Jim Crow Collection

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Jim Crow laws

Jim Crow laws

The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy, with, starting in 1890, a "separate but equal" status for African Americans. The separation in practice led to conditions that tended to be inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally de facto, with patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades. Some examples of Jim Crow laws are the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. The U.S. military was also segregated.

Cover of music score for "Jim Crow Jubilee," published in Boston in 1847.

These Jim Crow Laws followed the 18001866 Black Codes, which had previously restricted the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans with no pretense of equality. State-sponsored school segregation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. Generally, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964[1] and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Etymology
The phrase "Jim Crow Law" first appeared in 1904 according to the Dictionary of American English,[2] although there is some evidence of earlier usage.[3][4] The origin of the phrase "Jim Crow" has often been attributed to "Jump Jim Crow", a song-and-dance caricature of blacks performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface, which first surfaced in 1832 and was used to satirize Andrew Jackson's populist policies. As a result of Rice's fame, "Jim Crow" had become a pejorative expression meaning "Negro" by 1838. When southern legislatures passed laws of racial segregation directed against blacks at the end of the 19th century, these became known as Jim Crow laws.[3]

Origins of Jim Crow laws

During the Reconstruction period of 18651877, federal law provided civil rights protection in the U.S. South for freedmen the African Americans who had formerly been slaves. In the 1870s, Democrats gradually regained power in the Southern legislatures, sometimes as a result of elections in which paramilitary groups intimidated opponents, attacking blacks or preventing them from voting. Gubernatorial elections were close and disputed in Louisiana for years, with extreme violence unleashed during the campaigns. In 1877, a national compromise to gain Southern support in the presidential election resulted in the last of the federal troops being withdrawn from the South. White Democrats had regained political power in every Southern state.[5] These conservative, white, Democratic Redeemer governments legislated Jim Crow laws, segregating black people from the white population. Blacks were still elected to local offices in the 1880s, but the establishment Democrats were passing laws to make voter registration and electoral rules more restrictive, with the result that political participation by most blacks and

Jim Crow laws many poor whites began to decrease.[6][7] Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, starting with Mississippi, passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements.[6][7] Grandfather clauses temporarily permitted some illiterate whites to vote. Voter turnout dropped drastically through the South as a result of such measures. For example, Alabama had tens of thousands of poor whites disfranchised.[8] In Louisiana, by 1900, black voters were reduced to 5,320 on the rolls, although they comprised the majority of the state's population. By 1910, only 730 blacks were registered, less than 0.5 percent of eligible black men. "In 27 of the state's 60 parishes, not a single black voter was registered any longer; in 9 more parishes, only one black voter was."[9] The cumulative effect in North Carolina meant that black voters were completely eliminated from voter rolls during the period from 18961904. The growth of their thriving middle class was slowed. In North Carolina and other Southern states, there were also the effects of invisibility: "[W]ithin a decade of disfranchisement, the white supremacy campaign had erased the image of the black middle class from the minds of white North Carolinians."[9] Those who could not vote were not eligible to serve on juries and could not run for local offices. They effectively disappeared from political life, as they could not influence the state legislatures, and their interests were overlooked. While public schools had been established by Reconstruction legislatures for the first time in most Southern states; those for black children were consistently underfunded compared to schools for white children, even when considered within the strained finances of the postwar South where the decreasing price of cotton kept the agricultural economy at a low. In some cases, progressive measures intended to reduce election fraud, such as the Eight Box Law in South Carolina, acted against black and white voters who were illiterate, as they could not follow the directions.[10] While the separation of African Americans from the general population was becoming legalized and formalized during the Progressive Era (1890s1920s), it was also becoming customary. For instance, even in cases in which Jim Crow laws did not expressly forbid black people to participate in sports or recreation, the laws shaped a segregated culture.[3] In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of black Americans. Most blacks still lived in the South, where they had been effectively disfranchised, so they could not vote at all. While poll taxes and literacy requirements banned many poor or illiterate Americans from voting, these stipulations frequently had loopholes that exempted white Americans from meeting the requirements. In Oklahoma, for instance, anyone qualified to vote before 1866, or related to someone qualified to vote before 1866 (a kind of "grandfather clause"), was exempted from the literacy requirement; the only persons who could vote before that year were white male Americans. White Americans were effectively excluded from the literacy testing, whereas black Americans were effectively singled out by the law.[11] Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat and the first Southern-born president of the post-Civil War period, appointed Southerners to his Cabinet. Some quickly began to press for segregated work places, although Washington, D.C. and federal offices had been integrated since after the Civil War. In 1913, for instance, the Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo an appointee of the President was heard to express his opinion of black and white women working together in one government office: "I feel sure that this must go against the grain of the white women. Is there any reason why the white women should not have only white women working across from them on the machines?"[12] Wilson introduced segregation in federal offices, despite much protest from African-American leaders and groups. He appointed segregationist Southern politicians because of his own firm belief that racial segregation was in the best interest of black and white Americans alike.[13] At Gettysburg on July 4, 1913, the semi-centennial of Abraham Lincoln's declaration that "all men are created equal", Wilson addressed the crowd:

Jim Crow laws How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic, as state after state has been added to this, our great family of free men![14] A Washington Bee editorial wondered if the "reunion" of 1913 was a reunion of those who fought for "the extinction of slavery" or a reunion of those who fought to "perpetuate slavery and who are now employing every artifice and argument known to deceit" to present emancipation as a failed venture.[14] One historian notes that the "Peace Jubilee" at which Wilson presided at Gettysburg in 1913 "was a Jim Crow reunion, and white supremacy might be said to have been the silent, invisible master of ceremonies."[14] (See also: Great Reunion of 1913)

Early attempts to break Jim Crow

The Civil Rights Act of 1875, introduced by Charles Sumner and Benjamin F. Butler, stipulated a guarantee that everyone, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was entitled to the same treatment in public accommodations, such as inns, public transportation, theaters, and other places of recreation. This Act had little effect. An 1883 Supreme Court decision ruled that the act was unconstitutional in some respects, saying Congress was not afforded control over private persons or corporations. With white southern Democrats forming a solid voting bloc in Congress, with power out of proportion to the percentage of population they represented, Congress did not pass another civil rights law until 1957.

Sign for the "colored" waiting room at a bus station in Durham, North Carolina, 1940

In 1890, Louisiana passed a law requiring separate accommodations for colored and white passengers on railroads. Louisiana law distinguished between "white", "black" and "colored" (that is, people of mixed European and African ancestry). The law already specified that blacks could not ride with white people, but colored people could ride with whites before 1890. A group of concerned black, colored and white citizens in New Orleans formed an association dedicated to rescinding the law. The group persuaded Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth "Negro" and of fair complexion, to test it. In 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket from New Orleans on the East Louisiana Railway. Once he had boarded the train, he informed the train conductor of his racial lineage and took a seat in the whites-only car. He was directed to leave that car and sit instead in the "coloreds only" car. Plessy refused and was immediately arrested. The Citizens Committee of New Orleans fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. They lost in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the Court ruled that "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional. The finding contributed to 58 more years of legalized discrimination against black and colored people in the United States.

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Racism in the United States and defenses of Jim Crow

White Southerners encountered problems in learning free labor management after the end of slavery, and they resented black Americans, who represented the Confederacy's Civil War defeat: "With white supremacy challenged throughout the South, many whites sought to protect their former status by threatening African Americans who exercised their new rights."[15] White Democrats used their power to segregate public spaces and facilities in law and reestablish social dominance over blacks in the South.

One rationale for the systematic exclusion of black Americans from southern public society was that it was for their own protection. An early 20th-century scholar suggested that having allowed blacks in white schools would mean "constantly subjecting them to adverse feeling and opinion", which might lead to "a morbid race consciousness".[16] This perspective took anti-black sentiment for granted, because bigotry was widespread in the South after slavery became a racial caste.

1904 caricature of "White" and "Jim Crow" rail cars by John T. McCutcheon. Despite Jim Crow's legal pretense that the races be "separate but equal" under the law, non-whites were given inferior facilities and treatment.

World War II era

After World War II, African Americans increasingly challenged segregation, as they believed they had more than earned the right to be treated as full citizens because of their military service and sacrifices. The Civil Rights Movement was energized by a number of flashpoints, including the 1946 attack on World War II veteran Isaac Woodard while he was in U.S. Army uniform. In 1948 President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981, desegregating the armed services. As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum and used federal courts to attack Jim Crow statutes, the white-dominated governments of many of the southern states countered by passing alternative forms of restrictions. The NAACP Legal Defense Committee (a group that became independent of the NAACP) and its lawyer, Thurgood Marshall brought the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 [17] (1954) before the Supreme Court. In its pivotal 1954 decision, the Court unanimously overturned the 1896 Plessy decision. The Supreme Court found that legally mandated (de jure) public school segregation was unconstitutional. The decision had far-reaching social ramifications. De jure segregation was not brought to an end until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. History has shown that problems of educating poor children are not confined to minority status, and states and cities have continued to grapple with approaches.
A segregative sign on a restaurant in Lancaster, Ohio, 1938

A billiard hall for "colored" people in Memphis, Tennessee, 1939

The court ruling did not stop de facto or residentially based school segregation. Such segregation continues today in many regions. Some

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city school systems have also begun to focus on issues of economic and class segregation rather than racial segregation, as they have found that problems are more prevalent when the children of the poor of any ethnic group are concentrated. Associate Justice Frank Murphy introduced the word "racism" into the lexicon of U.S. Supreme Court opinions in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944).[18] He stated that by upholding the forced relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II, the Court was sinking into "the ugly abyss of racism." This was the first time that "racism" was used in Supreme Court opinion (Murphy used it twice in a concurring opinion in Steele v. Louisville & Nashville R. Co. 323 192 (1944) issued that day).[19] Murphy used the word in five separate opinions, but after he left the court, "racism" was not used again in an opinion for almost two decades. It next appeared in the landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 [20] (1967). Interpretation of the Constitution and its application to minority rights continues to be controversial as Court membership changes. Observers such as Ian F. Lopez believe that in the 2000s, the Supreme Court has become more protective of the status quo.[21]

Separate "white" and "colored" entrances to a cafe in Durham, North Carolina, 1940

Removal
Courts

Some restaurants, such as The Choke 'Em Down Lunch Room in Belle Glade, Florida, welcomed both white and black patrons alike, as indicated by the advertisement "White & colored served." overhanging the eatery in this 1939 photograph. Where this was allowed, state and local laws often required "whites" and "coloreds" be seated in separate sections.

In the 20th century, the Supreme Court began to overturn Jim Crow laws on constitutional grounds. In Buchanan v. Warley 245 US 60 (1917), the court held that a Kentucky law could not require residential segregation. The Supreme Court in 1946, in Irene Morgan v. Virginia ruled segregation in interstate transportation to be unconstitutional, in an application of the commerce clause of the Constitution. It was not until 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that the court held that separate facilities were inherently unequal in the area of public schools, effectively overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, and outlawing Jim Crow in other areas of society as well. This landmark case consisted of complaints filed in the states of Delaware (Gebhart v. Belton); South Carolina (Briggs v. Elliott); Virginia (Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County); and Washington, D.C. (Spottswode Bolling v. C. Melvin Sharpe). These decisions, along with other cases such as McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Board of Regents 339 US 637 (1950), NAACP v. Alabama 357 US 449 (1958), and Boynton v. Virginia 364 US 454 (1960), slowly dismantled the state-sponsored segregation imposed by Jim Crow laws. Along with Jim Crow laws, by which the state compelled segregation of the races, private parties such as businesses, political parties and unions created their own Jim Crow arrangements, barring blacks from buying homes in certain neighborhoods, from shopping or working in certain stores, from working at certain trades, etc. The Supreme Court outlawed some forms of private discrimination in Shelley v. Kraemer 334 US 1 (1948), in which it held that restrictive covenants that barred sale of homes to blacks or Jews or Asians were unconstitutional, because they represented state-sponsored discrimination, in that they were only effective if the courts enforced them. The Supreme Court was unwilling, however, to attack other forms of private discrimination. It reasoned that private parties did not violate the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution when they discriminated, because they were not "state actors" covered by that clause.

Jim Crow laws In 1971, the Supreme Court, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, upheld desegregation busing of students to achieve integration.

Public arena
Rosa Parks' 1955 act of civil disobedience, in which she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, was a catalyst in later years of the Civil Rights movement. Her action, and the demonstrations which it stimulated, led to a series of legislative and court decisions that contributed to undermining the Jim Crow system. The Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., which followed Rosa Parks' action, was not the first of its kind. Numerous boycotts and demonstrations against segregation had occurred throughout the 1930s and 1940s. These early demonstrations achieved positive results and helped spark political activism. K. Leroy Irvis of Pittsburgh's Urban League, for instance, led a demonstration against employment discrimination by Pittsburgh's department stores in 1947, launching his own influential political career.

End of de jure segregation

In January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson met with civil rights leaders. On January 8, during his first State of the Union address, Johnson asked Congress to "let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined." On June 21, civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where they were volunteering in the registration of African-American voters as part of the Mississippi Summer Project. The disappearance of the three activists captured national attention and the ensuing outrage was used by Johnson and civil rights activists to build a coalition of northern Democrats and Republicans and push Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.[1] On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964.[1][22] It invoked the commerce clause[1] to outlaw discrimination in public accommodations (privately owned restaurants, hotels, and stores, and in private schools and workplaces). This use of the commerce clause was upheld in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States 379 US 241 (1964).[23] By 1965, efforts to break the grip of state disfranchisement had been under way for some time, but had achieved only modest success overall and in some areas had proved almost entirely ineffectual. The murder of the three voting-rights activists in Mississippi in 1964 and the state's refusal to prosecute the murderers, along with numerous other acts of violence and terrorism against blacks, had gained national attention. Finally, the unprovoked attack on March 7, 1965, by state troopers on peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, en route to the state capitol in Montgomery, persuaded the President and Congress to overcome Southern legislators' resistance to effective voting rights enforcement legislation. President Johnson issued a call for a strong voting rights law and hearings soon began on the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act.[24] The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended legally sanctioned state barriers to voting for all federal, state and local elections. It also provided for federal oversight and monitoring of counties with historically low minority voter turnout, as this was a sign of discriminatory barriers.

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Legacy
Legal
The Supreme Court of the United States held in the Civil Rights Cases 109 US 3 (1883) that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give the federal government the power to outlaw private discrimination, and then held in Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896) that Jim Crow laws were constitutional as long as they allowed for "separate but equal" facilities. In the years that followed, the court made this "separate but equal" requirement a hollow phrase by upholding discriminatory laws in the face of evidence of profound inequalities in practice.

Political

An African-American youth at a "colored" drinking fountain on a courthouse lawn in Halifax, North Carolina, 1938

Jim Crow laws were a product of the solidly Democratic South. Conservative white Southern Democrats, exploiting racial fear, attacking the corruption (real or perceived) of Reconstruction Republican governments, and suppressing the black vote by violence and intimidation, took over state governments in the South in the 1870s and essentially dominated them for nearly 100 years. They disfranchised most blacks through voter registration laws and new constitutions by the end of the nineteenth century. In 1956, Southern resistance to the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education resulted in a resolution called the Southern Manifesto. It was read into the Congressional Record and supported by 96 Southern Congressmen and senators, all but two of them Southern Democrats.

African-American life
The Jim Crow laws and the high rate of lynchings in the South were major factors in the Great Migration during the first half of the 20th century. Because opportunities were so limited in the South, African Americans moved in great numbers to northern cities to seek better lives, becoming an urbanized population. Despite the hardship and prejudice of the Jim Crow era, several black entertainers and literary figures gained broad popularity with white audiences in the early 20th century. They included luminaries such as An African-American man drinking at a tap dancers Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and the Nicholas Brothers, jazz "colored" drinking fountain in a streetcar terminal musicians such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie, and the actress in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1939 Hattie McDaniel (in 1939 she was the first black to receive an Academy Award when she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as Mammy in Gone with the Wind). African-American athletes faced much discrimination during the Jim Crow period. White opposition led to their exclusion from most organized sporting competition. The boxers Jack Johnson and Joe Louis (both of whom became world heavyweight boxing champions) and track and field athlete Jesse Owens (who won four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin) earned fame during this era. In baseball, a color line instituted in the 1880s had informally barred blacks from playing in the major leagues, leading to the development of the Negro Leagues, which featured many fine players. A major breakthrough occurred in 1947, when Jackie Robinson was hired as the first African American to play in Major League Baseball; he permanently broke the color bar. Baseball teams continued to integrate in the following years, leading to the full participation of black baseball players in the Major Leagues in the 1960s.

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Remembrance
Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, houses the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, an extensive collection of everyday items that promoted racial segregation or presented racial stereotypes of African Americans, for the purpose of academic research and education about their cultural influence.[25]

Examples
Examples of Jim Crow laws are shown at the National Park Service website.[26] The examples include anti-miscegenation laws. Although sometimes counted among "Jim Crow laws" of the South, such laws were also passed by other states. Anti-miscegenation laws were not repealed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964[1] but were declared unconstitutional by the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia.

