Lynching

In Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander calls mass incarceration the “New Jim Crow.” In this way, Alexander connects the past of the Jim Crow era to the present way in which criminals are treated today. The Jim Crow era refers to the racial caste system of laws and policies once set in place during the end of Reconstruction through the late 1950s by which white southerners reasserted their dominance over African Americans by denying…

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lynchings on African Americans became quite popular due to many whites looking for someone to place a harsh blame on. No matter how small the crime committed was, or even if the victim was innocent; a minority, usually African Americans, was held accountable. The accused would not even be given a second to explain himself, for as soon as a “White” accuses him; he would be charged, jailed, and tortured a few days later. African Americans…

Literature has been around for as early as 2000 BC and has been evolving since then. The beginning of literature consisted of entertaining an audience. The main purpose of the literary works of authors was to determine the most successful way to entertain their audience and by doing so they came up with fictional stories. As time progressed, literature started to change. Authors no longer sought to entertain their audience, but wanted to express their ideas and opinions instead. The change in…

The New South was a challenging time period for Southern African Americans with discriminatory regulations, frequent violent acts, and segregation. During this time period four people stood out as influential leaders in the African American community. These four leaders were Ida B Wells, Booker T Washington, Henry McNeal Turner, and William DuBois. These leaders all had four different strategies that they advocated as the way to correct the wrong doings of the New South and promote civil rights.…

take upwards of a million years to make the conversions balance the output…” (Twain 4) This quote comes from Mark Twain’s essay entitled “The United States of Lyncherdom”; for Twain, a southern man, to write such a liberal essay at the time when lynching was popular is really quite a bold move. Unfortunately it was not published until after his death for he feared that he would not have a friend left in the world (Twain 1). Anyhow, the overall message of Twain’s essay is his loss of faith in…

There are always new challenges to come every few years or so. For instance, women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920. On down the line slavery ended with the help of president Abraham Lincoln in the year of 1865. Everyone is fighting for some rights or cause in this world, but women have to fight for so much more of not being judged by what role we are supposed to carry out in a family environment and working economy. Even when it comes to criminal punishment, we struggle by the hand’s of…

Two realities of human society always threaten to depress and confound us: many of us face daily violence and prejudice from those around us, and the collective conscious is slow to adopt positive change, i.e., we can hope that tomorrow we will stop fighting amongst ourselves and recognize the common humanity shared by all of us, but such an accomplishment is a far away goal with no end in sight. What then can we do? We must be the best citizens possible. Only then can real, albeit slow,…

Woven into the fabric of the United States, are certain cultural myths. These myths paint a specific portrait of America. The myth of the chosen nation portrays America as a “City upon a Hill”. Like the land of Canaan in the Bible, the U.S. is the promise land and Americans, much like the Hebrews, are a chosen people. The myth of nature’s nation says that America “was based on a natural order” or the American way of life is the way its suppose to be. There are three types of responses to these…

literature and media, convinced whites that they were racially superior to everyone else, causing them to look down upon other races, which resulted in the now legalized segregation. Segregation eventually grew to become discrimination, peaking at lynchings, being hosed down with water by police, and worse. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends” - Martin Luther King, Jr. , on racism.…

foremost, he is the attorney to an African American in a racist time period. Much courage is shown by him in accepting the case and doing the job right. Furthermore, he stays outside the jail the night before the trial to protect Tom Robinson from a lynching. In most cases, he would have been killed. Moreover, he also remains unwilling to fight with Bob Ewell, even after he threatens him and spits in his face. This shows he respected himself and his children’s fate enough to not fight or…