Nebraska State Office Building, 14th &Amp: Fill & Download for Free

Okay, there are going to be several points in this answer so, please bear with it past my opening “shock” comment.I’m a liberal Democrat in Texas, and I am a liberal before I’m a Democrat. You don’t hear me whining about it do you? Man up, Priscilla.Now, is your vote “valueless”? It depends on what value you place on it.First, there are no national electionS (plural). There is one national electioN (singular) that happens every four years. Technically, we vote for two offices nationally but we all know that it is the vote for president that matters. Every other vote is state or local. Do you only go to the polls once every four years and cast a single vote for one office? Or do you also vote for your Senators and Representatives? Or your various state officers? I don’t know anyone who only votes in one of the elections. That means that you are there anyway so, what does it harm or cost you to vote for your preferred presidential candidate while you’re voting for everyone else?If you are concerned about your state’s electoral votes, then get together with your friends and push your state legislature to change how your state allocates its electors. They can be cast, for example, based on who wins in each congressional district? Maine and Nebraska do that. There are even several different ways that your state’s two senatorial electoral votes can be allocated. The votes can be allocated proportionally, although no state does that because the want the power they think it gives them to allocate by “winner takes all”. Proportionally is how I advocate every state allocate them… see how effective I’ve been at that? Right now, there are, I think, 14 states that have committed their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Wouldn’t you feel like an idiot if your candidate lost the popular vote because of your single vote and all of the electoral votes from those states go to the other guy?Now, even if your candidate is the one who wins, how much does YOUR single vote contribute to that? Not much. You know those stories you hear about the time one single guy was carried to the poll because he was sick, and his candidate won by one vote, which had a ripple effect upwards? Yeah, ignore those stories. We know about them because they are SO rare that using that to justify going out and voting would also make you an idiot. Vote or don’t vote for a real reason, not because of some fairy tale. Hell, people win millions of dollars in lotteries around the country all the time. They don’t stick in our minds because they are actually fairly common. Yeah, that should tell you how UNcommon it is for one single vote to matter on a national level. Think of it, instead, like ants building a mound. No single ant makes any significant contribution to the building of that mound. Instead, it is the combined work of millions of ants that build the mound. You and me, we’re ants in this scenario.Now, your state has lousy legislators, not to mention your congressional delegation, right? I’m not pointing out anyone in particular, everyone in every state feels that way. I’ll be honest, I not only hate most of the people who get elected to state and federal offices in Texas, I can name a dozen who, if they aren’t in the running for stupidest person in Congress, they at least make it a contest. And the guy where I just moved… yeah, he’s my number 1 candidate for that distinction. So, work to get better candidates. What’s that? Your state party is full of idiots as well? Yeah, mine, too. But, what matters is not if you manage to get any changes made… again, we’re ants, remember? And yet, these are the people who draw all of our state’s political districts every 10 years… and that has just gotten worse and worse every decade of my life (I’m about to hit my 6th one). Still, do it because, if you don’t, what right do you have to bitch and moan about the morons and idiots making all of these decisions for us? I bitch and moan about them, but at least I’m not a hypocrite… I’m trying… but maybe not as hard as I could… hey, I have a life, too… so maybe, I’m a little bit of a hypocrite. It gives me room to improve, though.Finally, your vote has value because it is your by right. There is no guarantee that your candidate will win. There is no guarantee that you will be represented by worthwhile people that you can at least respect. The only guarantee is that your body gets to vote, regardless of any election outcome. And, even that has been a struggle.In 1800, every state got to say who got to vote there and, in most cases, it was free white men of age with property. In the elections of 1824 and 1828, it became free white men of age… but not paupers, vagrants, bums, or felons. Still, we took our first steps towards the IDEA of universal suffrage then.The 14th Amendment (1868) defined who were citizens and it was followed by the 15th Amendment (1870) which established that, in every state, voting was a right of citizenship. But, we still had a ways to go. Hell, we’re still working on that. Some people think that voting should be a privilege that only the “right” people get to utilize but, in theory, at least, just by being a citizen you have the right to vote.Do you know why we call a slate of candidates a “ticket”? Because people were handed ballots that had already been filled out for the candidates they were expected to vote for. Maybe they got the ballot from their party boss, or their work boss? Maybe it was from the guy you owed money to, or the guy who got you that good job you have? Maybe you owe someone a favor, or maybe you have been promised something for casting your ballot for their ticket? Or maybe it was the guy who had that big party, got you really drunk, and maybe even got you laid. Yeah, you want him to invite you to his next party, don’t you? But, here’s the thing… all of those different tickets you’ve