Footnotes
[1] Civil Rights Act of 1964 (http:/ / finduslaw. com/ civil_rights_act_of_1964_cra_title_vii_equal_employment_opportunities_42_us_code_chapter_21) [2] Craigie, William A., Sir, and Hulbert, James R., eds. A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, 4 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19381944. [3] Woodward, C. Vann and McFeely, William S. (2001), The Strange Career of Jim Crow. p. 7 [4] "Louisiana's 'Jim Crow' Law Valid" (http:/ / query. nytimes. com/ gst/ abstract. html?res=9E05EEDB1F31E033A25752C2A9649D94639ED7CF& scp=1& sq=jim+ crow+ December+ 21,+ 1892& st=p). The New York Times (New York). December 21, 1892. ISSN0362-4331. . Retrieved February 6, 2011. "New Orleans, Dec 20. The Supreme Court yesterday declared constitutional the law passed two years ago and known as the 'Jim Crow' law, making it compulsory on railroads to provide separate cars for blacks." [5] Woodward, C. Vann and McFeely, William S. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 2001, p.6 [6] Michael Perman.Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 18881908. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001, Introduction [7] J. Morgan Kousser.The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974 [8] Glenn Feldman, The Disfranchisement Myth: Poor Whites and Suffrage Restriction in Alabama, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004, pp.135136 [9] Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", 2000, pp.12, 27 (http:/ / papers. ssrn. com/ sol3/ papers. cfm?abstract_id=224731) Retrieved Mar 10, 2008 [10] Holt, Thomas (1979). Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. [11] Tomlins, Christopher L. The United States Supreme Court: The Pursuit of Justice. 2005, p.195 [12] King, Desmond. Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the US Federal Government. 1995, page 3. [13] Schulte Nordholt, J. W. and Rowen, Herbert H. Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace. 1991, pp.99100. [14] Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. page 911 [15] Gates, Henry Louis and Appiah, Anthony. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. 1999, p. 1211. [16] Murphy, Edgar Gardner. The Problems of the Present South. 1910, p. 37 [17] https:/ / supreme. justia. com/ us/ 347/ 483/ case. html [18] "Full text of Korematsu v. United States opinion" (http:/ / caselaw. lp. findlaw. com/ scripts/ getcase. pl?court=us& vol=323& invol=214). findlaw.com. . [19] Steele v. Louisville, full text of the opinion courtesy of Findlaw.com. (http:/ / caselaw. lp. findlaw. com/ cgi-bin/ getcase. pl?court=us& vol=323& invol=192) [20] https:/ / supreme. justia. com/ us/ 388/ 1/ case. html [21] Lopez, Ian F. Haney (February 1, 2007), "A nation of minorities: race, ethnicity, and reactionary colorblindness" (http:/ / www. accessmylibrary. com/ coms2/ summary_0286-30274716_ITM), Stanford Law Review [22] "LBJ for Kids Civil rights during the Johnson Administration" (http:/ / www. lbjlib. utexas. edu/ johnson/ lbjforkids/ civil_timeline. shtm). University of Texas. . [23] See generally, Lopez, Ian F. Haney (February 1, 2007). "A nation of minorities: race, ethnicity, and reactionary colorblindness" (http:/ / www. accessmylibrary. com/ coms2/ summary_0286-30274716_ITM). Stanford Law Review. . [24] "Introduction To Federal Voting Rights Laws" (http:/ / www. usdoj. gov/ crt/ voting/ intro/ intro_b. htm). United States Department of Justice. [25] Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University, Detroit Free Press (http:/ / www. ferris. edu/ jimcrow/ links/ newslist/ freep/ )

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[26] "Jim Crow Laws" (http:/ / www. nps. gov/ malu/ forteachers/ jim_crow_laws. htm). nps.gov. . Retrieved November 17, 2010.

Further reading
Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Barnes, Catherine A. Journey from Jim Crow: The Desegregation of Southern Transit. New York:Columbia University Press, 1983. Bartley, Numan V. The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950s. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Bond, Horace Mann. "The Extent and Character of Separate Schools in the United States." Journal of Negro Education vol. 4 (July 1935), pp. 321327. Chin, Gabriel, and Karthikeyan, Hrishi. Preserving Racial Identity: Population Patterns and the Application of Anti-Miscegenation Statutes to Asians, 1910 to 1950, 9 Asian L.J. 1 (2002) (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/ papers.cfm?abstract_id=283998&high= Gabriel CHin) Campbell, Nedra. More Justice, More Peace: The Black Person's Guide to the American Legal System. Lawrence Hill Books; Chicago Review Press, 2003. Dailey, Jane; Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth and Simon, Bryant, eds. Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (2000). Delany, Sarah; Delany, A. Elizabeth; and Hearth, Amy Hill. Having Our Say; The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years. Thorndike, ME: G.K. Hall & Co., 1993. Fairclough, Adam. "Being in the Field of Education and Also Being a NegroSeemsTragic: Black Teachers in the Jim Crow South." Journal of American History vol. 87 (June 2000), pp. 6591. Feldman, Glenn. Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 19151949. University of Alabama Press, 1999. Harvey Fireside, Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision That Legalized Racism, 2004. ISBN 0-7867-1293-7 Foner, Eric. Reconstruction, America's Unfinished Revolution, 18631877: America's Unfinished Revolution, 18631877. New York: Harpercollins, 1988. Gaines, Kevin. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Gaston, Paul M. The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Gender and Jim Crow Women and the Politics... in North Carolina, 18961920 (1996) Griffin, John Howard Black Like Me. New York: Signet, 1996. Haws, Robert, ed. The Age of Segregation: Race Relations in the South, 18901945 University Press of Mississippi, 1978. Hackney, Sheldon. Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (1969) Johnson, Charles S. Patterns of Negro Segregation Harper and Brothers, 1943. Klarman, Michael J. From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004 Litwack, Leon F.. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Alfred A. Knopf: 1998. Lopez, Ian F. Haney. "A nation of minorities": race, ethnicity, and reactionary colorblindness (http://www. accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-30274716_ITM). Stanford Law Review, February 1, 2007. Kantrowitz, Stephen. Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (2000) McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Medley, Keith Weldon. We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson. Pelican. March, 2003.

Jim Crow laws Murray, Pauli. States' Law on Race and Color. University of Georgia Press. 2d ed. 1997 (Davison Douglas ed.). ISBN 978-0-8203-1883-7 Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Row, 1944. Newby, I.A. Jim Crow's Defense: Anti-Negro Thought in America, 1900-1930. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1965. Percy, William Alexander. Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son. 1941. Reprint, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Rabinowitz, Howard N. Race Relations in the Urban South, 18561890 (1978) Smith, J. Douglas. Managing: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Smith, J. Douglas. "The Campaign for Racial Purity and the Erosion of Paternalism in Virginia, 19221930: "Nominally White, Biologically Mixed, and Legally Negro." Journal of Southern History vol. 68 (February 2002), pp. 65106. Smith, J. Douglas. "Patrolling the Boundaries of Race: Motion Picture Censorship and Jim Crow in Virginia, 19221932." Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 21 (August 2001): 27391. Sterner, Richard. The Negro's Share (1943) detailed statistics Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 1955. Woodward, C. Vann. The Origins of the New South: 18771913 (1951).

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External links
The History of Jim Crow (http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/history.htm), Ronald L. F. Davis A series of essays on the history of Jim Crow. Archive copy (http://web.archive.org/*/http://www.jimcrowhistory. org/history/history.htm) at the Wayback Machine Creating Jim Crow (http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/creating2.htm) Origins of the term and system of laws. Archive copy (http://web.archive.org/*/http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/ creating2.htm) at the Wayback Machine Racial Etiquette: The Racial Customs and Rules of Racial Behavior in Jim Crow America (http://www. jimcrowhistory.org/resources/lessonplans/hs_es_etiquette.htm) The basics of Jim Crow etiquette. Archive copy (http://web.archive.org/*/http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/resources/lessonplans/hs_es_etiquette. htm) at the Wayback Machine "You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow!" (http://www.robinwashington.com/jimcrow/1_home.html) PBS documentary on first Freedom Ride, in 1947. Archive copy (http://web.archive.org/*/http://www. robinwashington.com/jimcrow/1_home.html) at the Wayback Machine List of laws enacted in various states (http://afroamhistory.about.com/cs/jimcrowlaws/a/jimcrowlaws.htm) Ferris University page (http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/what.htm) about Jim Crow on Antisemitism Interview with David Pilgrim, founder of Jim Crow Museum (http://www.ushmm.org/ museum/exhibit/focus/antisemitism/voices/transcript/?content=20090423''Voices) from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Jim Crow Era, History in the Key of Jazz (http://www.pbs.org/jazz/time/time_jim_crow.htm), Gerald Early, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri (esp. see section "Jim Crow is Born")

Plessy v. Ferguson

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Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson

Supreme Court of the United States Argued April 13, 1896 Decided May 18, 1896 Full case name Citations Homer A. Plessy v. Ferguson [1] 163 U.S. 537 (more) 16 S. Ct. 1138; 41 L. Ed. 256; 1896 U.S. LEXIS 3390 Ex parte Plessy, 11 So. 948 (La. 1892) None Holding The "separate but equal" provision of private services mandated by state government is constitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. Court membership Case opinions Majority Dissent Brown, joined by Fuller, Field, Gray, Shiras, White, Peckham Harlan Brewer took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. Laws applied U.S. Const. amend. XIV; 1890 La. Acts 152 Overruled by Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 [17] (1954) [2]

Prior history Subsequent history

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but equal."[3] The decision was handed down by a vote of 7 to 1 with the majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown and the dissent written by Justice John Marshall Harlan. "Separate but equal" remained standard doctrine in U.S. law until its repudiation in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.[4] After the Supreme Court ruling, the New Orleans Comit des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens), which had brought the suit and arranged for Homer Plessy's arrest in order to challenge Louisiana's segregation law, replied, We, as freemen, still believe that we were right and our cause is sacred.[5]

Plessy v. Ferguson

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The Case
In 1890, the state of Louisiana passed a law (the "Separate Car Act") that required separate accommodations for blacks and whites on railroads, including separate railway cars.[6] Concerned, a group of prominent black, creole, and white New Orleans residents formed the Comit des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens) dedicated to repeal the law.[5] They eventually persuaded Homer Plessy to participate in an orchestrated test case. Plessy was born a free man and was an "octoroon" (someone of seven-eighths Caucasian descent and one-eighth African descent). However, under Louisiana law, he was classified as black, and thus required to sit in the "colored" car.[7] On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first class ticket at the Press Street Depot and boarded a "whites only" car of the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans, Louisiana, bound for Covington, Louisiana.[8] The railroad company, which opposed the law on the grounds that it would require the purchase of more railcars, had been informed already as to Plessy's racial lineage.[9] Additionally, the committee hired a private detective with arrest powers to detain Plessy, to ensure he was charged for violating the Separate Car Act, as opposed to a vagrancy or some other offense.[9] After Plessy had taken a seat in the whites-only railway car, he was asked to vacate it and sit instead in the blacks-only car. Plessy refused and was arrested immediately by the detective.[10] As planned, the train was stopped and Plessy was taken off the train at Press and Royal streets.[9] Plessy was remanded for trial in Orleans Parish. In his case, Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana, Plessy argued that the state law which required East Louisiana Railroad to segregate trains had denied him his rights under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution.[11] However, the judge presiding over his case, John Howard Ferguson, ruled that Louisiana had the right to regulate railroad companies as long as they operated within state boundaries. Plessy was convicted and sentenced to pay a $25 fine. He immediately sought a writ of prohibition. The Committee of Citizens took Plessy's appeal to the Supreme Court of Louisiana, where he again found an unreceptive ear, as the state Supreme Court upheld Judge Ferguson's ruling.[9] Undaunted, the Committee appealed to the United States Supreme Court in 1896.[12]Two legal briefs were submitted on Plessy's behalf. One was signed by Albion W. Tourge and James C. Walker and the other by Samuel F. Phillips and his legal partner F. D. McKenney. Oral arguments were held before the Supreme Court on April 13, 1896. Tourge and Phillips appeared in the courtroom to speak on behalf of Plessy. Tourge built his case upon violations of Plessy's rights under the Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees the same rights to all citizens of the United States, and the equal protection of those rights, against the deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Tourgee argued that the reputation of being a black man was "property," which, by the law, implied the inferiority of African-Americans as compared to whites.[13]
Marker placed at Press and Royal Streets on February 12, 2009 commemorating the arrest of Homer Plessy on June 7, 1892 for violating the Louisiana 1890 Separate Car Act.

The Decision
In a 7 to 1 decision handed down on May 18, 1896 (Justice David Josiah Brewer did not participate because of the death of his daughter),[14] the Court rejected Plessy's arguments based on the Fourteenth Amendment, seeing no way in which the Louisiana statute violated it.[9] In addition, the majority of the Court rejected the view that the Louisiana law implied any inferiority of blacks, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, it contended that the law separated the two races as a matter of public policy.[15]

Plessy v. Ferguson When summarizing, Justice Brown declared, "We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it."[16] While the Court did not find a difference in quality between the whites-only and blacks-only railway cars, this was manifestly untrue in the case of most other separate facilities, such as public toilets, cafs, and public schools, where the facilities designated for blacks were poorer than those designated for whites.[17] Justice John Marshall Harlan, who decried the excesses of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote a scathing dissent in which he predicted the court's decision would become as infamous as that of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). As heralded as this dissent may be, in which Harlan called for a "color-blind" constitution, it should be noted that he did not view all races as equal. In his dissent, Harlan highlighted the plight of blacks by pointing out that the Chinese, a race he viewed as inferior, could still ride with whites. "There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race," he wrote.[18] New Orleans historian Keith Weldon Medley, author of We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson, The Fight Against Legal Segregation, said the words in Justice Harlan's "Great Dissent" originated with papers filed with the court by "The Citizens Committee."[19] The case helped cement the legal foundation for the doctrine of separate but equal, the idea that segregation based on classifications was legal as long as facilities were of equal quality. However, Southern state governments refused to provide blacks with genuinely equal facilities and resources in the years after the Plessy decision. The states not only separated races but, in actuality, ensured differences in quality. In January 1897, Homer Plessy pleaded guilty to the violation and paid the fine.[9]

13

Influence of Plessy v. Ferguson

Plessy legitimized the move toward segregation practices begun earlier in the South and provided an impetus for further segregation laws. Legislative achievements won during the Reconstruction Era were erased through means of the "separate but equal" doctrine.[20] The doctrine was further justified by a previous Supreme Court decision in 1875, which limited the federal government's ability to intervene in state affairs, only guaranteeing Congress the power to restrain states from acts of racial discrimination and segregation."[21] The ruling basically granted states legislative immunity when dealing with questions of race, guaranteeing the states right to implement racially separate institutions requiring them only to be equal.[22] The prospect of greater state influence in matters of race worried numerous advocates of civil equalities including Supreme Court justice John Harlan who wrote in his dissent of the Plessy decision, we shall enter upon an era of constitutional law, when the rights of freedom and American citizenship cannot receive from the nation that efficient protection which heretofore was unhesitatingly accorded to slavery and the rights of the master."[23] Harlans concerns about the entrenchment on the 14th Amendment would prove well founded as states benefited to institute segregation based law that would become popularized as the Jim Crow system.[24] The effect was immediate as noted through significant racial differences in educational funding emerging in the late 1890s that would prove enormous by the 20th century. States which had previously successfully integrated elements of their society abruptly adopted oppressive legislation that erased reconstruction era efforts.[25] Jim Crow laws would spread northward in response to a second wave of African American immigration and would eventually extend to segregated educational facilities, separate public institutions such as hotels and restaurants, separate beaches among other public facilities, restrictions on interracial marriage among numerous other facets of daily life.[25] Unfortunately, the separate facilities and institutions accorded to the African American community were consistently inferior[26] to those provided to the White community and contradicted the vague declaration of separate but equal institutions issued after the Plessy decision.[27]

Plessy v. Ferguson Jim Crow legislation related to voting would quietly disenfranchise the Southern African American by requiring of prospective voters proof of land ownership or literacy tests at poll stations. Black community leaders who had achieved brief political success during the Reconstruction era lost any gains made when their voters disappeared. Historian Rogers Smith noted on the subject lawmakers frequently admitted, indeed boasted, that such measures as complex registration rules, literacy and property tests, poll taxes, white primaries, and grandfather clauses were designed to produce an electorate confined to a white race that declared itself supreme, notably rejecting the 14th and 15th Amendments to the American Constitution.[28] The separate but equal doctrine would characterize American society until the doctrine was ultimately overturned during the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.[29]

14

Plessy and Ferguson Foundation

Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson, descendants of the players on both sides of the Supreme Court case, have announced the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation for Education and Reconciliation. The foundation will work to create new ways to teach the history of civil rights through film, art, and public programs designed to create understanding of this historic case and its effect on the American conscience.[30]

Plaque at railyard site

Front of plaque

Back of plaque

Historians gathered with the Plessy and Ferguson families and a member of the Louisiana Supreme Court in New Orleans on February 12, 2009, to unveil a historical marker recalling the case.[9] "It is no longer Plessy v Ferguson. It is Plessy and Ferguson," said Keith Plessy in a Public Broadcasting radio interview[31]. The marker was placed on the corner of Press and Royal Streets, near the location of the former railway station where Plessy had boarded his train.[31]

