create their own cultural entertainment while they were pushed away from various sectors of the dominant white society. One of the most significant results of the segregation was expansion of Black Church. The Black Protestant Churches of the North played a crucial role in educating and socializing the black youth in the South. Since Protestantism was more favorable for the freed slaves, it was widely welcomed by them. Unlike the Catholic Churches, Black churches were more focused on social issues, like gang violence, murder, rape, drug abuse, etc. Again during the Jim Crow, the African American got involved in a number of sports such as Baseball, Boxing, Football, Horseracing, etc due to both social and economic factors. Socially these sports were a means of entertainments for the young generation and economically they were good sources of money for the blacks, as Jean M. West comments: There were dozens of "Jackie Robinsons," male and female--many of them unknown outside of their sport or era--who had to perform swifter, higher, and stronger while also acting as pioneers for their race. Their resistance, persistence, and excellence on field, ball court, arena, course, track, and sports venues of every description created the foundation for integrated sports Conclusion The impact of this segregation on the Black community was tremendous but better than the impact of slavery. The segregated equality was no more than a severe humiliation for a community who was formerly under the control and fear of their White Masters, but now started to feel their own existence as human beings. This ‘existent but ignored’ feeling pushed the black youth as well as the whole black community to the path of self-destruction and self-oblivion. Apart from this psychological impact, the African-Americans were undergoing severe economic crisis, illiteracy, physical and mental torture, political threat, etc. Works Cited Carter, Dan T. When the war was over: the failure of self-reconstruction in the South, 1865-1867. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985. Early, Gerald. “Jim Crow Era”, April 12, 2011, available at Healey, J. F. Hispanic American. Diversity and Society Race, Ethnicity, and Gender (pp. 201-304). Place: Publishers. 2010 Haws, Robert, ed. The Age of Segregation: Race Relations in the South, 1890– 1945 University Press of Mississippi, 1978. Johnson, Andrew. Papers of Andrew Johnson: 1822-1851. Princeton Press: Princeton, 1958 Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South Survey. The Old South University of Wisconsin Press, 1956 Ward, Derrick. “Urban Race Riots in the Jim Crow Era: An Overview Essay”, April 3, 2011, available at West, Jean M. “Jim Crow and Sports”, April 3, 2011, available at Read More