Jim Crow

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• SOURCE: Mississippi Free Press
  1/11/2023
  

  Mississippi AG: We Purged "Taint" of Racism from Felon Disenfranchisement Law in 1968

  Attorney General Janet Fitch insisted that the Supreme Court had no cause to review the state's law disenfranchising certain felons. She acknowledged the explicit racist intent embedded in the statute but insisted that "taint" had been removed. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  12/12/2022
  

  Review: When Freedom Meant the Freedom to Oppress

  by Jeff Shesol

  Jefferson Cowie's new book traces the current resurgence of racist and antigovernment radicalism through the history of George Wallace's Alabama home county. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  12/4/2022
  

  What the Jerry Jones Photo Shows About Historical Inequity in the NFL

  Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has explained his presence in an anti-integration mob as an innocent coincidence. As the most powerful owner in the NFL, he likewise leads an organization that exhibits racial inequality without anyone feeling responsible for it. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  11/30/2022
  

  1957 Jerry Jones Photo Shows How Close The Past Really Is

  "We know, at least in the abstract, what happened in the days and years after this photo of Jones was taken. He was there and he is here."

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  11/14/2022
  

  Monuments to the Unthinkable

  by Clint Smith

  German and European memorials to the Holocaust contrast starkly with an American memorial culture where the Confederate dead are revered, former slave plantations are tourist attractions, and state legislatures are seeking to ban the teaching of the nation's history in full. 

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• SOURCE: PBS News Hour
  11/1/2022
  

  Will Alabama Voters Strip Jim Crow Language from State Constitution?

  The framers of the 1901 constitution were direct about their goal to maintain a government controlled by whites.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/25/2022
  

  When Italian Immigrants were Tricked into Debt Peonage in the Jim Crow South

  A labor agency in Mississippi experimented with a creative, if evil, solution to the problem of Black demands for labor rights at the turn of the 20th century: trick Italian farmers to sign contracts that shackled them with debt to their employers.  

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  9/20/2022
  

  Governors DeSantis and Abbott Borrow from the Jim Crow Playbook

  by Greta de Jong

  "Immigration scholars have noted how U.S. foreign policies contributed to the poverty and violence in Central and South America that migrants are fleeing. Yet rather than acknowledge this – along with assuming the moral responsibilities it entails – some GOP leaders denigrate and dehumanize refugees to win support from voters."

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• SOURCE: Jacobin
  8/28/2022
  

  Recovering the Core Radicalism of the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Glenda Gilmore

  by Robert Greene II

  Cold war histories of civil rights have obscured the key role of communists and other radicals in establishing the economic demands of the movement and the practice of interracial mobilization. 

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• SOURCE: Mississippi Free Press
  8/24/2022
  

  Court Upholds Mississippi's 1890 Jim Crow Voting Law

  The framers of the state's voting laws were explicit in their intention to use the law to strip as many Black men of their right to vote as possible. A federal court recently ruled that the law, amended with nominally color-blind language, is acceptable. 

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• SOURCE: Associated Press
  8/3/2022
  

  Can 500 Dinner Discussions Bring Atlantans to Recognition and Reconciliation over the 1906 Race Massacre?

  Local activists seek to overcome a local pattern of forgetting of the events of 1906, a collective amnesia supported by the city's black and white leaders who have favored the image of a harmonious city as part of a good business climate. 

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• 7/31/2022
  

  Weaponizing Bad-Faith History is a Conservative Tradition from Jim Crow to Alito

  by Charles J. Holden

  "Conservatives’ invocations of history often mixed wishful thinking about the past with bad faith in interpreting it. And it was always done with the present-minded purpose of maintaining elite white male rule, especially on matters of race."

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• 6/5/2022
  

  Is the Republican Party Willing to Purge its Extremists?

  by Jeff Kolnick

  Beginning in the 1920s, the Democratic Party began the long, difficult, and politically costly process of dissociation from white supremacy. Do today's Republicans who claim to reject extremism have the courage to do the same?

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• 6/5/2022
  

  The Dobbs Decision Punctures the Supreme Court's Sacred Mythology

  by Alan J. Singer

  The Supreme Court uses a myth of its own impartiality to justify a legacy of judicial review that is tainted by its service to slavery and Jim Crow. 

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• SOURCE: Codastory
  3/30/2022
  

  Germany's Racial Reckoning Offers Warnings for US

  "Seen from an American perspective, Germany is often portrayed as the wise and capable professor of remembrance; the U.S its difficult student."

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• SOURCE: Oxford American
  3/22/2022
  

  Questing for the Past

  by Katherine Churchill

  A nameplate in an 1864 edition of Gawain and the Green Knight led the author to discover the connections between a mythic medieval past and the Lost Cause ideology of Jim Crow Virginia. 

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• SOURCE: PBS News Hour
  3/19/2022
  

  Will Alabama Expunge White Supremacist Language that Remains in its Constitution?

  Alabama's 1901 constitution was written expressly to enshrine white supremacy. Voters will have the chance to approve changes to its language by a ballot referendum this fall. 

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• SOURCE: AL.com
  1/16/2022
  

  Ambushed in Eufaula: Alabama's Forgotten Racist Massacre

  In 1874 a group of Black Republicans who came to the town of Eufaula to vote were ambushed by white mobs, part of the Democratic overthrow of Reconstruction and a step toward reestablishing white supremacy in the state.

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• SOURCE: AL.com
  1/12/2022
  

  Alabama's Capitol is a Crime Scene, with a 120 Year Coverup

  The Alabama Capitol in Montgomery was the first seat of the Confederate government and the place where white Democrats ratified a Jim Crow constitution in 1901. You'd learn little of this by touring the museum-like building. 

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• SOURCE: MSNBC
  1/5/2022
  

  Homer Plessy's Posthumous Pardon Finally Recognizes His Heroism

  by Keisha N. Blain

  "The decision to pardon Plessy and finally clear his record are the culmination of efforts by Keith Plessy, the great-great-grandson of Homer Plessy’s cousin, and Phoebe Ferguson, the great-great-granddaughter of John H. Ferguson, the Louisiana judge who upheld the state's Separate Car Act."