Plessy v. Ferguson

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References
[1] https:/ / supreme. justia. com/ us/ 163/ 537/ case. html [2] http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=U4I7AAAAIAAJ& printsec=titlepage#PPA948 [3] Groves, Harry E. "Separate but Equal--The Doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson." Phylon (1940-1956). 12. no. 1 (1st Qtr., 1951): 66-72. http:/ / www. jstor. org/ stable/ 272323 [4] Encyclopedia of American Studies, s.v. "Plessy v. Ferguson" http:/ / www. credoreference. com/ entry/ jhueas/ plessy_v_ferguson [5] Medley, Keith Weldon (2003). We As Freeman: Plessy v. Ferguson: The Fight Against Legal Segregation (http:/ / pelicanpub. com/ proddetail. asp?prod=1589801202). Pelican Publishing Company. ISBN978-1-58980-120-2. . [6] Encyclopedia of American Studies, s.v. "Plessy v. Ferguson" http:/ / www. credoreference. com/ entry/ jhueas/ plessy_v_ferguson [7] Koffi N, Maglo. "GENOMICS AND THE CONUNDRUM OF RACE: some epistemic and ethical considerations" (https:/ / envoy. lcc. edu/ login?url=http:/ / envoy. lcc. edu:2880/ ?url=http:/ / envoy. lcc. edu:2880/ docview/ 733078852?accountid=1599). Johns Hopkins University Press. . Retrieved 4 October 2011. [8] "Plessy v. Ferguson (No. 210)" (http:/ / www. law. cornell. edu/ supct/ html/ historics/ USSC_CR_0163_0537_ZS. html). Legal Information Institute. . Retrieved 4 October 2011. [9] Katy Reckdahl (2009-02-11). "Plessy and Ferguson unveil plaque today marking their ancestors' actions" (http:/ / www. nola. com/ news/ index. ssf/ 2009/ 02/ plessy_vs_ferguson_photo. html). The Times-Picayune. . [10] "Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)" (http:/ / www. pbs. org/ wnet/ supremecourt/ antebellum/ landmark_plessy. html). PBS. . Retrieved 4 October 2011. [11] Maidment, Richard A. "Plessy v. Ferguson Re-Examined." Journal of American Studies. 7. no. 2 (August 1973): 125-132. http:/ / www. jstor. org/ stable/ 27553056 [12] Maidment, Richard A. "Plessy v. Ferguson Re-Examined." Journal of American Studies. 7. no. 2 (August 1973): 125-132. http:/ / www. jstor. org/ stable/ 27553056 [13] Gordon, Milton M. "Enforcing Racial Segregation: It is Viewed As Violating the Rights of All Americans." New York Times (1923-Current File) http:/ / www. proquest. com/ [14] Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) (full text in one web page) (http:/ / caselaw. lp. findlaw. com/ scripts/ getcase. pl?court=US& vol=163& invol=537) [15] Bishop, David W. "Plessy v. Ferguson: A Reinterpretation." The Journal of Negro History. 62. no. 2 (April 1977): 125-133. http:/ / www. jstor. org/ stable/ 2717173 [16] http:/ / supreme. justia. com/ cases/ federal/ us/ 163/ 537/ case. html [17] Fireside, Harvey. Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision That Legalized Racism. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004. [18] http:/ / www. bgsu. edu/ departments/ acs/ 1890s/ plessy/ dissent. html [19] "Civil rights pioneer celebrated with marker" (http:/ / www. wwltv. com/ video/ news-index. html?nvid=330530) (Flash). 2009-02-10. . [20] Sutherland, Arthur E. "Segregation and the Supreme Court." The Atlantic Monthly, July 1954. http:/ / www. theatlantic. com/ magazine/ archive/ 1954/ 07/ segregation-and-the-supreme-court/ 6055 [21] Oldfield, John. 2004. "STATE POLITICS, RAILROADS, AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN SOUTH CAROLINA, 188389." American Nineteenth Century History 5, no. 2: 7191. America: History & Life, EBSCOhost (accessed February 1, 2010). [22] Smithsonian National Museum of American History Behring Center, "Separate But Equal: The Law of the Land." http:/ / www. americanhistory. si. edu/ brown/ history/ 1-segregated/ separate-but-equal. html [23] Oldfield, John. 2004. "STATE POLITICS, RAILROADS, AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN SOUTH CAROLINA, 188389." American Nineteenth Century History 5, no. 2: 7191. America: History & Life, EBSCOhost (accessed February 1, 2010 [24] Krock, Arthur. "In the Nation: An Historic Day in the Supreme Court Mr.Vinson Sets a Limit Facts Weighed Minutely." New York Times (1923-Current File). June 6, 1950, http:/ / www. proquest. com/ [25] Klarman, Michael J., From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press USA, 2004), http:/ / 0-lib. myilibrary. com. mercury. concordia. ca/ Browse/ open. asp?ID=56001& loc=19 (1 February 2010) [26] White, Walter. "Decision in Plessy Case." New York Times (1923-Current File), March 10, 1954, http:/ / www. proquest. com/ [27] Darden, Gary Helm. 2009. "The New Empire in the 'New South': Jim Crow in the Global Frontier of High Imperialism and Decolonization." Southern Quarterly 46, no. 3: 825. America: History & Life, EBSCOhost (accessed February 1, 2010). [28] McWilliams, Wilson Carey. 1999. "ON ROGERS SMITH'S 'CIVIC IDEALS'." Studies in American Political Development 13, no. 1: 216229. America: History & Life, EBSCOhost (accessed February 1, 2010). [29] "Our Radical Activist Supreme Court?" The Economist, September 14, 2009, http:/ / www. economist. org/ blogs/ democracyinamerica/ 2009/ 09/ our_radical_activist_supreme_c [30] "A Celebration of Progress: Unveiling the long-awaited historical marker for the arrest site of Homer Plessy" (http:/ / www. nocca. com/ newsevents/ newsletter. php?newsletter_ID=188). . [31] Eve Abrams (2009-02-12). "Plessy/Ferguson plaque dedicated" (http:/ / www. publicbroadcasting. net/ wwno/ news. newsmain?action=article& ARTICLE_ID=1468970). .

Plessy v. Ferguson

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Further reading
Thomas, Brook (1997). Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford Books. ISBN978-0-312-14997-0. Chin, Gabriel J. (1996). "The Plessy Myth: Justice Harlan and the Chinese Cases". Iowa Law Review 82: 151. SSRN1121505. Elliott, Mark (2006). Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourge and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-518139-5. Fireside, Harvey (2004). Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision That Legalized Racism. New York: Carroll & Graf. ISBN0-7867-1293-7. Hoffer, Williamjames Hull. Plessy v. Ferguson: Race and Inequality in Jim Crow America (University Press of Kansas; 2012) 219 pages Lofgren, Charles A. (1987). The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-505684-6. Medley, Keith Weldon (2003). We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson. Gretna, LA: Pelican. ISBN1-58980-120-2. Review (http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/subpages/reviews/Medley1003.htm) Tushnet, Mark (2008). I dissent: Great Opposing Opinions in Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Boston: Beacon Press. pp.6980. ISBN978-0-8070-0036-6.

External links
Text of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) is available from: Justia (http://supreme.justia.com/us/163/ 537/case.html) Findlaw (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US& vol=163&page=537) LII (http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0163_0537_ZS. html) Text of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) is available from: Justia (http://supreme. justia.com/us/347/483/case.html) Findlaw (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase. pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=347&page=483) LII (http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct-cgi/ get-us-cite?347+483) Case Brief for Plessy v. Ferguson (http://www.lawnix.com/cases/plessy-ferguson.html) at Lawnix.com

The New Jim Crow

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The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Author(s) Publisher Publication date ISBN Dewey Decimal LC Classification Michelle Alexander The New Press 2010 978-1-59558-643-8 364.973 HV9950 .A437

The New Jim Crow (complete title The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness) is a 2010 book published by The New Press and a name given to a category of race-related social and political phenomena in the United States by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. Alexander deals in the book primarily with the issue of the current mass levels of incarceration (the United States, with 5% of the world's population, has 25% of the world's prisoners)[1] and other means of societal suppression of African-American men (Latino men to a lesser degree), and the social consequences of the policies described, for the "people of color" and for the country as a whole.[2] According to Alexander, the majority of young black men in large American cities are "warehoused in prisons" (their labor no longer needed in the globalized economy) or, after having criminal records and labeled as "felons", are permanently trapped in a second-class status. The conventional point of view holds that discrimination has mostly ended with the Civil rights movement reforms of the 1960s. However, the U.S. criminal justice system uses the War on Drugs as its primary tool in the continuation of many of the traditional and new forms of discrimination.[2] In an article addressing the status of contemporary African Americans, Alexander said, "The clock has been turned back on racial progress in America, though scarcely anyone seems to notice. All eyes are fixed on people like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey who have defied the odds and achieved great power, wealth and fame".[3] Alexander sees the masses of ordinary African Americans as being relegated to the status of a "racial caste", even though the official approach to dealing with the minorities has been redesigned, to avoid explicit use of racial attributes. According to Alexander, the forms of "racial control" evolve as required by changing political circumstances and contemporary standards, with the current "criminal justice" activities replacing the Jim Crow laws, which in turn had replaced slavery. Michelle Alexander aims to mobilize the civil rights community to move the incarceration issue to the forefront of its agenda and to provide factual information, data, arguments and reference for those interested in pursuing the issue. Her broader goal is the revamping of the prevailing mentality regarding human rights, equality and equal opportunities in America, to prevent future cyclical recurrence of racial control under changing disguise.[2]

The New Jim Crow

18

Overview
According to the author, what has been altered since the collapse of Jim Crow is not so much the basic structure of the society, as the language used to justify its affairs. People of color are classified as "criminals", which allows the unleashing of a whole range of legal discrimination measures (in employment, housing, education, public benefits, voting rights, jury duty etc.).[4] Michelle Alexander explains how it took her years to become fully aware and convinced of the phenomena she describes, despite her professional civil rights background; she expects similar reluctance and disbelief on the part of many of her readers. She found the problems besetting African American communities to be not merely a passive and collateral function of factors such as poverty or lack of educational opportunity, but a consequence of actively and purposely pursued government policies, for example the three strikes laws. Alexander came to recognize the mass incarceration policies, which were swiftly developed and implemented, as a "comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow".[5] The "War on Drugs", presented later by the media as the authorities' response to the crack cocaine crisis in black ghettos, was officially announced by the government of Ronald Reagan in 1982. Crack cocaine emerged in inner city neighborhoods beginning in 1985/1986 and the problem was highly publicized by the Reagan administration in order to generate support for the drug war.[6] The extraordinarily successful media campaign made the enormous expansion of the law enforcement anti-crack activities possible. The intensity of the government assault caused many in the black community to believe in conspiracy theories and speculate about genocidal government plans to destroy the black people in the USA. In 1998 the CIA admitted that the faction supported by the US in its covert war in Nicaragua was involved in smuggling illegal drugs into the USA. Efforts to uncover those activities were blocked.[7][8] The "War on Drugs" has had a devastating impact on the African American communities, on a scale entirely out of proportion with the actual dimensions of criminal activity taking place within these communities. In less than three decades the US prison population exploded from 300,000 to more than two million (majority of the conviction increase for drug violations),[9] resulting in the world's highest incarceration rate, exceeding the rates of a number of regimes strongly criticized by the US government as highly repressive. It is eight times the incarceration rate in Germany, a comparatively developed large democracy.[10] The USA is unparalleled in the world in concentrating its penal activities on its racial/ethnic minorities. In the capital city of Washington, D.C. three out of four young African American males are expected to serve time in prison.[11] While studies show Americans of different races using illegal drugs quantitatively on a similar scale,[12] in some states black men have been admitted to prisons on drug charges at the rate twenty to fifty times that of white men.[13] The high proportion of African American men with criminal record of some sort (as many as 80% in major cities) are marginalized and a part of the growing permanent undercaste.[14][15] While historically crime and punishment intensities have often been poorly correlated, the scale and lack of balance of the present USA criminal justice activity and penal system have turned it, according to Alexander, into a system of social control unparalleled in world history. Its targets can be defined largely by race. The rate of incarceration in the US has soared, while its crime rates have generally not been higher than those in other western countries, where the incarceration rates accordingly have remained stable. The current rate of incarceration in the USA, six to ten times greater than in other industrialized nations, is therefore not related to the actual rates of crime or their increase, but can be traced to a great extent to the artificially invoked "War on Drugs" discriminatory policies.[16] In 1973 the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals of the Justice Department stated that there is overwhelming evidence that prisons and jails create crime rather than prevent it, and recommended no further construction of adult facilities, combined with elimination of the existing juvenile centers.[17] Actual developments went in the exactly opposite direction, as the USA embarked on an unprecedented in human history expansion of its prison system.[18][19]

The New Jim Crow The civil rights community has been reluctant to get involved in this issue, concentrating first of all on protecting the threatened affirmative action gains, that is the access of their best and brightest to the nation's top universities. At the other end of the African American social spectrum is the one third of all black young men, who are under active control of the criminal justice system, currently in jail, on probation or on parole. Criminal justice was not on the list of top priorities of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in 2007 and 2008 or of the Congressional Black Caucus in 2009. NAACP and ACLU have been involved in legal action and grassroots campaigns have been organized, but Alexander feels that generally there is a lack of appreciation of the enormity of the crisis. According to her, mass incarceration is "the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement", and those who feel that the election of Barack Obama represents the ultimate "triumph over race" ("the widespread belief that race no longer matters") are dangerously misguided.[20] The persistent racial inequality, which has created what Alexander considers a rigid caste system, is hidden from view, invisible within a maze of rationalizations. Mass incarceration is its most salient manifestation. Alexander employs the racial caste term to denote a "stigmatized racial group locked into inferior position by law and custom", as it is commonly used in scientific literature. By "mass incarceration" she means the criminal justice system together with the larger web of laws, rules, policies and customs, racial stigmatization and permanent marginalization, to which it serves as a gateway. The members of the new undercaste, once released from prison, face a "hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social exclusion". Americans are, says Alexander, ashamed of our racial history, and therefore avoid talking about race, or even class, and the terms used here to many will seem strangely unfamiliar. Americans want to believe that everybody is in principle and practically capable of upward mobility, given enough effort on his or her part; this assumption forms a part of the national collective self-image. African Americans are prevented from joining this mobility process by law and the resulting institutional discrimination. The ostensibly colorblind system produces the undercaste, defined largely by race and forming a huge percentage of African Americans. The existence of this system is not disproved by the election of Barack Obama and other African American exceptional achievement, but to the contrary, it depends on such factors. It does not require overt racial hostility or bigotry, indifference serves its purpose. The New Jim Crow system relies on the underlying racial ideology, will not be significantly disturbed by half-measures such as laws mandating shorter sentences, and like its predecessors has been largely immunized from legal challenge. "A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch" and it cannot be dealt with effectively without the phenomenon being recognized by a broad social consensus; at the moment such awareness is lacking. To many the problem may seem too daunting and intractable. The New Jim Crow book is intended to stimulate a much-needed national conversation "about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy in the United States".[21]

19

Summary of chapters
The New Jim Crow is divided into the Introduction, which provides an overview of the book's themes, and six chapters.

Chapter 1: The Rebirth of Caste

Chapter 1: The Rebirth of Caste reviews the history of racial social control in the United States. It describes the changing forms and reemerging patterns of racial caste systems, and explains how the proponents of racial hierarchy have been able to ensure its reemergence after successful collapses, to a large extent by appealing to the prejudices and insecurities of lower-class whites.[22] To secure their long-term interests and establish a social alliance, slave-owning planters introduced arrangements that improved, to a limited degree, the situation of poor whites. Poor whites were offered some practical privileges, labor deals and assurances of their superior, in relation to black slaves, position; such inter-white social contract was later referred to as a "racial bribe".[23]

The New Jim Crow The original United States Constitution, while using colorblind language, sanctioned the slavery, which was the condition of the southern states for joining the Union. Those who were not free persons were defined as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of numerical apportioning of congressional representation.[24] Slavery ended with the American Civil War, which was followed first by the defeated southern states attempting to reassert their racial controls through a variety of legal measures. Then however the constructive and fundamental amendments to the Constitution and federal civil rights legislation of the Reconstruction Era were passed. As a result, while the protected by the federal authority and troops African Americans were making unprecedented political gains (in 1870 at least 15% of all southern elected officials were black), the southern states began formulating and implementing their new comprehensive policies aimed at maintaining the racial order through the separation of races. The Reconstruction's absence of land reform had prevented the southern blacks from achieving meaningful economic and lasting social progress.[25][a] The Reconstruction was followed by a white backlash and the so-called Southern Redemption, a movement that resulted in the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the federal government ceasing its enforcement activity there (1877). The former slavery states were free to impose a number of punitive legal measures. They put into common use practices such as convict leasing, tailoring the criminal justice system for the purpose of repressing the African American population.[26] In the 1880s and 1890s many southern blacks came under the influence of the conservative and radical philosophies, each offering a different path and scope for the realization of black social gains. The radical Populist Party was able to put together a formidable and unprecedented alliance of blacks and poor whites, before it succumbed to mounting political pressures and abandoned its interracial coalition efforts. The Populist attempts and successes were countered by campaigns of terror and white supremacy and by the actions of southern establishments, which adopted racially restrictive laws across many states. The new laws imposed segregation and black disenfranchisement in countless areas of economical, governmental, educational, public and social activity. This new, mature system of oppressive control and racial order, known as the Jim Crow, was fully implemented by the turn of the twentieth century. It secured the support of lower-class whites by offering them a "racial bribe" of the largely psychological, privileged (segregated from black people) status of racial supremacy and by eliminating African Americans as a viable political ally.[26] The Jim Crow system functioned undisturbed throughout the South for several decades. Gradual change arrived in the aftermath of World War II, with the first Supreme Court decisions outlawing racial segregation and exclusion in some instances. The celebrated landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954. The forced desegregation of southern schools was met with discriminatory state legislative actions and violent opposition among the white southern populace. The faltering desegregation process was however saved, as a mass grassroots Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. came into prominence and was able to reassert itself in the yearly 1960s. The determined civil rights struggle led to President John F. Kennedy's announcement in 1963 of a major new civil rights legislation being prepared. After Kennedy's death the political leadership of the civil rights federal activity was assumed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose support and determination were essential in engineering and helping to push through the Congress the two most important legislative acts, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Jim Crow was officially, and as it turned out also in practice, dismantled.[27] At that time Dr. King and others in the civil rights community were becoming increasingly conscious of and preoccupied with the economic aspect of the civil rights struggle. Widespread poverty was now the minority's greatest hardship and an obvious impediment to the attainment of equality and further social gains. The activists advocated switching emphasis in part from the political and personal rights to the war on poverty and economic empowerment, the subjects also embraced by presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The multiracial class issue of wealth redistribution and the building of interracial coalitions were seen by King as the next frontier in the "human rights movement".[27]

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The New Jim Crow The white right wing, in process of regrouping and searching for its response to the collapse of the established racial control system in America, had a different version of future in mind. Adapting to the new reality they looked for ways of rebuilding the conservative social order ("putting the vast majority of blacks back in their place"), while conforming to the formally race-neutral language and learning to live within the new limits of acceptable political discourse.[27] From the 1950s, the rhetoric of "law and order" gradually replaced the rhetoric of segregation among the right wing activists, especially politicians, who demanded tough punitive legislation and police action. During the civil rights era, the campaign of disobedience and the acts of social violence, such as the riots of 1964, were presented as newly-prevalent lawlessness that had to be dealt with harshly, but was treated with excessive lenience by liberals, including federal courts. The increasing at that time crime rate and white fears were exploited by one of the founders of the modern US conservative movement, Barry Goldwater, during his unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign. Politicians who opposed the civil rights acts, after their passage focused on "tough on crime" legislation, the calls for which became sanitized in terms of explicitly racial appeals. The law and order and tough on crime rhetoric proved appealing to working class whites, who were most directly affected by the government's desegregation measures and the resulting, often difficult, situation in urban centers and neighborhoods. The "anti-crime" campaign was to become the most successful and durable political tool and manipulation of the resurgent white right wing, and, together with the spontaneous white opposition to the social transformations that were taking place, led to a momentous and lasting to this day realignment of political forces in the United States.[28] Following the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the Democratic Party became not only the representative force of the working-class whites of the North and southern whites (who had been Democrats since the Civil War because of the Democratic Party's support for the racial policies in the South), but was also popular among the blacks, who benefited from the New Deal government policies. This broad coalition remained in force until the implementation of the Republican southern strategy, which followed the civil rights reforms and pursued a "new majority", consisting of Republican traditional support (northern upper and middle class), augmented by the now disaffected southern whites and many of the northern, traditionally Democratic whites, such as the blue-collar ethnic Catholics. Beginning with the 1968 presidential campaign, the southern strategy was pursued by Richard Nixon, who became adept in using "coded antiblack rhetoric" to advance his political career and his party's expansion. The success of the southern strategy depended on continuous maintenance of a racially polarized environment.[28] Working class whites were forced to compete on more equal bases with African Americans, suffered from the deterioration of urban neighborhoods and were susceptible to the conservative critique of the Democratic leadership as a liberal elite, out of touch with their rank-and-file. As a lasting alliance of lower class whites with the corporate and conservative establishments was being forged, the law and order presidential candidates Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968 acquired 57% of the total vote. The majority of white voters in future national elections would vote Republican. The decade that followed saw a number of issues, such as civil rights enforcement, affirmative action, busing and welfare (conservatives indirectly suggested that the blacks were refusing to work, because they preferred to live off government hand-outs) developing into intense controversies. Nixon declared illicit drugs a "public enemy number one" and declared a "war on drugs", although no specific drug enforcement policy was yet envisioned and no right wing race and social policy consensus had yet emerged.[28] The conservative revolution with the political focus in the Republican Party reached its mature stage when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. Reagan issued many implicit, but formally race-neutral appeals concerning crime, welfare, taxes and state rights and his candidacy was enthusiastically embraced by frustrated and disaffected whites; 22% of all Democrats ended up voting for him. Once elected, Reagan proceeded to fulfill his promise of enhancing the federal government's role in combating crime, which at first seemed to be no easy task, since street crime had traditionally been the area of jurisdiction and responsibility of state and local authorities. But the determination was there and the expansion of federal authority posed no difficulty for conservative politicians in this