been given? They are all different colors. And you have to walk in front of everyone to drop your colored paper in a box, so EVERYONE knows who you voted for. Maybe you lose your job now, or get kicked out of your house? Maybe you get waylaid and beaten to a bloody pulp? Maybe your loan is called in? Maybe any of a dozen different things happen to you because everyone knows who you voted for. But, guess what, in the 1880s, this new voting idea got here from Australia… the “Australian” ballot or, as you know it, the secret ballot.And yet, there were more struggles ahead. Women weren’t given the right to vote in every state until 1920. The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, in an effort to make it possible for all citizens to be allowed to exercise their right to vote. Eighteen-year-olds got the right to vote in all elections in 1971. Now, people are wondering if the voting age should be dropped to 16? It is a never finished effort. Once one hurdle is overcome, there is still another one ahead on the road. So, a hell of a lot of people lived and died in this country without even having the right to vote. People fought and, yes, people died to give more people that right. People are still fighting about it. But, if people don’t make the effort to vote, even if it is for someone who is going to lose, maybe tomorrow someone will say that not everyone needs that right and starts taking it away.The right to vote is a defining characteristic of American citizenship, of American democracy (yeah, we can have that discussion another day, for now, just go with it). So, you tell me, regardless of your political party or ideology, regardless of where you live, regardless of any other factors… is your vote without value just because your candidate might lose?

Oddly the name comes from a white man who was caricaturing a black man:Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white man, was born in New York City in 1808. He devoted himself to the theater in his twenties, and in the early 1830s, he began performing the act that would make him famous: he painted his face black and did a song and dance he claimed were inspired by a slave he saw. The act was called “Jump, Jim Crow” (or “Jumping Jim Crow”).“He would put on not only blackface makeup, but shabby dress that imitated in his mind and white peoples minds of the time” the dress and aspect and demeanor of the southern enslaved black person,says Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Classand professor of English and American Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center.Rice’s routine was a hit in New York City, one of many of places in the North where working-class whites could see blackface minstrelsy, which was quickly becoming a dominant form of theater and a leading source for popular music in America. Rice took his act on tour, even going as far as England; and as his popularity grew, his stage name seeped into the culture. Who Was Jim Crow?Jim Crow was a way of life. It was an ideology of racial superiority similar to apartheid and was codified into law.The following discussion is long but this era deserves to be understood for the horrorshow it was.Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that whites were the Chosen people, blacks were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that blacks were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to whites. Pro-segregation politicians gave eloquent speeches on the great danger of integration: the mongrelization of the white race. Newspaper and magazine writers routinely referred to blacks as niggers, coons, and darkies; and worse, their articles reinforced anti-black stereotypes. Even children's games portrayed blacks as inferior beings. All major societal institutions reflected and supported the oppression of blacks.The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or rationalizations: whites were superior to blacks in all important ways, including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior; sexual relations between blacks and whites would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America; treating blacks as equals would encourage interracial sexual unions; any activity which suggested social equality encouraged interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. The following Jim Crow etiquette norms show how inclusive and pervasive these norms were:• A black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a white male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a white woman, because he risked being accused of rape.• Blacks and whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them.• Under no circumstance was a black male to offer to light the cigarette of a white female -- that gesture implied intimacy.• Blacks were not allowed to show public affection toward one another in public, especially kissing, because it offended whites.• Jim Crow etiquette prescribed that blacks were introduced to whites, never whites to blacks. For example: "Mr. Peters (the white person), this is Charlie (the black person), that I spoke to you about."• Whites did not use courtesy titles of respect when referring to blacks, for example, Mr., Mrs., Miss., Sir, or Ma'am. Instead, blacks were called by their first names. Blacks had to use courtesy titles when referring to whites, and were not allowed to call them by their first names.• If a black person rode in a car driven by a white person, the black person sat in the back seat, or the back of a truck.