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In the aftermath of the Civil War, the black slaves were given their rights and much of the same rights as those given to the “white” population. Many believed that the former slaves would soon be graduating to the level of their former slaves. However, this was not the case; in fact, over the next two decades, the former slaves would be stripped of everything these had gained in the wake of the war. In fact, the declination of the rights of the black people was not only supported, these were institutionalized by the adoption of the “Jim Crow” laws. These laws were premised on the concept of “white supremacy;” during the recession in the 1890s, this concept became extremely attractive to the “whites” as a form of a violent response over fears that these would be losing their jobs to the newly liberated “blacks (Constitutional Rights Foundation).
This struggle for equality in American society regardless of one’s skin color has been documented in literature and in history. In a time when the United States has elected an African American as its head of state, many African American men in major US cities are still feeling the same bigoted responses as did the slaves in the past. In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), Michelle Alexander proffers that the African American population, in terms of their rights, are no different than their predecessors. Many of these Americans have been denied not only basic civil and human rights, these are also denied many of the rights and resources normally accessible to the “white class.” In the same way that Jim Crow laws impacted the rights of the newly liberated slaves, modern day American society has created a slew of laws and regulations that have literally pushed the African American society into a second class citizenship akin to the era of Jim Crow (Alexander 4).
Works Cited
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New Press, 2010
Constitutional Rights Foundation “A brief history of Jim Crow” <http://www.crf-usa.org/black-history-month/a-brief-history-of-jim-crown (Accessed 6 September 2016)