21

The New Jim Crow case.[28] The Justice Department first announced the cutting in half of the personnel assigned to the prosecution of white-collar crimes and switching its emphasis to street crime, especially the enforcement of illegal drug policies. In October 1982, President Reagan officially declared his administration's "War on Drugs", a political move intended to facilitate the implementation of the white right wing's informal race policies that were then assuming a definitive shape, rather than to address the (quite limited at that time) public concern about drugs.[28] During the 1980s the budgets of the federal departments and agencies charged with drug enforcement (e.g. the Department of Defense antidrug allocations, Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI) were radically increased, while the drug treatment and prevention programs (National Institute on Drug Abuse, Department of Education antidrug funds) suffered corresponding deep cuts. To ensure the congressional and public support for the new policies, expansion and expenditures, the Reagan administration launched a massive media campaign to promote its "War on Drugs", and in particular to sensationalize the emergence of crack cocaine in inner city neighborhoods.[28] The heavy-handed federally-led enforcement activity came at the time of economic collapse and acute distress being experienced by the American ghetto communities. Due to globalization trends, the 1970s was the period of rapid disappearance of urban, local blue collar manufacturing jobs on which the African-American and other less skilled workers depended. The developing service economy and relocated industry often required higher technical abilities and costly commuting to better-off (typically suburban) districts of metropolitan areas. The approximate percentage of working black men in metropolitan areas that were holding industrial jobs fell from 70% in 1970 to 28% in 1987. The blacks, especially young, trapped in ghettos, typically lacking dependable transportation, were increasingly unemployed and desolate, under intense pressure to generate income by whatever means available.[28] The appearance of crack in 1985 and related violence coincided with the "War on Drugs" in full swing and provided the Republican administration authorities with an expedient target for a high intensity, sustained and highly successful media and political campaign, one that resulted in massive increases in congressional funding and in legal penalties for crack-related activities. The legal process was becoming more skewed against African American men in various respects, including disproportionally harsh penalties for crack, as opposed to powder cocaine, usage and dealing. The Congress passed the increasingly comprehensive and punitive anti-drug abuse acts in 1986 and 1988, mandating anti-narcotic participation by the U.S. military, allowing court admission of some illegally obtained evidence and widening the scope of criminal suspects sought and penalized to include also individuals not directly involved in illicit drugs (passive associates such as roommates and family members). The acts also introduced five-year jail term first-time offender minimums for simple possession and set up a racially biased system that differentially targeted the most disadvantaged and impoverished segments of the society, and, when combined with the lax or intentionally biased enforcement practices, guaranteed the disparate racial distribution of the population incarcerated or otherwise controlled by the criminal justice system.[28] George Bush Sr. played the race card during the 1988 election: The Willie Horton ad practically destroyed the candidacy of Michael Dukakis. President Bush enthusiastically continued the war on drugs and other policies of his predecessor. The white general public had embraced the race policies under the crime and drugs disguise and the formerly allied with African Americans Democrats, struggling to reclaim political control, were jumping on the "tough on crime" bandwagon; most progressives were silent on the issue. The new system of racial control, with mass incarceration as its preeminent feature, had thus become an established mainstream social reality, by the early 1990s no longer a subject of major controversy. According to the Sentencing Project, the proportion of Americans that were imprisoned was in 1991 unmatched in history of nations of the world.[28] Democrat Bill Clinton's presidency reinforced and magnified the damage inflicted on African Americans by his predecessors. He endorsed "three strikes and you're out" federal policies, signed in 1994 a crime bill of unprecedented scope and expanded the drug war beyond what was considered possible before; his policies resulted in the largest of any president's tenure increase in the number of inmates. By signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, President Clinton fulfilled his promise to "end welfare as we know it" and

22

The New Jim Crow imposed enormous further hardship on the already decimated African American communities. By the mid-1990s, no serious alternatives for dealing with the problem of the largely impoverished and marginalized minorities, beyond the "get tough" approach, were a part of mainstream political discourse and the system of "racialized social control" was firmly in place. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the New Jim Crow was operating at its full capacity, justified in race-neutral terms, but with ninety percent of those imprisoned for drug offenses in many states being a minority black or Hispanic people.[28]

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Chapter 2: The Lockdown

Chapter 2: The Lockdown describes the structure of mass incarceration, focusing on the "War on Drugs". The expanded powers and incentives of the police and the fate of the defendants that fall into the system are discussed. The arrested are typically denied meaningful legal representation, pressured into plea bargain deals and placed under extended control of the penal system, from which they have a slim chance of ever freeing themselves.[22] Between 1980 and 2000, the number of people imprisoned in the United States had increased more than five times per population unit, resulting in a historically unprecedented prison-building boom. The "War on Drugs" is the single most important culprit and the vast majority of arrests have been made for minor offenses, such as possession of small amounts of marihuana.[29] The vast expansion of police powers has been facilitated by the US Supreme Court, which has largely exempted the Drug War from the Fourth Amendments protections, the protections that up to that point had been upheld by the judiciary in a fairly stringent fashion. Justice Thurgood Marshall expressed his dismay by noticing that there is no drug exception written into the Bill of Rights, and Justice John Paul Stevens called the Supreme Court in 1991 a "loyal foot soldier in the Executive's fight against crime". Numerous other constitutionally protected civil liberties have been likewise compromised by the Supreme Court, which for example allowed forfeiture of property for unproven allegations of illegal drug activity. The new legal rules allow material self-interest (of law enforcement institutions) to interfere with law enforcement pursuits and judgement and make it relatively easy for law enforcement authorities to actively target anybody for virtually any reason they choose.[30] In the 1991 Florida v. Bostick case, the US Supreme Court overruled the Florida Supreme Court and gave its approval to "consent searches", in which individuals approached by the police supposedly give their consent to being searched. There may be no indication of criminal activity and people typically cooperate with police "requests" because of feeling intimidated. The validation of consent searches has allowed the police to conduct large scale sweeps in public places, involving individuals they arbitrarily choose, since no reasonable suspicion of criminal activity is required on the part of the police.[31] In the 1996 Ohio v. Robinette case, the US Supreme Court overruled the Ohio Supreme Court. The Ohio court wanted to require police officers using traffic stops (motorists pulled over for alleged traffic violations) as an excuse for conducting drug searches, to tell the offenders explicitly that they are free to leave the scene if they so choose, before asking for permission for the search. The state court wished to impose a limitation on the disturbing and by that time common police practice; the US Supreme Court would have none of it. Such court rulings emboldened the police to push the limits of what they could do, without much fear of adverse legal consequences.[32] The federal oversight of the "War on Drugs" is provided by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which in close cooperation with countless many state and local law enforcement agencies provides training and federal guidelines (e.g. appearance and behavioral profiles of those considered to be promising suspects). At the core of the method used to interdict people involved with illegal drugs are (high) volume sweeps, typically involving traffic stops and consent searches, targeting in practice individuals who give no particular cause for suspicion, but belong to disfavored groups.[33] Reagan Administration's announcement of the "War on Drugs" was initially met with some skepticism and resistance from conservative circles concerned with states' rights and from law enforcement agencies pursuing their current local priorities. The convincing took the form of a massive federal financial bribe: Huge cash grants and, in 1988, the

The New Jim Crow Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 and Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Grant Program[34] resulted in the proliferation of highway and localized narcotics task forces. The Pentagon became involved in militarization of police departments by delivering to local governments weaponry and equipment intended originally for the defense of the country. By the late 1990s, in the context of the "War on Drugs", most police forces across the nation had taken advantage of the resources offered by the federal government and had added a significant military component to their operation.[35] The implementation of military tactics in urban centers has most often taken the form of paramilitary SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) units. SWAT teams had been (rarely) utilized from the 1960s for high-profile emergencies, such as hostage situations and hijackings, and later to combat terrorism. From the 1980s many SWAT teams were formed with federal help in localities, to be used primarily and with increasing frequency for serving drug warrants on suspected drug dealers. The SWAT raids, often ruthlessly carried out in minority communities, became very common (40,000 deployments in 2001) and resulted in many unwarranted and unjustified fatalities, trauma and other damage. The transformation from community to military policing began with the passing by the Congress in 1981 of the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act; the act authorized police forces of several different types to access a variety of military facilities and resources, for the purported purpose of drug interdiction. Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton enthusiastically continued the drug policies of the Reagan administration. The size of federal disbursements to the police of a given locality was linked to the number Drug War arrests made there.[36] The Congressional Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 was amended by the Comprehensive Forfeiture Act of 1984 (part of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984). The new law allowed federal law enforcement agencies to retain and use proceeds from drug operations forfeitures, while state and local police agencies were allowed to keep up to 80% of the total value of confiscated assets. The broadly interpreted federal forfeiture laws gave police departments a pecuniary interest, and therefore another powerful incentive, to aggressively wage the "War on Drugs". The rules of the War (or their absence) were increasingly skewed against the suspected or accused, most of whom lacked the resources to legally defend themselves or "buy their freedom". The result was a large-scale confinement of persons whose role in the drug enterprise had been marginal.[37] Some of the abuse that had taken place when assets were seized by the police became well-publicized and led to the passage of the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000, in which the Congress addressed some of the most egregious issues, leaving however the system of financial incentives for the police intact. The political and cultural aspects of the "War on Drugs" were not dealt with, and as a result the system is now well-entrenched and fully institutionalized, with funding provided on all levels, from federal to local. Barack Obama stated in 2008 that reviving the Byrne grant program was "critical to creating the anti-drug task forces our communities need".[38] Indigent criminal defendants are most often not provided with meaningful legal representation (to which they are in theory entitled) and their cases very rarely go to trial. Threatened with severe mandatory sentences, they are, in nearly all instances, pressured into plea bargain deals, which in practice place them under permanent control of the criminal justice system.[b][c] In its 2004 report the American Bar Association stated that countless poor people accused of crimes are in reality denied access to a lawyer. Minors are routinely manipulated to waive their right to counsel.[39] With the Congressional Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, disproportionately long mandatory minimum prison terms were imposed for low-level dealing and possession of crack cocaine. State assemblies quickly joined the trend with similar harsh legislation, introducing also "three strikes" laws that mandated a life sentence for a third felony offense of any kind. The draconian mandatory penalties, entirely out of step with the practice abroad in developed countries, eliminated judicial discretion and made the prosecutors, not judges or juries, the most powerful parties in the criminal legal process. The severity of charges filed against the defendant and the plea bargain process, as well as the deals made as its outcome, are at the prosecutor's discretion. The possible disastrous consequences of choosing a trial

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The New Jim Crow compel many accused, who lack legal experience or judgement, to plead guilty and opt for a deal offered, regardless of whether they committed the crime or not.[40] The majority of the Supreme Court justices have consistently upheld the constitutionality and practice of harsh mandatory sentencing, for example in the 1991 Harmelin v. Michigan case. California's three strikes law was upheld in the 2003 Lockyer v. Andrade, where a sentence of fifty years without parole for minor theft was declared valid. According to the Court, the Eight Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment does not apply in such cases. Heavy mandatory penalties have been most often invoked in nonviolent cases, against low-level drug offenders.[41] The huge rise of the US prison population has been caused by the "tough on crime" laws and policies, not by increasing crime rates. Individuals labeled or branded "felons", whether actually serving jail time, or managed by the criminal justice system in other ways (as happens in the majority of cases), are, because of the myriad legally mandated restrictions and discrimination and the associated stigma, unable to reenter the mainstream society and tend to be rearrested. A violation of a parole condition is a leading case of imprisonment. The members of the marginalized felon population "undercaste" end up cycling in and out of penal confinement, sometimes for the rest of their lives.[42]

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Chapter 3: The Color of Justice

Chapter 3: The Color of Justice analyzes the ways in which the formally race-neutral criminal justice system ends up producing disproportionately large numbers of "black and brown men" within its domain. Of crucial importance has been the role of the Supreme Court, which has rejected challenges to the police procedures employed and legal processes utilized.[43] The high court has also not recognized the validity of statistical evidence of bias and discrimination, requiring instead specific proof of individual prosecutorial misconduct in each case, an indication of ill intention that is in practice impossible to obtain.[44] In 2001 the court rejected private law suits brought under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, thus eliminating the last avenue for challenging racial profiling through litigation.[45] The enormous racial disparity among those swept into the mass incarceration system (now legally immunized from claims of racial bias) cannot, according to Alexander, be explained by differential crime rates. The system is structured to generate this particular outcome.[22] The law enforcement methods developed in the course of the "War on Drugs" are utilized almost exclusively in low income communities of racial minorities; they would result in publicized outcry if practiced in middle class white areas. The outcomes differ among the regions and states, but in 2000, according to the Human Rights Watch, blacks were sent to prison on drug charges at the rate of 20 to 57 times that of whites in fifteen states. Nationwide, African-American prison admission for drug offenses rates had increased 26 times between 1983 and 2000, 22 times in case of Latinos, and 8 times for whites. Three-fourths of the imprisoned have been blacks and Latinos, while the majority of illegal drug users and dealers are white. The relevant black imprisonment has declined more recently by some 25% from its peak in the 1990s, but African Americans are still being incarcerated at grossly disproportionate rates. The official explanation for the disparate numbers, the crime rates, is belied by research data: The surveys that have been conducted so far show people of all races using illegal drugs at "remarkably similar rates". Drug markets reflect racial and socioeconomic boundaries, that is most users buy drugs locally from their own. Yet in 2006 for example, 1 out of every 14 black men was incarcerated, compared to 1 in 106 ratio for white men, due largely to the racial bias of the drug war practices.[46] This raises the issue of how exactly such disparity comes about in a society where old-fashioned racism is not normally practiced and racial discrimination is condemned by most, under a formally colorblind criminal justice system. The usual opinion is that the grossly disproportionate incarceration rates are the result of black men having much higher rates of violent crime; it is however drug convictions, not violent crime, that are primarily responsible for the prison boom. According to Alexander, "despite the colorblind rhetoric and fanfare of recent years, the design of the drug war effectively guarantees that those who are swept into the nation's new undercaste are largely black and

The New Jim Crow brown".[47] The system operates in two major stages. The first is the granting law enforcement personnel extraordinary discretion as to whom to stop, investigate further, arrest and charge. This allows beliefs, stereotypes, policies and assumptions to unduly influence the decisions of officials. The second step is to disable the ability of court systems to consider claims of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. It has been accomplished by requiring an unreasonably high standard of proof in discrimination cases: a (unobtainable in almost all cases) proof of some official's intentional racial discrimination (bigotry, racial hostility), rather than allowing a demonstration of the clearly discriminatory outcome of the legal process. This design turned out to be extraordinarily effective for the promoters of the system of racial control and extremely damaging for the segments of the population subjected to it.[48] By 1985 the "War on Drugs" had become largely localized, partially because of the persistent government and media promotion campaign (most prominently in television presentations), in poor communities of color, identified with the highly publicized in the media crack cocaine usage and dealing. Law enforcement officials replaced drug treatment center sources as media "experts" and the imagery of drug, or any other street criminals being dark was firmly established in public perception. Equally affected were officials in public capacity, such as police officers, prosecutors and jurors, who with the rest of the viewers primed by the campaign, developed conscious or (often) unconscious anti-black biases. An effective "public consensus was constructed by political and media elites", directed against the demonized black and brown men and women. This framework made it the obvious choice for the police to concentrate their "War on Drugs" efforts on black inner cities. The perceived enemy was also the one most accessible and easy to pursue, because of having the least political clout.[49] Back in 1938 the US Supreme Court recognized its own responsibility in protecting "discrete and insular minorities" to whose interests the majoritarian political process may be at times be injurious, and to guarantee constitutional rights of groups deemed unpopular or subject to prejudice. In the 1990s however the high court, according to Alexander, adopted rules that would actually maximize the likely discriminative effects. In Whren v. United States, the police stop and search procedures, even without a presumption of criminal activity likely to have occurred, were upheld, declared not in violation of the ban on unreasonable searches and seizures of the Fourth Amendment. The lack of such likelihood requirement allowed unlimited racially discriminatory discretion on the part of the police. The court also barred the accused from claiming racial bias under the Fourth Amendment. Using the Fourteenth Amendment for this purpose was formally allowed, but the Supreme Court had already effectively eviscerated that avenue for seeking legal redress in an earlier 1987 case.[50] In McCleskey v. Kemp, under the Supreme Court consideration in 1987, the alleged racial bias in Georgia death penalty practice was challenged. Racial bias in violation of the Fourteenth and Eight Amendments was claimed by the defendant, based on the extensive study of Georgia murder cases published by David C. Baldus and others. Georgia prosecutors were found in the study to be disproportionally more inclined to seek the death penalty when the victim was white and defendant black, rather than the other way around (70% to 19% respectively), which resulted in defendants charged with killing of white victims receiving the death penalty at the rate eleven times that of defendants charged with killing of black victims (4.3 times after adjusting for a number of non-racial variables). Black defendants found guilty of killing white victims were the group most likely to be sentenced to death. By a one vote margin the high court, apparently worried about undermining the entire U.S. criminal justice system practice, immunized it from claims of racial bias, by ruling that statistical arguments alleging discriminatory court decisions (patterns of discrimination) did not prove unequal treatment (and therefore could not be used in legal challenges) and that conscious, discriminatory intent on the part of plaintiff officials must be demonstrated. The requirement of proving deliberate official bias in each individual case, impossible to satisfy within the existing trial procedures, has rendered challenging court racial discrimination under the Fourteenth and Eight Amendments impractical.[44] There have been judicial attempts to circumvent the legal consequences of McCleskey v. Kemp, including the issue of disparate sentencing laws for crack and powder cocaine violations, but they were unsuccessful or reversed on

