African Americans had integrated into white society with enthusiasm, soon reaching congressional offices, before the clock was turned back and while the Ku Klux Klan rose up to run things their way. Some may say that what followed was worse than slavery. Registration, felon status (an old law that was revived in Florida 2000 to keep as many as 94,000 voters from the polls), and other laws still on our books originated then to further isolate blacks from the system. Even the Australian ballot, introduced in the late 1800s, served to weed out more under-educated populations from the voting process.
Jim Crow 2 encompasses further features of segregated society: "The election of 1876, in which stolen electoral votes selected Rutherford B. Hayes, brought the end of Reconstruction and stripped away federal protection of freed former slaves." After blacks' brief breath of freedom, poll taxes and literacy tests kept even more of them from voting. The nearly unanimous SCOTUS decision Plessy V. Ferguson "enshrined [the first Jim Crow's] 'separate but equal' segregation."
The pushback nearly 100 years later may have occurred when black veterans returned here from fighting World War II, where they had fought alongside whites, and refused to bow to Jim Crow. The Brown v. Board of Education decision to integrate schools came next in 1954. The following year, when Rosa Parks refused to yield her bus seat to a white man, the Montgomery bus boycott, the march from Selma to Montgomery, and other nonviolent actions followed. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. now leading the movement, made contact with JFK, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts seemed to spell out the demise of Jim Crow.
"The Civil Rights movement succeeded in raising black voter participation. African American registration rates soared in Georgia from 19.3% to 60.4%; in Alabama from 19.3% to 61.3%; in Mississippi from 6.7% to 66.5%; in Louisiana from 31.6% to 60.8%," write Fitrakis and Wasserman.
Jim Crow 3 assumes a strange, unexpected guise indeed. He became the War on Drugs--really a war on blacks--which filled prisons to the breaking point. Privatization of prisons exacerbated the suffering of the by-far largest numbers of "criminals" in the world." Americans serve essentially as cash flow, regardless of the impact of their imprisonment on society as a whole" and "The particular focus on the black community has become an organized assault not unlike US oppression of Third World countries around the world." Fitrakis and Wasserman call this blighted system "the prison-industrial complex."
Everyone smoked pot, but, since Nixon's push in 1971, somehow blacks and Hispanics were rounded up in far greater numbers than whites. The recent push to legalize marijuana is slow indeed, with just a few states having signed on, but citizens are rallying for it in large numbers in many other states. And voting laws are becoming more lenient toward nonviolent felons, many of their convictions drug-related, also gradually but farther along since the 1990s, incentive for some amount of optimism in the midst of this racist morass.
This section, on the Drug Wars as a form of Jim Crow, is the most compelling since it forms a new and shocking chapter in the history of oppression.
"As of 2016, roughly one in every three young African American men are under control of the criminal justice system, i.e., in prison, in jail, or on probation or parole. Millions have lost their right to vote, skewing the electorate strongly toward the GOP"; and "In 2009, according to the Department of Justice, African-Americans made up 12% of the general US population but 60% of the prison population."
But the next two sections shock again: Part 2, "Flip," is subtitled "The Fourth Jim Crow: Race-Based Election Theft Goes Global":
"William Blum's book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions since World War II lists 57 instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow, a foreign government since the World War II.
Our military and intelligence agencies have regularly interfered in elections, overthrown or killed the rightful victors and installed regimes friendly to the financial interests of American corporations.
The blowback has reshaped our own political system.
The art and science of subverting foreign governments has come home to roost."
The authors expand Blum's list of 57 events hereafter, as endless as human corruption and suffering itself; it begins in 1804, when Haitian slaves overthrew their masters and US intervention subsequently installed puppet dictators, the Duvaliers, at the end of the twentieth century, denying the people their basic human rights; and ends with the rise of ISIS and other terrorist organizations and how they have come to shape our elections "as candidates outdo each other in demanding military solutions to complex problems where armed intervention often makes things worse."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
