Jim Crow Laws Research Paper

Imagine going to the grocery store and never returning home. Now, envision yourself being followed and ultimately killed by a neighborhood watchman. Is that how neighborhood residents watch over their community to prevent crime? On a rainy evening of February 26, 2012, a black young male was walking back to his father’s house in Sanford, Florida from a 7-Eleven convenient store with a bag of Skittles and a can of Arizona iced tea. This innocent teenager was reported to the local authorities as a “suspicious young black male” walking around with a grey hoodie by a neighborhood watchman. After reporting him to the police, the neighborhood watchman tried to take into account the safety of others by refusing to listen to the instructions of a 911 dispatcher of not following the teenager. At that time, George Zimmerman, the twenty-eight year old self-proclaimed neighborhood watch volunteer, confronted and fatally shot this unarmed seventeen year old …show more content…
Charles E. Silberman, an American journalist and scholar, states that “Race and racism continue to shape American life, as they have for three and a half centuries” (160). In simple terms, the criminal justice system is defined as a continuation of slavery and the Jim Crow laws. Even though slavery and the Jim Crow laws were declared unconstitutional in the 1800s, racism is a factor that is unceasingly taking place within our criminal justice system. As a result of racism, African Americans have been victimized by the dominant population, which in this case are white people, because of their race or skin color. This demonstrates that racial discrimination, the unfair treatment of a group of people or person based on their race or skin color, currently takes place in our nation and it negatively impacts African