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The New Jim Crow appeals based on the high court precedent. In 1995 the Georgia Supreme Court, faced with the fact that 98.4% of those serving the life sentence under a "two strikes" drug sentencing provision were black, in a 4-3 decision attempted to force state prosecutors to provide a race-neutral explanation for this outcome (the prosecutors had invoked the life term penalty in 1% of white, but in 16% of black eligible cases). Instead of complying, the Georgia attorney general demanded a rehearing through a petition signed by all 46 of the state's district attorneys, all of whom were white. The prosecuting establishment felt again that the implementation of the ruling would "paralyze the criminal justice system" and the Georgia court was pressured to reverse itself. The new decision was formally based mostly on McCleskey v. Kemp.[51] In United States v. Armstrong in 1996, the defendant attempted to obtain a discovery order to show selective enforcement, because out of over two thousands crack cocaine federal prosecutions in California, none, according to the government three-year record, were against whites (the majority of crack offenders are believed to be white). The discovery that could point to selective prosecution (switching by federal prosecutors of white defendants to the state system, where crack penalties were far less severe, was suspected), granted by the district court in California, was denied by the U.S. Supreme Court, which felt that deference to the exercise of prosecutorial discretion must be kept intact at the expense of non-discriminatory treatment of the accused. The court-protected discretion of prosecution includes the domains of charging, plea bargain, transfer of cases and sentencing. Studies have shown that in prosecutor-controlled pretrial negotiation process whites are far more successful than non-whites. Prosecutorial discretion includes the ability to transfer cases from state to the federal system (or the other way around) and transfer juveniles to adult courts. African-American minors, who account for 16% of all youth in the United States, constitute 28% of all juveniles arrested, 35% of those redirected to adult criminal courts and 58% of all minors admitted in state adult prisons. Differential treatment of white and non-white youth by prosecutors, who have fought against and are protected from any judicial checks or scrutiny by the Supreme Court rulings, is one major cause of the disparities. The U.S. Supreme Court, according to Alexander, devised a system, which appears to be colorblind, but in which "racial biases and stereotypes are given free rein".[52] Black defendants who go through criminal trials may end up before a jury; the selection of jurors and racial composition of juries have always been of great importance to the accused. In 1880 in Strauder v. West Virginia, the US Supreme Court, based on the then recent Fourteenth Amendment, adamantly rejected the automatic exclusion of blacks from jury duty based on race. In reality however, convicting of African Americans by all-white exclusionary juries had remained regular practice throughout the South and the outcomes of such trials were upheld by the high court on a number of occasions, with the exception of a couple of cases in the 1930s (Scottsboro Boys, Hale v. Kentucky). In the 1965 Swain v. Alabama decision, the Supreme Court provided a numerically insignificant protection against all-white juries, allowing (racially motivated) peremptory challenges, on the condition that a given prosecutor had not always excluded blacks. This result was overruled in 1986 in Batson v. Kentucky, when, based on the Fourteenth Amendment, the selection of jurors based on race was explicitly prohibited. The ruling, believed at that time to be of fundamental importance for the rights of the defendants of color, has subsequently been practically compromised by prosecutorial practice and further court decisions that accepted the circumventing strategies. The pool of available black jurors had already been severely limited, because of the government lists from which jurors are selected (typically registered voters or vehicle owners) and the widely applied (by the federal government and most states) exclusion of felons, often for life. To remove most of the remaining African Americans, the prosecutors now had to come up with race-neutral explanations. In 1995, in Purkett v. Elem, the court accepted the plausibility of using trivial or arbitrary excuses for exclusion of jurors, as long as they were not racially based, letting the trial judge rule on the validity of the reasons given for the challenges. Since that time federal courts have tolerated many cases of practical, if informal exclusion of blacks from juries. Miller-El v. Cockrell of 2003 was an exception, because a jury selection manual with racial criteria was found to have been used, which violated the prevalent contemporary standard of condoning discrimination, on the condition that the policy is not explicitly stated.[53] While the prosecutorial class has the most practical power in the criminal justice system, the police enjoys the greatest discretion in deciding where the "War on Drugs" is waged and which specific enemy is being targeted and

27

The New Jim Crow pursued. Large scale militarized police operations in more affluent neighborhoods (shown by research to be equally affected by illegal drug use) are in the US unthinkable, for a number of structural and political reasons (such activities would be career-suicidal for the police in the first place). The obvious and intended choice for aggressive police action is the ghetto of underprivileged black and brown people, invariably present in every urban area. The overbearing police presence in such places is referred to by local youth as "The Occupation".[54] A team of researchers at the University of Washington (Katherine Beckett and others) published in 2005 and 2006 the results of their empirical studies of illicit drug market practices and police response in Seattle. They found that police priority enforcement in minority neighborhoods and actions preferentially directed against members of the black and Latino ethnicities could not be justified or explained by the phenomena conventionally claimed to be responsible by defenders of the government drug policies, such as high rates of drug offending, accessibility of "open-air drug markets", crime rates, violence, citizen complaints etc. Police stereotypes and the assumption that drug dealing and usage crimes typically occurred within the minority communities, combined with the perception that crack, associated with urban blacks, was the single most important culprit, resulted in a situation where whites were "not perceived as drug offenders by Seattle police officers". The department members therefore directed their enforcement efforts in accordance with this politicized, "racialized conception of the drug problem".[55] Altering the ways of the police and defense of other rights of an unpopular minority (perceived "black criminals" in this case) could properly be accomplished through the court system, utilizing the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection guarantee. This however is no longer feasible, because of the unreasonably high barriers and procedural requirements that have been imposed by the courts, including the standing requirement. The "standing" are very narrowly defined, in racial cases usually impossible to fulfill criteria that the party bringing a discrimination suit must fulfill in order to show that he or she properly belongs to the category claimed for redress. In City of Los Angeles v. Lyons the plaintiff sought to force the Los Angeles police to discontinue a violent procedure that he was subjected to (and others had been killed by), but in 1983 the Supreme Court declined and established the normally impossible to meet standing requirements that have since prevented or discouraged further legal challenges to (even obviously illegal and discriminatory) police practices. In a series of rulings the Supreme Court has also declared state institutions immune to monetary damage suits and greatly restricted the applicability of such lawsuits (proved intentional discrimination required) in case of local government units.[56] In the 1975 United States v. Brignoni-Ponce case, the Supreme Court allowed the police to take into account racial appearance (Mexican in this instant) of motorists when making discretionary traffic stop and search decisions. This has led to informal policies of police departments, which consider racial profiling to have taken place only when race can be shown to be the only criterion involved. In practice however race is rarely the sole reason, but often the determinative reason. The racial disparities of the "War on Drugs" are exacerbated by the police practice of selective targeting of "high crime" minority ghettos; black youth accumulate much higher criminal records than their white counterparts, who do not live in neighborhoods heavily targeted by the police.[57] Numerous studies have shown a dramatic pattern of racial bias also in situations where the racial minorities do not numerically predominate, prominently in highway patrol stops and searches. African-American and Latino divers stopped and searched in disproportionate numbers consequently constitute a large majority of those arrested and charged with drug crimes. There is no positive correlation between the frequency of occurrence of drug violations among racial groups and criminal drug charges filed by the police; the relationship depends on the make-up of motorists subjected to discretionary stops.[58] Pedestrian stop and frisk tactics, widely practiced by the police in New York City and other municipalities, target blacks and Latinos at the rates much greater than white pedestrians and likewise contribute to the racially disparate proportions among those charged with drug crimes.[59] Possibly the fatal blow to racial bias anti-discrimination litigation was delivered in 2001 by the US Supreme Court in Alexander v. Sandoval. The merits of the case had never been considered, because the court decided that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on which the plaintiffs' reasoning was based, does not provide a "private right of

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The New Jim Crow action" (such as suits by civil rights organizations) and its antidiscrimination provisions can be used in suits by the federal government only. Title VI and its pursuant regulations prohibit federally funded activities from race discrimination, based on their discriminatory impact that cannot be justified by law enforcement necessity, not on the necessity of proving intention to discriminate. Law enforcement agencies involved in the drug war receive federal funding, so Title VI had been seen and used as the avenue through which local enforcement tactics, such as pretext stops and consent searches, could be curtailed. Title VI, limited to the federal government enforcement initiative, is of little use, given the central government's limitations and its institutional reluctance to confront state and local authorities (and the fact that the "War on Drugs" has been waged and maintained by the federal government itself).[60] This and other similar legal outcomes have in practice thoroughly immunized the system of mass incarceration from claims of racial bias that can be filed in courts, at every stage of the criminal justice process. According to Alexander, the rulings of the Supreme Court in their totality "guarantee that those who find themselves locked up and permanently locked out due to the drug war are overwhelmingly black and brown".[61]

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Chapter 4: The Cruel Hand

Chapter 4: The Cruel Hand considers how the system operates once a prisoner is released. The formal discrimination and social stigmatization that follow prevent the former convict from re-integrating into the society and unravel social structures of the African-American community.[22] Individuals released from physical confinement, especially people of color, those on parole, probation and also those, who have completed their formal punishment and institutional involvement with the criminal justice system, are subjected to many forms of discrimination and often lifetime limitations and exclusion. "Criminals", in the prevalent white public perception associated with dark skin color, are seen as a class of people worthy of societal disrespect.[62] First time offenders accepting a guilty plea bargain are kept ignorant of the "parallel universe" or "internal exile" of civil penalties that they are going to live in when no longer in prison. Those reentering the society are relegated to a second-class status through numerous legal restrictions, denial of government benefits and perpetuated social rejection, factors that force many to repeatedly cycle through the prison system. A great majority of ex-offenders struggle hard to keep up, play by the rules and, against the odds, succeed.[63] The first and most common difficulty encountered by the newly released from prison is finding a place to live. Those convicted of a felony are ineligible for public housing assistance for at least five years. Further discrimination against them and even against suspected criminals is also legal and routinely applied. One current federal legal basis for eviction policies is the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. In 1996 President Clinton proposed a "One Strike and You're Out" legislation, which took the form of the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998. It allows a ban on applicants not convicted of any crime, but believed to abuse drugs or alcohol. Further strict guidelines for public housing agencies were developed under Clinton by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which also encourages the housing authorities to develop their own screening and exclusion criteria. Housing exclusion can be based on an arrest not followed by any further legal action. African Americans and Latinos are frequently targeted by the police and arrested in the course of the "War on Drugs". The One Strike policies also require the termination of any tenant whose household members, guests or caregivers engage in drug-related or other criminal activity, even if the violation took place not on the tenant's premises and without his or her knowledge. This last clause was struck down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Rucker v. Davis in 2001, but that decision was reversed by the Supreme Court in Department of Housing and Urban Development v. Rucker in 2002. As a result of such draconian policies, families are reluctant to allow relatives, especially recently released from prison, to stay with them. The legal eviction policies contribute greatly to the homelessness phenomenon (no national numerical data is available), among the over half million released from incarceration every year and among others, such as the many millions of those simply arrested, possibly without any valid (and therefore not pursued further) cause.[64]

The New Jim Crow The released from prison face the necessity of finding work next. The parolees not only have to make a living and desperately want to establish themselves as normal members of the society; most jurisdictions also "require" them to "maintain gainful employment", under the threat of violating parole conditions.[65] Almost all states however allow employers to discriminate on the basis of past convictions, and most allow also to consider arrests. A growing number of professional and licensing agencies exclude applicants with criminal convictions or arrests. The former convict's job landing attempt therefore typically ends with the marking of the relevant criminal history box on the application, as many employers will not hire (depending in part on the nature of the offense) people with criminal records.[65] People coming out of prison, most of whom are already badly disadvantaged in many respects relevant to employment opportunities, are typically prevented from work also by the "spacial mismatch" between where they live and where the jobs may be available. Ex-offenders are more likely to be hired in job areas with little or no customer contact, such as construction or manufacturing, but work of that nature has for the most part disappeared from inner cities where they live. Service sector jobs may be more available in the suburbs, but the match in this case is less favorable and commuting distances and cost tend to be prohibitive, especially for workers with no dependable transportation or whose driver's license has been suspended.[65] Of all demographic groups of job seekers, black ex-offenders are the most severely disadvantaged. This status is a result not only of the general public ostracism and social stigma, but in particular of their government-certified status, an official branding that acts as a source of negative credentials. An approximate one-third of all young African-American men in the USA are out of work, and, urged by local grassroots initiatives, a few municipalities have been making efforts to partially remove the official policies that contribute to this condition. On the other hand it has been argued that the mere prohibition of the criminal history box on the job application will motivate employers to consider all or most black men as potentially threatening violent criminals.[66] The newly released prisoners, most of whom have been low income people to begin with, if lucky enough to find and able to sustain employment, are burdened with a variety of legal fees and monetary penalties. The financial obligations imposed by various government and court institutions will likely take away whatever the meager earnings he or she may be able to generate and with it any incentive to work. Not paying or not being able to pay the fines will push the newly released back toward the prison system. The financial burdens for which the victims of the criminal justice system have been held responsible are a new development. They have been created by law within the past twenty years and they are frequently the tipping point that turns the individual's effort to reestablish himself or herself as an independent person into a mission impossible. People unjustly imprisoned, for example in the course of the "War on Drugs", are then held responsible for the cost of their imprisonment and a variety of imposed charges (these may vary widely from one state or jurisdiction to another) such as, for example, mandatory drug treatment, which in turn may be a necessary condition for the parole. A great variety of preconviction fees and postconviction fees and other arbitrary penalties have been instituted and the former inmate's paycheck may end up entirely garnished by the various agencies claiming the right to his or her income. These extreme hardships are a modern form of debtors' prison and resemble the reality faced by black Americans after the Civil War, when they were arrested in the South for minor violations, punished with heavy fines and kept in work incarceration till the "debt" was paid. Today convicts work in prison for nominal wages and then are charged for various expenses related to their incarceration.[67] Through the 1996 welfare reform legislation, under President Clinton, the uniform federal welfare programs became decentralized with block grants funding extended for assistance provided by individual states. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program replaced the federally controlled Aid to Families with Dependent Children, imposed a five-year lifetime limit on access to benefits and required recipients to work, including mothers with young children. The law also requires the states to permanently exclude people with drug felony convictions from federally funded assistance programs. The ban allows no exceptions for cases such as pregnant women or gravely ill individuals, who accordingly are ineligible for food assistance for life.[68]

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The New Jim Crow One of the most fundamental factors that contribute to the phenomenon of stripping former prisoners of full citizenship is the denial of voting rights. Successful efforts to reduce the number of African Americans who vote in elections at all levels have been taking place ever since the blacks were given the right to vote, and continue unabated to this day.[69] All states and the District of Columbia, except Maine and Vermont, prohibit inmates incarcerated for a felony from voting. The vast majority of states extend the denial of the right to vote also to those on probation or parole. Even after the expiration of that condition some states continue vote prohibition policies for a number of years, or even for the former convict's lifetime.[69] This American disfranchisement practices stands in stark contrast to the prevailing international point of view, as other countries have not adopted significant restrictions on voting rights. Most European democracies allow all or most prisoners to vote. The United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that the United States disfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law. The voting disqualification rules adopted in the US have no legitimate purpose and infringe on democratic rights of millions of its citizens.[69] A variety of factors, including state and local laws, practices and relations, impinge in reality on the right to vote of even those, who in theory are allowed to vote. Each state has its own procedures and standards for restoring the former inmate's right to vote. They typically involve going through complicated and cumbersome bureaucratic obstacles and payments of court fines and costs, that a returning prisoner is hardly able to afford. These "colorblind" rules for all practical purposes have become the modern equivalent of the historic poll taxes and literacy tests, because they keep a group defined mostly by race from being able to vote. During the closely contested 2000 presidential election, 600,000 former felons who had completed their sentences were not allowed to vote in Florida; in this and many other instances the discriminatory laws have vastly affected the course of the American and world history.[69] The informal but practically important by-product of the rush to incarcerate policies is the minorities', especially former offenders', reluctance to interact with the enforcement and administrative authorities of all levels of government. Many won't put themselves through the demanding requirements to obtain such "luxury" as voting, because they worry about bothering officials seen as looking for excuses to put them back in jail; many don't want to attract attention and risk their families losing food assistance or other badly needed services. Many suffer greatly from not being able to exercise their right to affect their lives through voting, an issue that, they have been told in school, has long been resolved.[69] The unforgiving, often permanent societal exclusion brings with it shame and stigma that last for the lifetime of those afflicted. Individuals perceived as belonging to the criminal caste are treated with suspicion and contempt, in official and informal situations alike. Alexander deals with the issue of some personalities (e.g. Bill Cosby) who have complained of black men today having no shame or treating prison stints as "a rite of passage". Scientific studies done on the issue of social consequences of shame and stigmatization show however devastating psychological effects suffered by those subjected to the criminal and other stereotypes related to race and poverty. The alienation experienced is amplified by the fact that families and friends of the troubled individuals, although aware of the racist environment that contributed to their condition, somehow still blame the young men or themselves for the suffering of their inner circle (including the lack of desperately needed material support that men are hoped to be able to provide) and avoid discussing with or even revealing the embarrassing reality to others in their community. Alexander invokes Frederick Douglass and his A heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us statement delivered at the 1853 National Colored Convention, and argues that in today's society, in which the "felon"'s "debt to the society" can never be repaid, his words as current as ever.[70] Because of the shame the families affected by incarceration of one of their members typically refrain from seeking support and consolation even from resources of their own communities, such as circles of friends and black churches, adding self-imposed isolation to the stress they already experience. [71] Many African Americans aspire to be seen as members of the modern, upwardly mobile class; to protect their precarious status they become a part of