• White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections.Stetson Kennedy, the author of Jim Crow Guide(1990), offered these simple rules that blacks were supposed to observe in conversing with whites:1) Never assert or even intimate that a white person is lying.2) Never impute dishonorable intentions to a white person.3) Never suggest that a white person is from an inferior class.4) Never lay claim to, or overly demonstrate, superior knowledge or intelligence.5) Never curse a white person.6) Never laugh derisively at a white person.7) Never comment upon the appearance of a white female.Jim Crow etiquette operated in conjunction with Jim Crow laws (black codes). When most people think of Jim Crow they think of laws (not the Jim Crow etiquette) which excluded blacks from public transport and facilities, juries, jobs, and neighborhoods. The passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution had granted blacks the same legal protections as whites. However, after 1877, and the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, southern and border states began restricting the liberties of blacks. Unfortunately for blacks, the Supreme Court helped undermine the Constitutional protections of blacks with the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case, which legitimized Jim Crow laws and the Jim Crow way of life.In 1890, Louisiana passed the "Separate Car Law," which purported to aid passenger comfort by creating "equal but separate" cars for blacks and whites. This was a ruse. No public accommodations, including railway travel, provided blacks with equal facilities. The Louisiana law made it illegal for blacks to sit in coach seats reserved for whites, and whites could not sit in seats reserved for blacks. In 1891, a group of blacks decided to test the Jim Crow law. They had Homer A. Plessy, who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black (therefore, black), sit in the white-only railroad coach. He was arrested. Plessy's lawyer argued that Louisiana did not have the right to label one citizen as white and another black for the purposes of restricting their rights and privileges. In Plessy, the Supreme Court stated that so long as state governments provided legal process and legal freedoms for blacks, equal to those of whites, they could maintain separate institutions to facilitate these rights. The Court, by a 7-2 vote, upheld the Louisiana law, declaring that racial separation did not necessarily mean an abrogation of equality. In practice, Plessy represented the legitimization of two societies: one white, and advantaged; the other, black, disadvantaged and despised.Blacks were denied the right to vote by grandfather clauses (laws that restricted the right to vote to people whose ancestors had voted before the Civil War), poll taxes (fees charged to poor blacks), white primaries (only Democrats could vote, only whites could be Democrats), and literacy tests ("Name all the Vice Presidents and Supreme Court Justices throughout America's history"). Plessy sent this message to southern and border states: Discrimination against blacks is acceptable.Jim Crow states passed statutes severely regulating social interactions between the races. Jim Crow signs were placed above water fountains, door entrances and exits, and in front of public facilities. There were separate hospitals for blacks and whites, separate prisons, separate public and private schools, separate churches, separate cemeteries, separate public restrooms, and separate public accommodations. In most instances, the black facilities were grossly inferior -- generally, older, less-well-kept. In other cases, there were no black facilities -- no Colored public restroom, no public beach, no place to sit or eat. Plessy gave Jim Crow states a legal way to ignore their constitutional obligations to their black citizens.Jim Crow laws touched every aspect of everyday life. For example, in 1935, Oklahoma prohibited blacks and whites from boating together. Boating implied social equality. In 1905, Georgia established separate parks for blacks and whites. In 1930, Birmingham, Alabama, made it illegal for blacks and whites to play checkers or dominoes together. Here are some of the typical Jim Crow laws, as compiled by the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site Interpretive Staff:• Barbers. No colored barber shall serve as a barber (to) white girls or women (Georgia).• Blind Wards. The board of trustees shall...maintain a separate building...on separate ground for the admission, care, instruction, and support of all blind persons of the colored or black race (Louisiana).• Burial. The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons (Georgia).• Buses. All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races (Alabama).• Child Custody. It shall be unlawful for any parent, relative, or other white person in this State, having the control or custody of any white child, by right of guardianship, natural or acquired, or otherwise, to dispose of, give or surrender such white child permanently into the custody, control, maintenance, or support, of a negro (South Carolina).• Education. The schools for white children and the schools for negro children shall be conducted separately (Florida).• Libraries. The state librarian is directed to fit up and maintain a separate place for the use of the colored people who may come to the library for the purpose of reading books or periodicals (North Carolina).• Mental Hospitals. The Board of Control shall see that proper and distinct apartments are arranged for said patients, so that in no case shall Negroes and white persons be together (Georgia).• Militia. The white and colored militia shall be separately enrolled, and shall never be compelled to serve in the same organization. No organization of colored troops shall be permitted where white troops are available and where whites are permitted to be organized, colored troops shall be under the command of white officers (North Carolina).• Nurses. No person or corporation shall require any White female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which negro men are placed (Alabama).• Prisons. The warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts (Mississippi).• Reform Schools.The children of white and colored races committed to the houses of reform shall be kept entirely separate from each other (Kentucky).