Sunday, September 25, 2011

Jim Crow Laws

I think they're interesting. Not because I am racist or heartless or believe they should be implimented...but to realize that these laws, which looking back upon are ridiculous, were seemingly just and neccessary at the time.

Okay, so everything is crazy and kind of overkill, but the ones I found the most surprising were the juvinile delinquents/prisons and mental hospital laws. Even if people were bad and did illegal things, or if they had mental illnesses or were insane, they still felt it was necessary to separate them by race.
And they regulated marriages. And went as far as to make sure burials were done by separate people.
Even the militia which is supposed to be a patriotic and unified group was separated by race.

The context of these laws with Letter from Birmingham Jail demonstrate how humiliated and degraded the blacks felts in America. It shows how they were treated. And why they were fighting.

MLK, as well as others, used the word 'disease' to describe segregation. It is actually as if the white people thought the black people were diseases. They didn't want to be near them, or use the same facilities as them, or have the same people sell or operate the things they bought or used.

I actually really enjoyed reading Letter from Birmingham Jail, even with the very tedious CRJ attached to it. It was really powerful, and definitely had an 'FU' tone, in a classy and respectable way.

I also found it interesting to see how some of the laws parallel the issues of some social injustices today (mainly homosexuals in the cases of marriage and child custody and the army) and how perhaps someday people will look back on our laws and shake their heads at us.

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