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The New Jim Crow the self-repressing and damaging phenomenon of "social silence", an invisible disease of present day communities of color.[72] The gangsta rap and generally culture of violence phenomena, which often involve behavior and displays seen as provocative if not intimidating and aggressive, Alexander interprets as psychological self-defense mechanisms practiced by those ostracized and rejected by the mainstream society. Embracing one's perceived "criminal" identity is an act of rebellion, but is essentially no different from the black is beautiful or gay pride points of view and expressions ("a severely stigmatized group embracing their stigma"). Embracing criminality serves however no affirmative purpose and is self-defeating and self-destructive to the already persecuted and subjected to constant surveillance and suppression black youth. The behavior of the trapped is a reflection of the society's failings, not of character defects, such as lack of "personal responsibility", on the part of African-American men, as it is often presented by the media. As the "War on Drugs" is claiming a second generation of its victims, deprived of proper parental role-models "many (black) youth embrace their stigmatized identity as a means of survival in this new caste system". The marginalized try to gain a measure of self-esteem by whatever means available, often turning for support to gangs and fellow inmates, while the criminal activity causes further damage disproportionally to minority communities and in particular to the perpetrators themselves.[73] The "gangsta culture" is nevertheless pervaded by violence, decadence and misogyny, which gives rise to damaging for the black community "reality television" shows and other media presentations, that purport to represent the "authentic" expressions of black culture. Alexander considers such undertakings to be "for-profit displays of worst racial stereotypes", in an era when African Americans are repressed, criminalized, negatively portrayed and generally subjected to a societal character assault. She sees a parallel with the black minstrel shows of the past and wonders why would the young men, subjected to brutal oppression, want to glorify their predicament. The hip hop culture was originally predicated on a different set of rules, but had changed in part when the intensifying war on drugs swept large numbers of ghetto youth into prisons. The massive crackdown caused a rapid deterioration in the already highly stressed communities, while its primary targets and victims, young black men, demonized and outlawed (often also in their own communities), like other outcasts throughout history, struggled to find a positive identity by embracing their condition.[74] Alexander ends the chapter by regretting the fate of those, who have been broken by the "extraordinarily comprehensive system of racialized social control" and saluting those former inmates, who against all odds have managed to overcome the handicap imposed on them, stay out of prison and function as contributing members of the society. She wishes that the Civil Rights Era had been followed by love, care, compassion and concern rather than by the false colorblindness, and sees embracing the humanness of the "deeply stigmatized" as the prescription for liberation.[75]

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Chapter 5: The New Jim Crow

Chapter 5: The New Jim Crow explores the many parallels between the current practice of mass incarceration of the racial minority and the former Jim Crow legal system. In both cases legalized discrimination marginalizes and physically separates large segments of the African-American community (now in penal institutions and ghettos) and then authorizes their inferior treatment in a number of fields. Racial bias suits have been rendered ineffective by the federal court system, as was the case under Jim Crow. The stigma of criminality has replaced the stigma of race and allowed the establishment of a new dividing line between "us" and "them". Differences between the older and current practices are discussed. Most importantly, the earlier systems were designed to exploit black labor, while the new mass incarceration provides for warehousing of a population deemed disposable, not needed for the functioning of the new global economy. The chapter discusses how the white people have also been negatively affected by the new caste system.[22] The message of personal responsibility and fatherhood duties has been delivered to African-American audiences countless many times by preachers and personalities, including Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier and Louis Farrakhan, one

The New Jim Crow of the organizers of the Million Man March. It was invoked again by Barack Obama in a black Chicago church, after his Democratic Party presidential nomination. In the speech, interpreted as aimed chiefly at the white electorate, Obama raised the issue of missing, absent black fathers, without suggesting where the "missing" men might have gone. Even the sociologist Michael Eric Dyson, who wrote a critique of Obama's speech in Time magazine, had not mentioned prisons.[76] The gender gap (numerical deficiency of men) is 26% in the African-American communities, while the disparity reaches only 8% in the case of whites. The identification and discussion of the underlying problems and causes of the missing men phenomenon had been, by the time of the writing of The New Jim Crow, avoided by mainstream media, for example The New York Times or CNN, as well as by the black leaders and media, such as Ebony magazine. Alexander's blunt assessment is that the men have been "warehoused in prisons, locked in cages... for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed by whites".[76] The general public, preoccupied with the success stories of the few individuals who defied the odds, such as Barack Obama or Oprah Winfrey, has not noticed or has chosen not to notice the overall reversal of racial progress in America. The "War on Drugs" and the associated remaking of the criminal justice system, which initially required "tremendous political initiative and resources", have by now been normalized, become largely invisible and replaced in public consciousness with the War on Terror. The racial stereotypes and assumptions involved have been accepted, embraced or internalized by people of all colors and walks of life. The fact that the majority of men of color are under control of the criminal justice system is taken as ordinary occurrence, even though this racially selective practice is "unheard of in the rest of the world".[76] Alexander next poses the question whether and to what degree the public opinion is aware and informed of the policies pursued against black men. Individuals and even whole cultures can be shown to have denied the existence of realities too troubling to admit, in particular the forms of oppression practiced by their own societies. In today's America, there is the prevailing "common sense" that attributes the incarceration rate (of which many people are vaguely aware) to the magnitude of crimes committed by those who have freely chosen to perpetrate the crimes, and who therefore "deserve" their punishment. This point of view has been directly promoted or implied by mainstream media outlets. The idea is due to a large extent to a "profound misunderstanding", the belief that racial oppression, if it takes place, is caused by people whose attitudes are hostile or abusive in some readily apparent way towards the persecuted; such feelings are reinforced by the imagery associated with the excesses of the past. "A racial caste system" that functions "naturally", not explicitly based on race, without inflammatory rhetoric and visible persecution, structural racism embedded in the society, may not be so noticeable and the awareness of it may be to some degree lacking. Certain features of such system may not have been developed with the express purpose of controlling racial minorities. It appears far less distinct and more difficult to pinpoint than its historical predecessors and it may well prove more durable and harder to ultimately eradicate than the systems of oppression from the past. This racial caste system consists nonetheless of a highly effective set of structural arrangements, designed to lock a racially distinct group into a subordinate position and second-class citizenship.[77] The laws that in particular control the lives of released former prisoners ensure that they practically stand no chance of integrating into the mainstream, or even their own local former society. The life on the outside has been called the period of "invisible punishment"; it lasts for the lifetime of the person affected.[78] The law enforcement and criminal justice systems have always disproportionally concentrated their operations in minority and low income communities. Until the mid-1980s however, the penal system was not a dominant presence there (affected a rather small proportion of the population) and its influence was marginal to the communities of color. What is different about the New Jim Crow is that the criminal justice system has become a factor that governs those entire communities. It operates on a vastly greater scale and is primarily concerned with "the management and control of the dispossessed".[79] Chicago and its suburbs may be given as a typical example of a large urban metropolitan area in the US. The city itself has had its share of highest level African-American government officials and is the home of the nation's first

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The New Jim Crow black president. The area has a very large Latino population and a substantial black middle class. Yet "stark patterns if racial inequality, segregation and poverty" exist on a massive scale; they have been exacerbated and perpetuated by the "War on Drugs" and the racially disparate system of mass incarceration.[79] About 90% of the sentenced to prison for drug offenses in Illinois are African Americans. The system rarely bothers with the whites, who, if arrested, are given more lenient treatment. A large majority of adult black males in the city are burdened with a felony record. Within Chicago region, the number sent to prison yearly on drug charges had increased between 1985 and 2005 by 2000 percent. Around the year 2000, about 1000 black men were receiving bachelor's degrees from Illinois state universities per year, while in the same period 7000 were being released from the state prison system.[79] Parallels between the old and new Jim Crow systems The close, in many respects, relationship between the current and past racial caste systems is strikingly present in their functioning and effects. In other ways the two systems may significantly differ. Racial stigma and shame, the presence of an elaborate system of control that involves disenfranchisement and legalized discrimination, and the practical production of meaning of race and its boundaries are among the similarities.[80] Historical parallels The old and new Jim Crow systems originated under parallel political and social circumstances. In both cases, following major liberating upheavals (the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement, respectively), white elites of power were able to forestall economic and other reforms, by redirecting the anger and hostility of the vulnerable and bias-inclined white lower classes away from themselves and the system that served the interests of the privileged, toward an easy to identify, separate and scapegoat racial minority. Reforms were avoided and pretended white racial solidarity had been assumed (informally in the case of the later mass incarceration), at the expense of "the others", the black and the brown. The propaganda and rhetoric have been successful, structural changes that would allow more equitable economic opportunities have never been adopted and surrogate psychological mechanisms of societal control have been established instead.[81] Legalized discrimination Legal (de jure) discrimination is an obvious correspondence between the old and new systems of control and oppression. A large percentage of black men are branded "felons" early in their lives, which subjects them to long periods, if not a lifetime, of legalized discrimination in many fields that often have to do with vital human necessities and citizenship rights. By legal and practical extensions, people around them, such as family members, are affected by legalized discrimination as well, which puts in this category a huge segment, in a sense the totality, of low income communities of color. Full integration into the mainstream white society is out of the question for most and many gains, limited as they were, of the Civil Rights Movement, have in practice been nullified. This parallel reality is skillfully concealed by government propaganda, as "Americans congratulate themselves for having put an end to discrimination" and "schoolchildren wonder out loud how discrimination could ever have been legal in this great land of ours".[82]

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The New Jim Crow Political disenfranchisement Regardless of the Fifteenth Amendment guarantees, the Jim Crow era politically disenfranchised African Americans in a variety of ways, including poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and felon disenfranchisement laws. Formally race-neutral measures were implemented.[83] Such "race-neutral" devices were eliminated through legal and legislative action after the collapse of Jim Crow, except for the felony laws, which have been upheld by the courts. This exception turned out to be of major practical importance, because felon disenfranchisement is today more effective. Besides the one in seven black men who as felons are excluded from voting in their states, there are millions of others who are not formally excluded, but prevented by additional requirements imposed, such as payment of fines and fees.[83] The United States Census Bureau counts prisoners as members of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. These are typically white rural communities, who benefit from their inflated population figures at the expense of urban minority communities from where the prisoners came. Power is shifted to the right in state and national legislative apportionment and redistricting. The phenomenon of not being allowed to vote, but being counted with the result opposite to what the voting would produce is reminiscent of and has comparable numerical effect to the three-fifth clause in the Constitution, as it was originally written in times of slavery.[83] Exclusion from juries Blacks have been disproportionally excluded from juries under the old and new systems. Today, about 30% of African-American men are classified as felons and automatically excluded from jury duty. In other cases, systematic exclusion of blacks has been taking place through the practice of peremptory challenges, which has been employed by the courts despite its highly arbitrary nature. In reality, according to Alexander, the situation of black defendants is, in respect to the (still all or mostly white) juries they face, very similar to what it was a hundred years ago.[84] Prevention of civil rights litigation The U.S. Supreme Court has historically played a decisive role in both protecting and dismantling racial case systems, responding to shifts in the political and social climate in the United States. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the institution of slavery was protected on the bases that African Americans were not citizens. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the "separate but equal" legal doctrine was established and it had subsequently served as a foundation of the Jim Crow system. Presently a parallel function is served by McCleskey v. Kemp and the cases that followed, as the Court has assumed the "protection mode" of preserving the currently predominant system of control. The mass incarceration policies cannot be challenged on the grounds of racial bias, so the practice goes on, the Fourteenth Amendment and modern federal civil rights legislation notwithstanding.[85] Racial segregation The Jim Crow system sanctioned racial segregation. Blacks were relegated to separate sections of towns, where they, their dwellings and condition remained out of sight, as most whites would not venture there. The racially selective mass incarceration system greatly helps in maintaining a de facto racial segregation today.[86] Prisoners are segregated, both by their imprisonment and by the location of their prisons, typically in rural areas, far from the population centers the prisoners came from and therefore inaccessible to family members and friends. When they are released, they go back to the relatively few ghetto neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, where they find little opportunity (other than to engage in prohibited contacts with other "felons") and where their presence aggravates the already existing economic and social problems.[86] Poor whites are imprisoned for drug offenses far less frequently, and when released from prison they do not suffer from practical racial segregation, which considerably improves their social reintegration chances. While most poor urban people of color live in high-poverty neighborhoods, most poor urban whites do not, because they are spared from segregation pressures. The urban ghettos, still suffering from the legacy of an earlier era, have their segregated

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The New Jim Crow world crippled further by the War on Drugs and mass incarceration policies pursued by governmental entities of all levels.[86] Symbolic production of race Both the historical and present racial caste systems have had the purpose of defining the meaning of race and its significance in the United States. Slavery defined blackness in terms of being a slave. Jim Crow associated it with second-class citizenship. The mass incarceration system produced the criminal connotation. Through selective law enforcement and application of law pursuits as well as media presentations, African Americans were made criminals and racial stigma has been produced, resulting from this negative definition of the meaning of blackness. While the criminal association applies to a greater degree to men and boys, the racial stigma extends to their families and entire black communities.[87] The criminal designation provides a convenient and "legitimate", in the era of "colorblindness", outlet for expressions of racist and hateful attitudes. In parallel with the Jim Crow laws and practices that affected also the northern blacks, the present criminal racial stigma affects also the individuals who have never been subjected to the criminal justice system activities in a significant way. The informal presumption of black criminality is particularly damaging in the case of black youth, who, often removed from schools at an early age, then face debilitating employment discrimination. The presumption of criminality also contributes to the widespread phenomenon of "random and degrading stops and searches of ghetto youth" by the police.[87] Areas where the two systems differ Despite the striking parallels, there are important differences between the Jim Crow and the presently practiced mass incarceration, as each system has been well adapted to the political and social milieu of its time.[88] In some respects, however, the two systems may appear to be fundamentally different, but upon closer inspection the differences prove to be not so significant. Jim Crow is often thought of as an explicitly race-based system, but many of its policies and practices were actually designed to be formally race-neutral (colorblind), to satisfy the Fifteenth Amendment requirements. The enforcement of the laws was highly discriminatory and the same applies to the drug war.[88] Jim Crow racial stigma had become a cause for increased racial solidarity among African Americans. The stigma of black criminality today has had the opposite effect. It has caused disintegration in the black community and has evoked a response of silence among many of its victims. It has not been a unifying cause, to the contrary, it has made collective action more difficult.[88] Absence of racial hostility Overt racial hostility is generally not displayed by politicians, who pass the harsh and punitive laws; by judges, who validate, interpret and follow them; or by law enforcement officials, who perform their duties at the various stages of the criminal justice process. A clear shift in public attitudes has taken place, as the segregationist thinking and values appear to have been rejected by most Americans. The supporters of the mass incarceration system may not be racist in the usual understanding of the term. Racial indifference may be largely responsible for the current state of affairs, but this is also the way that racial control systems had operated in the past.[89] Racial violence, according to some scholars, has been to some extent legitimized and taken over by the state, through the present government-run criminal justice system. The different tone in public discourse about race and many reformed public practices are, however, clearly important factors in the lives of members of racial minorities. Many Americans may feel "sincere" in their support for equal treatment of all races, but to characterize this lame sincerity Alexander quotes Martin Luther King, who declared "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity".[89]

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The New Jim Crow White victims of racial caste Under the historical systems of slavery and Jim Crow, it was rare for white persons to be in some way victimized by the racial caste system intended to favor and protect them. Under mass incarceration, because of its professed colorblindness, white people do find themselves in prison on drug charges or under other arbitrary circumstances, even though the system was designed specifically to curb a racial minority. White people harmed under mass incarceration, says Alexander, constitute often an unintended collateral damage, like civilians killed or injured during attacks on insurgents in the course of the Iraq War. The war on drugs, she reiterates, "was declared as part of a political ploy to capitalize on white racial resentment" by the Reagan administration and other right-wing forces.[90] To demonstrate differential societal responses to situations involving social harm and violation of legal rules, depending on the perceived racial profile of the perpetrators, Alexander compares forms and degrees of punishment received by drug offenders with the treatment afforded those with drunk driving violations. Drunk drivers, who are predominantly white, cause directly considerably more death than the various illegal drug use related activities that can be in some way attributed to a lethal outcome. Clamping down on drunk driving, the society resorted to comparatively mild punishments, with the stress being placed on counseling, treatment, and preserving the individual's ability to function normally, keep his or her job, support family etc. This stands in stark contrast with the severe official and public attitudes toward drug offenders, who are perceived by the society as, and are conflated by the authorities with, people of color.[90] Black support for "tough" policies and enforcement It appears that many African Americans support "get tough on crime" policies to a much greater degree than their forebears of the Jim Crow era could possibly have supported the system they were subject to. Because of the extremely high crime rates, many in ghetto communities respond positively to police presence, which does not mean they support the policy of mass incarceration of their troubled youth, whose desperate situation they know well. Some blacks, says Alexander, are "complicit" with the mass incarceration system, not unlike the many who had consciously cooperated with the Jim Crow in the past, even if they oppose it as a social policy (they would, of course, much prefer constructive measures designed to help their distressed communities). Many surveys have shown African Americans to be less supportive of harsh criminal justice policies than whites, even though their lives are much more affected by crime and they are much more likely to be crime victims.[91] Black men do have much higher rate of violent crime than whites. The group's extremely high rate of unemployment is by far the most important reason for this phenomenon. Controlled for joblessness in studies, the different rates of violent crime disappear.[91] The political decisions that determined the internal policies of the nation were made a decade and more after the deaths of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. In 1954, unemployment rates of white and black youth were equal. By 1984, the black rate was nearly four times as high as white, due to the economic and social transformations that had taken place. The inner-cities found themselves trapped between this economic collapse and the resurgent white right wing backlash against civil rights progress, inextricably combined with the building of the new Republican majority in the South.[91] Alexander summarizes the evolution of the racial caste system as having progressed from exploitation (slavery), through subordination (Jim Crow), to marginalization (mass incarceration). Extreme marginalization and stigmatization, she says, poses the risk of extermination, as history have shown in events such as the Nazi Holocaust or ethnic cleansing and killing during Bosnian War. Exploitation may be better than marginalization, because the exploited are still needed by those interested in exploiting them. The accusations of black genocide in the early years of the War on Drugs may not have been as far-fetched as they sounded, because ghetto residents suddenly found themselves in no demand, and therefore disposable.[91]