• Teaching. Any instructor who shall teach in any school, college or institution where members of the white and colored race are received and enrolled as pupils for instruction shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined... (Oklahoma).• Wine and Beer. All persons licensed to conduct the business of selling beer or wine...shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room at any time (Georgia).The Jim Crow laws and system of etiquette were undergirded by violence, real and threatened. Blacks who violated Jim Crow norms, for example, drinking from the white water fountain or trying to vote, risked their homes, their jobs, even their lives. Whites could physically beat blacks with impunity. Blacks had little legal recourse against these assaults because the Jim Crow criminal justice system was all-white: police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and prison officials. Violence was instrumental for Jim Crow. It was a method of social control. The most extreme forms of Jim Crow violence were lynchings.Lynchings were public, often sadistic, murders carried out by mobs. Between 1882, when the first reliable data were collected, and 1968, when lynchings had become rare, there were 4,730 known lynchings, including 3,440 black men and women. Most of the victims of Lynch Law were hanged or shot, but some were burned at the stake, castrated, beaten with clubs, or dismembered. In the mid-1800s, whites constituted the majority of victims (and perpetrators); however, by the period of Radical Reconstruction, blacks became the most frequent lynching victims. This is an early indication that lynching was used as an intimidation tool to keep blacks, in this case the newly freed people, "in their places." The great majority of lynchings occurred in southern and border states, where the resentment against blacks ran deepest. According to the social economist Gunnar Myrdal (1994): "The southern states account for nine-tenths of the lynchings. More than two thirds of the remaining one-tenth occurred in the six states which immediately border the South".Many whites claimed that although lynchings were distasteful, they were necessary supplements to the criminal justice system because blacks were prone to violent crimes, especially the rapes of white women. Arthur Raper investigated nearly a century of lynchings and concluded that approximately one-third of all the victims were falsely accused.Under Jim Crow any and all sexual interactions between black men and white women was illegal, illicit, socially repugnant, and within the Jim Crow definition of rape. Although only 19.2 percent of the lynching victims between 1882 to 1951 were even accused of rape, lynch law was often supported on the popular belief that lynchings were necessary to protect white women from black rapists. Myrdal (1994) refutes this belief in this way: "There is much reason to believe that this figure has been inflated by the fact that a mob which makes the accusation of rape is secure from any further investigation; by the broad Southern definition of rape to include all sexual relations between Negro men and white women; and by the psychopathic fears of white women in their contacts with Negro men". Most blacks were lynched for demanding civil rights, violating Jim Crow etiquette or laws, or in the aftermath of race riots.Lynchings were most common in small and middle-sized towns where blacks often were economic competitors to the local whites. These whites resented any economic and political gains made by blacks. Lynchers were seldomly arrested, and if arrested, rarely convicted. Raper (1933) estimated that "at least one-half of the lynchings are carried out with police officers participating, and that in nine-tenths of the others the officers either condone or wink at the mob action". Lynching served many purposes: it was cheap entertainment; it served as a rallying, uniting point for whites; it functioned as an ego-massage for low-income, low-status whites; it was a method of defending white domination and helped stop or retard the fledgling social equality movement.Lynch mobs directed their hatred against one (sometimes several) victims. The victim was an example of what happened to a black man who tried to vote, or who looked at a white woman, or who tried to get a white man's job. Unfortunately for blacks, sometimes the mob was not satisfied to murder a single or several victims. Instead, in the spirit of pogroms, the mobs went into black communities and destroyed additional lives and property. Their immediate goal was to drive out -- through death or expulsion -- all blacks; the larger goal was to maintain, at all costs, white supremacy. These pogrom-like actions are often referred to as riots; however, Gunnar Myrdal (1944) was right when he described these "riots" as "a terrorization or massacre...a mass lynching". Interestingly, these mass lynchings were primarily urban phenomena, whereas the lynching of single victims was primarily a rural phenomena.James Weldon Johnson, the famous black writer, labeled 1919 as "The Red Summer." It was red from racial tension; it was red from bloodletting. During the summer of 1919, there were race riots in Chicago, Illinois; Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee; Charleston, South Carolina; Omaha, Nebraska; and two dozen other cities. W.E.B. DuBois (1986), the black social scientist and civil rights activist, wrote: "During that year seventy-seven Negroes were lynched, of whom one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, fourteen were publicly burned, eleven of them being burned alive. That year there were race riots large and small in twenty-six American cities including thirty-eight killed in a Chicago riot of August; from twenty-five to fifty in Phillips County, Arkansas; and six killed in Washington".The riots of 1919 were