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The New Jim Crow

38

Chapter 6: The Fire This Time

Chapter 6: The Fire This Time raises the issue of present and future approaches to dealing with the New Jim Crow crisis. The chapter's title is based on James Baldwin's seminal forewarning The Fire Next Time. Alexander believes that pushing reforms through a broad-based social coalition, as has been done in the past, while possibly helpful, will not be enough, because "a new system of racialized social control" will eventually appear, assuming forms impossible to predict now. If a movement emerges to confront mass incarceration, it will have to cure the underlying causes and ills in society at large, which needs to "cultivate an ethic of genuine care" for every individual, regardless of ethnic, gender, class, immigration status, or any other consideration.[22] The new civil rights movement, or racial justice movement, must deal specifically with the defining characteristics of the present system of control, its official colorblindness, and vigorously challenge the public consensus on which it is based. Combating the problem is difficult, because of the collective denial or lack of recognition of the new caste system's existence.[92] Despite some important initiatives undertaken, such as campaigns challenging felon disenfranchisement laws, the civil rights community (itself influenced by the prevailing public consensus) has been, in Alexander's opinion, "awkwardly silent" on the minority mass incarceration issue. From the time of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the main thrust of civil rights activities has shifted from grassroots movement and street action to sophisticated litigation, which in the past had often been a highly successful strategy. The professionalized, Washington, D.C. focused civil rights establishment has in effect distanced itself from the people whose interests they aspire to represent. Moreover, the mass incarceration of people of color turned out to be not the kind of problem that can be solved through litigation. Advocacy on behalf of criminals or even people of questionable reputation has historically been avoided by civil rights litigants coping with the prevalent among white populace negative black stereotypes. Young black men, often criminalized from childhood years, are, from the perspective of traditional civil rights action, "damaged goods", and novel approaches are called for to effectively deal with the problem in which they play a central role.[93] Some undoubtedly feel that the scarce resources available would be better allocated by pursuing "winnable" causes, such as defense of affirmative action. The traditional policies, however, must be considered to have failed, since African Americans as a group are no better off than they were back in the 1960s. The official poverty and unemployment statistics, bad as they are, do not include those currently incarcerated. Counting them would make the jobless rate go up by over 20% in the case of black men of lower educational achievement. Even during the economic boom of the 1990s, the true jobless rate of non-college African-American males was 42%. Black advocacy can no longer afford to focus on the more attractive plaintiffs, serving black elites at the expense of the masses subjected to the new racial order. Its victims must now be embraced. Without attempting to outline a comprehensive plan of action for a modern racial justice movement, the author wishes to present a few ideas, as "conversation starters".[93] The criminal justice system expansion has given rise to a prisonindustrial complex, in which huge investments have been made by "rich and powerful people" and influential societal interests, and which directly or indirectly provides employment and economic "opportunity" for vast segments of society. The complex will prove extremely resistant to any efforts to dismantle it. The establishment of this center of political and economic interest greatly limits the practicality and effectiveness of a hypothetical movement attempting to significantly reform the criminal justice in the United States in a piecemeal fashion ("by isolated victories in legislatures or courtrooms", or even their strings). The War on Drugs and its collateral phenomena have become all-pervasive, having fundamentally altered the law enforcement practices and their scope as well as legal standards throughout the country. To put an end to the mass incarceration system, the War would have to be terminated.[94] Among the partial practical remedies suggested so far have been elimination of financial law enforcement incentives for arresting "black and brown people for drug offenses", stopping the militarization of equipment of local police and practical designation of minority communities as enemy areas, mandatory collection of police data to prevent

The New Jim Crow selective enforcement and profiling, racial impact statements for criminal justice legislation, and funding of public defender offices to provide resources equal to those of the prosecutorial machine. Mandatory sentencing would have to be rescinded and meaningful re-entry programs instituted. Permanent discrimination of felons would have to be reconsidered.[94] All the necessary reforms cannot take place, Alexander argues, without changing the prevailing public attitudes, altering the deeply flawed public consensus (which supports the new caste system) in the matters of race. The harmful practices can be fixed not by selective legal actions and a handful of winnable cases, but by dealing with the racially defined public consciousness, which brings us again to the stage of mass mobilization, as explained back in 1965 by Martin Luther King Jr. Lacking an egalitarian racial consensus, a racial oppression system can be to some degree mollified, but the system will rebound and assume a new equilibrium, in a form that conforms to the prevailing contemporary attitudes and expectations and therefore seems natural and normal. This process has been cyclical and will remain cyclical unless the cycle is broken by a mass movement that is able to effect change in national racial consensus, a change far more comprehensive and permanent than any attempted thus far.[94] The system of mas incarceration, says Alexander, is an abysmal failure, as it comes to its professed role as a crime control measure: it causes far more crime than it prevents, for example by creating a class of permanently unemployable. It has been a fantastic success as a system of racial control and must be understood as such, if there is to be a chance for a movement to end mass incarceration.[95] The temptation and tendency to ignore the racial aspects of incarceration, which reflect the current "colorblind" preference for public discourse, must be overcome and race must be dealt with honestly, however uncomfortable racial openness may feel to many whites. Colorblind approaches aiming at decreasing incarceration rates may seem pragmatic and promising in the short run (the present budgetary pressures in states is a case in point), but in the long run the fundamental issues cannot be resolved without constant reference to race; colorblindness, far from being the solution, turns out to be the problem.[95] Many in the civil rights community have long regarded a colorblind society as an ultimate, indisputable goal. In this context affirmative action, for example, has been considered a temporary measure, to be applied for only as long as necessitated by the state of society (unequal opportunities). Colorblindness, however, has allowed and facilitated an attitude of indifference toward groups that require (because of their historically imposed condition) special attention and has made the mass incarceration of racial minorities possible. Selective incarceration has taken place under a pretense of colorblindness. Dr. King wrote of indifference as the factor responsible for "the limiting of neighborly concern to tribe, race, class or nation". An insular attitude results and it prevents people from caring about what happens to those outside their own group.[96] Alexander postulates that in order to keep correcting existing problems Americans should remain race-conscious indefinitely. Racial differences will always exist and it is better to account for this fact than to ignore it. Awareness and recognition of racial and ethnic diversity and the attendant inequalities is a necessary condition for creating societal willingness to tackle and fix problems as troublesome as "the existence of racial caste in America". The problem is not seeing race, but refusing to care.[96]

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The New Jim Crow

40

Criticism
Some intellectuals have criticized The New Jim Crow for simplification, omission, and use of a generally mainstream white perspective. These critics agree that racially biased mass incarceration is a catastrophic situation, but disagree with Alexander about history, causes, and solutions, as well as about how to think about and represent the problem.

Whitewashing
A few scholars in the field of Black Studies have criticized The New Jim Crow for retaining a white liberal perspective, arguing that it isolates the "War on Drugs" as a problem without reflecting the deeper systems of capitalism and racism. However, many other Black Studies scholars champion Alexander's work as a profoundly important contribution to historical and contemporary discussions of the Black experience. Alexander writes in the preface that her target audience is "people who care deeply about racial justice but who, for any number of reasons, do not yet appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration." In his critical review Black Out: Michelle Alexanders Operational Whitewash, Joseph D. Osel criticizes Alexander for favoring the perspective of this (presumably white, middle class, and liberal) audience. However Alexander's supporters would likely maintain that Osel's assumption that Alexander is writing exclusively, or even primarily, to a white liberal audience is simply that...his assumption...and it is not well supported when considered alongside the arguments she makes in the remainder of her book. Another criticism her detractors have raised is one of omission: "According to Alexander's history, there is no Malcolm X or George Jackson, no Frantz Fanon, no Richard Wright, no Eldridge Cleaver, no Angela Davis, no Huey P. Newton, no Bobby Seale, no Black Panther Party, no Black Power Movement, no self-determination, no prison-struggles, no political prisoners, no, no, no. Suspiciously there is almost no 1960's, no 1970's, no Black History, no Black Criticism, no Black Radicalism, no radicalism, no class struggle... the radical voices of America's black and brown inmates, the strong voices of anti-oppression, anti-imperialism, anti-exploitation, the voices of revolt, rebellion, revolution, Black and Brown power, the most salient historical texts, speeches, time-periods, and philosophies - all these things have been miraculously purged from Alexander's lens in a sort of operational whitewash, a black out, apparently unnoticed." Here again, scholars of Black Studies who support Alexander's thesis would take issue with this analysis. They would assert that while Alexander's study doesn't not explicitly engage the history of the Black liberation struggle, it does not negate it either. To the contrary, her work states an obvious, albeit painful, truth, which is that despite the legacy of Black resistance, American society has remained stubbornly opposed to Black equality and has created the system of mass incarceration to function---as previous system of social control have functioned---to prevent the Black liberation struggle from achieving its ultimate goals of racial justice and equality. Osel also suggests that the book lacks perspective on the larger systems of capitalism, neocolonialism, and racism that generate mass incarcerationpartly, because Alexander's audience would be uncomfortably complicit with these systems.[97] In the end, however, many scholars would argue that Osel's criticism is, again, only mere speculation because it makes dangerous assumptions about Alexander's motivations and her audience without sufficient knowledge or research. Greg Thomas (Associate Professor of Global Black Studies at Syracuse University) has also criticized Alexander for Eurocentrism, emphasizing problems with her terminology. He observes that she uses the terms "Jim Crow," "mass incarceration," and "slavery," but not "racism,""white supremacy," or "capitalism." These choices also serve to isolate the problem of imprisonment from larger systems of domination. Thomas also criticizes Alexander's omission of black history, noting that her historical points of reference are the "founding fathers," "democracy,"and "Obama," rather than radical black anti-prison leaders. She marginalizes longtime activists as "conspiracy theorists," who are misguided to accuse the American government of genocide or to challenge the prison system itself. Alexander also ignores the history of political hip-hop, making only the broad generalization about "gangsta rap" that it enables black youth to identify with the stigma of being criminals. The New Jim Crow repetitively affirms the reality of

The New Jim Crow "colorblindness", arguing that marginalization of blacks is almost accidental, an afterthought that could not be caused by racial prejudice or "bigotry." ("Old fashioned racism seems out of the question."[98]) Finally, Thomas argues that Alexander's solutions to the problem of mass incarceration are counter-revolutionary. Instead of demanding changes to the social structure of the US, she asks for (Christian) love and for "civil rights," positions that will not create radical change.[99] However, not everyone in Black/Africana Studies would agree with Thomas's assessment. Many would maintain that while Alexander may not frequently use terms such as "white supremacy" or "capitalism," her entire thesis is, in fact, a strong critique of both of these systems of oppression. After reviewing her work more carefully, it becomes clear that attacking her use of terms is really a semantic game rather than a serious criticism of her core argument. Similarly, a closer read of Alexander's introduction proves that at least one aspect of Thomas' attack is totally false. While Alexander does admit that she once (many years ago) dismissed prison activists as "conspiracy theorists," she discusses at length how and why she had a fundamental change of heart on this matter. A change of heart that ultimately inspired her to research and write The Jim Crow. If one reads the introduction (and the entire book) carefully, it becomes quite apparent that Thomas' characterization of Alexander is wholly inaccurate. Indeed, much like the "longtime activists" he describes, Alexander is dedicating her life to challenging the very existence of the prison system itself. Moreover, she does not believe that anti-Black racism is "accidental" at all, and after reading her book many scholars would struggle to understand how Thomas could reach this conclusion. In the end, it is interesting and ironic that Thomas concludes with yet another assumption...his assertion that Alexander endorses civil rights and Christian love over any other solution. Does he even know whether Alexander is Christian? And can he state unequivocally that civil rights is the only solution she proposes? If he had followed her public presentations carefully, he should have noted she has also endorsed the legalization of marijuana and advocated for the abolition of the prison industrial complex. See also note C below for another one of Alexander's alternative strategies.

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Analogy to Jim Crow

Yale University Clinical Law Professor James Forman Jr., son of James Forman, prominent civil rights leader of the 1950s and 1960s, has argued that Alexander simplifies and overstates her case by relying too heavily on analogy to the original Jim Crow laws. In his paper Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow, James Forman Jr. identifies Alexander as one of a number of authors who have overstated and misstated their case. He argues that the "New Jim Crow" framework over-emphasizes the War on Drugs and ignores violent crimes. Forman attributes the rise of incarceration and prisons partly to increases in violent crime, and demands for police protection from black communities. Forman argues that Alexander's analysis is demographically simplistic. He suggests that Alexander does not analyze the way imprisonment is (now) heavily stratified by class, even among African-Americans. She also does not discuss mass incarceration of other races. Forman suggests that the original Jim Crow should be kept separate as a unique historical event, and that "new Jim Crow" writers leave out descriptions of the atrocities like lynching and torture that the old regime entailed. He cautions that a movement against mass incarceration will need to address community safety and the treatment of prisoners, in addition than the sheer number of people imprisoned.[100]

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Victimization
Referring to the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, to which Michelle Alexander has repeatedly referenced in public appearances,[101] Senior Fellow Shelby Steele at Stanford University's Hoover Institution stated: "And this points to the second tragedy that Trayvon's sad demise highlights. Before the 1960s the black American identity (though no one ever used the word) was based on our common humanity, on the idea that race was always an artificial and exploitive division between people. After the '60sin a society guilty for its long abuse of uswe took our historical victimization as the central theme of our group identity. We could not have made a worse mistake. "It has given us a generation of ambulance-chasing leaders, and the illusion that our greatest power lies in the manipulation of white guilt. The tragedy surrounding Trayvon's death is not in the possibility that it might have something to do with white racism; the tragedy is in the lustfulness with which so many black leaders, in conjunction with the media, have leapt to exploit his demise for their own power."[102]

Media attention
Alexander's book and work has had media attention including: Boston Review, January/February 2011 Harms Way: Understanding Race and Punishment [103], James Forman. "Legal Scholar Michelle Alexander on The New Jim Crow (part 1) [104] and part 2 [105], Democracy Now! interview by Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman, March 11, 2010. "The Nation: The New Jim Crow" [106], NPR, March 15, 2010. "Scholar: Jim Crow Is Far From Dead" [107], Michel Martin NPR interview with Alexander, June 2, 2010. More 2010 and 2011 citations on NPR [108]. "Michelle Alexander on the New Jim Crow" [109], Making Contact, February 15, 2011. "The LA Progressive: More Black Men Now in Prison System than Enslaved in 1850" [110], report of a talk given by Michelle Alexander, March 27, 2011. The New York Times (limited no-charge access) [111] op-ed by Alexander, May 15, 2011. Other Times mentions [112] including ones by Cornel West ("Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial" [113], August 26, 2011) and Albert R. Hunt ("A Country of Inmates" [114], November 21, 2011 via Bloomberg News). "On Eve of MLK Day, Michelle Alexander & [115] [TransAfrica founder] Randall Robinson on the Mass Incarceration of Black America", Democracy Now! interview by Gonzalez and Goodman, January 13, 2012. "Legal Scholar: Jim Crow Still Exists In America" [116], Fresh Air Dave Davies interview with Michelle Alexander (39 m.), January 16, 2012. Ellison, Garret, "Why author, legal advocate Michelle Alexander thinks Jim Crow still exists in America" [117], The Grand Rapids Press, January 16, 2012.

Notes
a.The persistently lingering result of the lack of land reform, of the fact that the former slaves were not granted any of the property on which they had long labored (unlike many European serfs, emancipated and economically empowered to various degrees by that time,[118] their American counterparts ended up with nothing), is the present extremely inequitable distribution of wealth in the United States along the racial lines. 150 years after the Civil War, the median wealth of a black family is a small fraction of the median wealth of a white family.[119] b.According to Ruth W. Grant of Duke University, the author of the book Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives (Princeton University Press 2011, ISBN 978-0-691-15160-1), the expediency-based plea bargain process, in which 90 to 95% of the felony prosecutions never go to trial, but are settled by the defendant pleading guilty, undermines the purpose and challenges the legitimacy of the justice system. Justice won't take place, because "either the defendant is guilty, but gets off easy by copping a plea, or the defendant is innocent but pleads guilty to

The New Jim Crow avoid the risk of greater punishment". The question of guilt is decided without adjudicating the evidence, the fundamental process of determining the truth and assigning proportionate punishment does not take place.[120] c.Michelle Alexander suggested in a March 2012 New York Times article a possible strategy (she attributed the idea to Susan Burton) for coping with the unjust criminal justice system. If large numbers of the accused could be persuaded to opt out of plea bargain and demand a full trial by jury, to which they are constitutionally entitled, the criminal justice system in its present form would be unable to continue because of lack of resources (it would "crash"). This last resort strategy is controversial, as some would end up with extremely harsh sentences, but, it is argued, progress often cannot be made without sacrifice.[121]

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References
[1] Falling Crime, Teeming Prisons, The New York Times, October 29, 2011 (http:/ / www. nytimes. com/ 2011/ 10/ 30/ opinion/ sunday/ falling-crime-teeming-prisons. html) [2] The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, The New Press, New York 2010, ISBN 978-1-59558-103-7 [3] http:/ / www. laprogressive. com/ rankism/ jim-crow/ [4] The New Jim Crow, p. 1-2 [5] The New Jim Crow, p. 2-5 [6] Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine, "The Crack Attack: America's Latest Drug Scare, 1986-1992", in Images and Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1995) (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=bDdmDnTfffsC& pg=PA147& dq=The+ Crack+ Attack:America's+ latest+ drug+ scare& hl=en& ei=-PLbTKyeBMzAnAfDlJQX& sa=X& oi=book_result& ct=result& resnum=1& ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage& q& f=false) [7] Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout, The CIA, Drugs, and the Press (New York: Verso, 1999) (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=s5qIj_h_PtkC& printsec=frontcover& dq=cockburn+ whiteout& source=bl& ots=zcuB271Ayg& sig=MFZMOz3KvRSTimZ0JE_S1oTZV20& hl=en& ei=X0zcTMKAC4einQep4JQW& sa=X& oi=book_result& ct=result& resnum=2& ved=0CCEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage& q& f=false) [8] The New Jim Crow, p. 5-6 [9] Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate rev. ed. (New York: The New Press, 2006), p. 33 [10] PEW Center on the States, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 (Washington, DC: PEW Center, Feb. 2008), p. 5 (http:/ / www. pewcenteronthestates. org/ report_detail. aspx?id=35904) [11] Donald Braman, Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 3 [12] Results from the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings, NSDUH series H-34, DHHS pub. no. SMA 08-4343 (http:/ / oas. samhsa. gov/ nsduh/ 2k7nsduh/ 2k7Results. cfm) [13] Human Rights Watch, Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs, HRW Reports vol. 12, no. 2 (New York, 2000) (http:/ / www. hrw. org/ reports/ 2000/ usa/ ) [14] Paul Street, The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs, and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (Chicago Urban League, Department of Research and Planning, 2002) (http:/ / www. prisonpolicy. org/ scans/ theviciouscircle. pdf) [15] The New Jim Crow, p. 6-7 [16] Michael Tonry, Thinking About Crime: Sense and Sensibility in American Penal Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 14, 20 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=GHOGsOeyzXgC& printsec=frontcover& dq=thinking+ about+ crime) [17] National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, Task Force Report on Corrections (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973), p. 358, 597 [18] Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, p. 17-18 [19] The New Jim Crow, p. 7-9 [20] The New Jim Crow, p. 9-12 [21] The New Jim Crow, p. 12-16 [22] The New Jim Crow, p. 16-19 [23] The New Jim Crow, p. 25 [24] The New Jim Crow, p. 25-26 [25] The New Jim Crow, p. 26-30 [26] The New Jim Crow, p. 30-35 [27] The New Jim Crow, p. 35-40 [28] The New Jim Crow, p. 40-57 [29] The New Jim Crow, p. 59 [30] The New Jim Crow, p. 60-62 [31] The New Jim Crow, p. 62-66

The New Jim Crow

[32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] [56] [57] [58] [59] [60] [61] [62] [63] [64] [65] [66] [67] [68] [69] [70] [71] [72] [73] [74] [75] [76] [77] [78] [79] [80] [81] [82] [83] [84] [85] [86] [87] The New Jim Crow, p. 66-68 The New Jim Crow, p. 68-71 Bureau of Justice Assistance (http:/ / www. ojp. usdoj. gov/ BJA/ grant/ byrne. html) The New Jim Crow, p. 71-73 The New Jim Crow, p. 73-77 The New Jim Crow, p. 77-79 The New Jim Crow, p. 79-83 The New Jim Crow, p. 83-85 The New Jim Crow, p. 85-88 The New Jim Crow, p. 89-92 The New Jim Crow, p. 92-94 The New Jim Crow, p. 105-106 The New Jim Crow, p. 106-109 The New Jim Crow, p. 134-136 The New Jim Crow, p. 95-98 The New Jim Crow, p. 98-100 The New Jim Crow, p. 100-101 The New Jim Crow, p. 101-105 The New Jim Crow, p. 105-106 The New Jim Crow, p. 109-112 The New Jim Crow, p. 112-116 The New Jim Crow, p. 116-120 The New Jim Crow, p. 120-124 The New Jim Crow, p. 124-125 The New Jim Crow, p. 125-128 The New Jim Crow, p. 128-130 The New Jim Crow, p. 130-132 The New Jim Crow, p. 132-133 The New Jim Crow, p. 134-135 The New Jim Crow, p. 135-136 The New Jim Crow, p. 137-138 The New Jim Crow, p. 139-141 The New Jim Crow, p. 141-145 The New Jim Crow, p. 145-148 The New Jim Crow, p. 148-150 The New Jim Crow, p. 150-152 The New Jim Crow, p. 152-153 The New Jim Crow, p. 153-156 The New Jim Crow, p. 156-160 The New Jim Crow, p. 161-162 The New Jim Crow, p. 162-164 The New Jim Crow, p. 164-167 The New Jim Crow, p. 168-170 The New Jim Crow, p. 170-172 The New Jim Crow, p. 173-176 The New Jim Crow, p. 176-180 The New Jim Crow, p. 180-182 The New Jim Crow, p. 182-185 The New Jim Crow, p. 185-186 The New Jim Crow, p. 186 The New Jim Crow, p. 186-187 The New Jim Crow, p. 187-188 The New Jim Crow, p. 188-189 The New Jim Crow, p. 189 The New Jim Crow, p. 189-192 The New Jim Crow, p. 192-195

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[88] The New Jim Crow, p. 195-197 [89] The New Jim Crow, p. 197-198 [90] The New Jim Crow, p. 198-202

The New Jim Crow

[91] The New Jim Crow, p. 202-208 [92] The New Jim Crow, p. 209-211 [93] The New Jim Crow, p. 211-217 [94] The New Jim Crow, p. 217-224 [95] The New Jim Crow, p. 224-227 [96] The New Jim Crow, p. 227-231 [97] Joseph D. Osel (2012-04-07). "Black Out: Michelle Alexander's Operational Whitewash" (http:/ / philpapers. org/ archive/ OSEBOM. 4. pdf?pagewanted=all). International Journal of Radical Critique. . Retrieved 2012-05-04. [98] The New Jim Crow, p. 103; quoted in Thomas, 2012 [99] Greg Thomas (2012-04-26). "Why Some Like The New Jim Crow So Much" (http:/ / www. voxunion. com/ why-some-like-the-new-jim-crow-so-much/ ?pagewanted=all). Vox Union. . Retrieved 2012-05-04. [100] Forman, Jr., James (26 February 2012). "RACIAL CRITIQUES OF MASS INCARCERATION: BEYOND THE NEW JIM CROW" (http:/ / www. law. yale. edu/ documents/ pdf/ Faculty/ Forman_RacialCritiques. pdf?pagewanted=all). Racial Critiques 87: 101-146. . Retrieved 13 June 2012. [101] http:/ / www. npr. org/ 2012/ 04/ 01/ 149808240/ race-politics-and-the-trayvon-martin-case [102] Steele, Shelby (April 6, 2012). "Shelby Steele: The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin" (http:/ / online. wsj. com/ article/ SB10001424052702303302504577323691134926300. html?mod=googlenews_wsj). The Wall Street Journal. . [103] http:/ / bostonreview. net/ BR36. 1/ forman. php [104] http:/ / www. democracynow. org/ 2010/ 3/ 11/ legal_scholar_michelle_alexander_on_the [105] http:/ / www. democracynow. org/ 2010/ 3/ 12/ part_ii_michelle_alexander_on_the [106] http:/ / www. npr. org/ templates/ story/ story. php?storyId=124687663 [107] http:/ / www. npr. org/ templates/ story/ story. php?storyId=127368484 [108] http:/ / www. npr. org/ templates/ search/ index. php?searchinput=%22Michelle+ Alexander%22& tabId=all& sort=date& sort=date& start=10 [109] http:/ / www. radioproject. org/ 2011/ 02/ michelle-alexander-on-the-new-jim-crow/ [110] http:/ / www. laprogressive. com/ black-men-prison-system/ [111] http:/ / www. nytimes. com/ 2011/ 05/ 15/ opinion/ 15alexander. html [112] http:/ / query. nytimes. com/ search/ sitesearch?query=%22Michelle+ Alexander%22& more=date_all [113] http:/ / www. nytimes. com/ 2011/ 08/ 26/ opinion/ martin-luther-king-jr-would-want-a-revolution-not-a-memorial. html [114] http:/ / www. nytimes. com/ 2011/ 11/ 21/ us/ 21iht-letter21. html [115] http:/ / www. democracynow. org/ 2012/ 1/ 13/ on_eve_of_mlk_day_michelle [116] http:/ / www. npr. org/ 2012/ 01/ 16/ 145175694/ legal-scholar-jim-crow-still-exists-in-america [117] http:/ / www. mlive. com/ news/ grand-rapids/ index. ssf/ 2012/ 01/ why_author_legal_advocate_mich. html [118] Richard Overy (2010), The Times Complete History of the World, Eights Edition, p. 200-201. London: Times Books. ISBN 978-0-00-788089-8. [119] "Downturn widens racial wealth gap" (http:/ / www. bbc. co. uk/ news/ 14296246). BBC News. 2011-07-26. . Retrieved 2012-05-17. [120] Nancy F. Koehn (2012-02-04). "When Life Is a Bunch of Carrots" (http:/ / www. nytimes. com/ 2012/ 02/ 05/ business/ strings-attached-looks-at-incentives-and-ethics-review. html?pagewanted=all). The New York Times. . Retrieved 2012-02-10. [121] Michelle Alexander (2012-03-11). "Go to trial: Crash the Justice System" (http:/ / www. nytimes. com/ 2012/ 03/ 11/ opinion/ sunday/ go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system. html?pagewanted=all). The New York Times. . Retrieved 2012-03-25.

45

External links
The New Jim Crow official site (http://www.newjimcrow.com/) In Prison Reform, Money Trumps Civil Rights, Michelle Alexander (The New York Times, May 14, 2011) (http:/ /www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15alexander.html) Justices, 5-4, Tell California to Cut Prisoner Population, Adam Liptak (The New York Times, May 23, 2011) (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html?ref=us) Trend to Lighten Harsh Sentences Catches On in Conservative States, Charlie Savage (The New York Times, August 13, 2011) (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/us/13penal.html?ref=us) Sex Offenders: The Last Pariahs, Roger N. Lancaster (The New York Times, August 20, 2011) (http://www. nytimes.com/2011/08/21/opinion/sunday/sex-offenders-the-last-pariahs.html?pagewanted=all) Tortured by Solitude, Sarah Shourd (The New York Times, November 5, 2011) (http://www.nytimes.com/ 2011/11/06/opinion/sunday/in-an-iranian-prison-tortured-by-solitude.html?pagewanted=all) Why Is the N.Y.P.D. After Me?, Nicholas K. Peart (The New York Times, December 17, 2011) (http://www. nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/young-black-and-frisked-by-the-nypd.html?pagewanted=all)

The New Jim Crow Radical Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow, Critical Review (Radical Critiques, February 27, 2012) (http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Faculty/Forman_RacialCritiques. pdf?pagewanted=all) Black Out: Michelle Alexander's Operational Whitewash, Critical Review (International Journal of Radical Critique, April 7, 2012) (http://philpapers.org/archive/OSEBOM.4.pdf?pagewanted=all) Why Some Like The New Jim Crow So Much, Critical Review (Vox Union, April 26, 2012) (http://www. voxunion.com/why-some-like-the-new-jim-crow-so-much/?pagewanted=all)

46

Article Sources and Contributors

47

Article Sources and Contributors

Jim Crow laws Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=516337039 Contributors: 0kdal, 0x6D667061, 128.196.133.xxx, 1995hoo, 34h5, 34oj6h, 45435g, 7&6=thirteen, A066611484, AbbyKelleyite, Absalom89, Absecon 59, Acbertrand, Addshore, Agiacco, Ahoerstemeier, Al Lemos, Ale jrb, Alex.tan, AlexR, Alexmartini945, Aliceinlampyland, Alien Threat, Allstarecho, Andonic, Andrew Maiman, Andrummer2012, Andy pyro, Angela, Anger22, Animarxivist, Anna678, AnnaFrance, Antandrus, Anthony Appleyard, Arenlor, Ariellen, Arminius, Asc85, Aspects, Atavi, Atlant, Atomsmasher86, AuburnPilot, Avocato, Az1568, AzaToth, BD2412, Baffle gab1978, Balco1, Banpei, BanyanTree, Barbsmart, Barcovelero, Barneca, BaronGrackle, Bastique, Bcorr, Bcrowell, Beland, Bellerophon5685, Belovedfreak, Bender235, Benjiboi, Benwbrum, Bhadani, Big Adamsky, BigK HeX, Billybutterworthreborn, Bkhouser, Blake-, Blobglob, Bobo192, Bogey97, BostonMA, Brian0918, Brianga, Brunohonurb, Brunshteyn, CIreland, CWY2190, CWii, Caieq1, Calor, Caltas, CambridgeBayWeather, Can't sleep, clown will eat me, Caper13, CapitalR, Captain538, Carrite, Cb77305, Cdoug20, CelticJobber, Cgingold, Ch110593, Chanting Fox, Chapps, Charles Hsu, CharlotteWebb, Chaser, Chitt66, Chochopk, Chrislk02, Christopher Mann McKay, Christopher Parham, City52, Civil Engineer III, Clamster5, Clarahamster, Claygate, Clutch, Cmtsk8er, Colipon, Colonies Chris, Conversion script, Cool3, Coorsnfl, Corevette, Cotton10, Countdown to oblivion, Cremepuff222, Crust, CryptoDerk, Curps, CutOffTies, Cyan, Cyfal, Cyrrk, D55689951, DBaba, DMacks, DS1953, Dakinijones, Dale Arnett, DanKeshet, Dangerousnerd, Daniel Case, Danny-w, Danthemankhan, Dardasavta, Dargen, Darth Panda, Darwinek, David Underdown, Davidcannon, Dawn Bard, Dc freethinker, Dcandeto, Decumanus, Deeceevoice, Deltabeignet, Denisearden, Deor, Der Eberswalder, DerHexer, Derek Ross, Dgw, DingoGroton, DiscordantNote, Discospinster, Djmattb, Djwolfie, Doc Tropics, Dodger, Dodo von den Bergen, Dogru144, Dominus, Doradus, Durin, Durova, Dwalls, E. 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Ferguson Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=516011326 Contributors: -Midorihana-, 15turnsm, 2D, 5 albert square, A.R., ABF, Aaron Schulz, Aazn, Abeg92, Abelian, Absecon 59, Acalamari, Acroterion, Adashiel, AdjustShift, Adrian, Ahoerstemeier, Ajt067, AlanK, Alansohn, Albacore, Ale jrb, Alexius08, Alf.laylah.wa.laylah, Ali K, AliMaghrebi, Allisonmarieanne, Amatulic, Amcbride, AmiDaniel, Andrij Kursetsky, AngelOfSadness, Angelfalls06, Ann Stouter, Antandrus, Arcadie, Arda Xi, Arichnad, Arthena, Arthur Rubin, Aruton, Audacity, Autiger, AutoGeek, Avant Guard, Avenged Eightfold, Avnjay, Avono, Az1568, B.Davis21, B00P, BD2412, Bart133, Beardo, Belles echo, Bender235, Bennetto, Bennybp, Bento00, Betacommand, Bhadani, BigTanker, BillWSmithJr, Black Yoshi, Bleh999, Blethering Scot, Blimpie0513, BlueMoonlet, Blueanode, Bluezy, Blulightning, Blz43, Bobo192, Boing! said Zebedee, Bolt Vanderhuge, Bongwarrior, Boothy443, Bradyodad44, Breckgordon, BrianGV, Bryan Derksen, Burner0718, BusterD, Bytenik, CALR, CBDunkerson, CPMcE, CWenger, Cadwaladr, Caiaffa, Can't sleep, clown will eat me, Cannaya, Canuckian89, Capricorn42, Capt. 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SDC, SMC, Sandstein, Saradonati, Savidan, Schumi555, Scotty795, Sean William, Seaphoto, Seb az86556, Seilidair, ShadowRangerRIT, Sheldrake, Shelliekretzschmar, Shirulashem, Sietse Snel, Simesa, Sionus, Siroxo, Sisyphe, Sjfsldkfs, Skarebo, Skittlez10672, Skyler1534, Skywriter, Sladen, Slon02, Smb1138, SnapLaw, Snowolf, Some jerk on the Internet, Someone37, Soulpatch, SpaceFlight89, Spadeprince, Specs112, Speedyd410, Spr411, Srmacrina, StaticGull, SteinbDJ, Stephan Schulz, StephenF, Stevenscollege, Stuttermullet1, Subsailor, Superbeecat, SwedishConqueror, Swerdnaneb, THEN WHO WAS PHONE?, THF, TMC1982, TOttenville8, TYelliot, Tad Lincoln, Tariqabjotu, Tealwisp, Techman224, Tfine80, The Placebo Effect, The Thing That Should Not Be, The sunder king, TheSwami, Theaveng, Thingg, Tiddly Tom, Tide rolls, Tim!, Tim1357, Timrem, Timrollpickering, Tiptoety, Tjb 1999, Tlim7882, Togepi3x3, Tom Morris, Tom harrison, Tommy2010, Toytoy, Tphi, Trademark123, TransUtopian, Trentters, Trusilver, Twinkie eater91, Twir, Twooars, TyA, Tysen, Tyw7, UCLATre, UW, Uaktags, Uncle Dick, Unclebanglin, Unschool, Utcursch, Velella, Vgranucci, Vickser, Victor9876, Vineet90, Volga2, Vrenator, WAvegetarian, Wavelength, Wayward, WendellPhillips, Weregerbil, West Brom 4ever, White Shadows, White28, Wiki Raja, Wiki alf, Wikidudeman, Wikieditor1534, Willmcca, Woohookitty, Work permit, Wysprgr2005, Xo leading starr ox, Xompanthy, Y, Y0u, Yahel Guhan, Yamamoto Ichiro, Yeslekxox, Yolo4all, Yukisealive, Z4r4thustr4, Zach99998, Zacreese, Zav, Zhaladshar, Zoe, Zsinj, 1979 anonymous edits The New Jim Crow Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=516549718 Contributors: Ammodramus, Apostle12, Bender235, BillShurts, Bucoli, Eastlaw, Funnyfarmofdoom, Gasterly, Giraffedata, Glacialfox, GrahamHardy, Groupuscule, Iso700, Jgleissn, John of Reading, Kumioko (renamed), LanternLight, Maimone, Materialscientist, Nick Number, Orczar, Servatai, Skjinnes, Smkyle1, Student7, Sun Creator, Swliv, Tahseen libra, TehNomad, Topbanana, 35 anonymous edits

Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors

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Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors

File:Jim Crow Jubilee (Boston Public Library).jpg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Jim_Crow_Jubilee_(Boston_Public_Library).jpg License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Contributors: BPL File:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:JimCrowInDurhamNC.jpg License: Public Domain Contributors: BaomoVW, Cocoaguy, DanTD, Darwinek, Dbaba, FSII, Infrogmation, Pullus In Fabula, Skinsmoke, Timeshifter File:JimCrowCar2.jpg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:JimCrowCar2.jpg License: Public Domain Contributors: John T. McCutcheon File:WhiteTradeOnlyLancasterOhio.jpg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:WhiteTradeOnlyLancasterOhio.jpg License: Public Domain Contributors: Ben Shahn (18981969) File:BilliardHallForColored.jpg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:BilliardHallForColored.jpg License: Public Domain Contributors: Darwinek, Dbaba, DoxTxob, FSII, Infrogmation File:WhiteDoorColoredDoor.jpg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:WhiteDoorColoredDoor.jpg License: Public Domain Contributors: Darwinek, Dbaba, Djembayz, FSII, Infrogmation File:WhiteAndColoredServedBelleGlade.jpg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:WhiteAndColoredServedBelleGlade.jpg License: Public Domain Contributors: AnRo0002, Darwinek, Dbaba, FSII, Infrogmation, J 1982, 1 anonymous edits File:Segregation 1938b.jpg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Segregation_1938b.jpg License: Public Domain Contributors: John Vachon for U.S. Farm Security Administration File:ColoredDrinking.jpg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:ColoredDrinking.jpg License: unknown Contributors: Image:Seal of the United States Supreme Court.svg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Seal_of_the_United_States_Supreme_Court.svg License: Public Domain Contributors: Ipankonin File:Plessy marker.jpg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Plessy_marker.jpg License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Contributors: Skywriter Image:upclosepvsfergfront.JPG Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Upclosepvsfergfront.JPG License: Public Domain Contributors: Bluemarie0428 Image:plessyfergusonphototwo.jpg Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Plessyfergusonphototwo.jpg License: Public Domain Contributors: Bluemarie0428

License

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License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported //creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/