not the first or last "mass lynchings" of blacks, as evidenced by the race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); Atlanta, Georgia (1906); Springfield, Illinois (1908); East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921); and Detroit, Michigan (1943). Joseph Boskin, author of Urban Racial Violence (1976), claimed that the riots of the 1900s had the following traits:1) In each of the race riots, with few exceptions, it was white people that sparked the incident by attacking black people.2) In the majority of the riots, some extraordinary social condition prevailed at the time of the riot: prewar social changes, wartime mobility, post-war adjustment, or economic depression.3) The majority of the riots occurred during the hot summer months.4) Rumor played an extremely important role in causing many riots. Rumors of some criminal activity by blacks against whites perpetuated the actions of the white mobs.5) The police force, more than any other institution, was invariably involved as a precipitating cause or perpetuating factor in the riots. In almost every one of the riots, the police sided with the attackers, either by actually participating in, or by failing to quell the attack.6) In almost every instance, the fighting occurred within the black community.Boskin omitted the following: the mass media, especially newspapers often published inflammatory articles about "black criminals" immediately before the riots; blacks were not only killed, but their homes and businesses were looted, and many who did not flee were left homeless; and, the goal of the white rioters, as was true of white lynchers of single victims, was to instill fear and terror into blacks, thereby buttressing white domination. The Jim Crow hierarchy could not work without violence being used against those on the bottom rung. George Fredrickson (1971), a historian, stated it this way: "Lynching represented...a way of using fear and terror to check 'dangerous' tendencies in a black community considered to be ineffectively regimented or supervised. As such it constituted a confession that the regular institutions of a segregated society provided an inadequate measure of day-to-day control".Many blacks resisted the indignities of Jim Crow, and, far too often, they paid for their bravery with their lives. What was Jim CrowBlack Like Me:In late 1959, John Howard Griffin went to a friend's house in New Orleans, Louisiana. Once there, under the care of a dermatologist, Griffin underwent a regimen of large oral doses of the anti-vitiligo drug methoxsalen, and spending up to fifteen hours daily under an ultraviolet lamp. When he could pass as an African American, Griffin began a six-week journey in the South. Don Rutledge traveled with him, documenting the experience with photos.During his trip, Griffin abided by the rule that he would not change his name or alter his identity; if asked who he was or what he was doing, he would tell the truth. In the beginning, he decided to talk as little as possible to ease his transition into the social milieu of southern U.S. blacks. He became accustomed everywhere to the "hate stare" received from whites.After he disguised himself, many people who knew Griffin as a white man did not recognize him. Sterling Williams, a black shoeshine man in the French Quarter whom Griffin regarded as a casual friend, did not recognize him. Because Griffin wanted assistance in entering into the black community, he decided to tell Sterling about his identity and project. He first hinted that he wore the same unusual shoes as somebody else, but Sterling still did not recognize him until Griffin told him.In New Orleans, a black counterman at a small restaurant chatted with Griffin about the difficulties of finding a place to go to the bathroom, as facilities were segregated and blacks were prohibited from many. He turned a question about a Catholic church into a joke about "spending much of your time praying for a place to piss".On a bus trip, Griffin began to give his seat to a white woman, but disapproving looks from black passengers stopped him. He thought he had a momentary breakthrough with the woman, but she insulted him and began talking with other white passengers about how impudent the blacks were becoming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Like_MeHe wasn’t the first. Ray Sprigle spent thirty days undercover as a black man and published his experience as I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days starting in 1948. Read it here: I was a Negro in the South for 30 DaysSouthern Belles in 19601956195619561956Teach them youngPoliceman enforcing the law in 1961Jim Crow laws - WikipediaJim Crow Laws | American Experience | PBSJim Crow law | History & Factshttps://www.amazon.com/Love-Thef...https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_1_13?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=black+like+me+by+john+howard+griffin&sprefix=black+like+me%2Caps%2C263&crid=1O05BLY3F6OGR

Oddly the name comes from a white man who was caricaturing a black man:Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white man, was born in New York City in 1808. He devoted himself to the theater in his twenties, and in the early 1830s, he began performing the act that would make him famous: he painted his face black and did a song and dance he claimed were inspired by a slave he saw. The act was called “Jump, Jim Crow” (or “Jumping Jim Crow”).“He would put on not only blackface makeup, but shabby dress that imitated in his mind and white peoples minds of the time” the dress and aspect and demeanor of the southern enslaved black person, says Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class and professor of English and American Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center.Rice’s routine was a hit in New York City, one of many of places in the North where working-class whites could see blackface minstrelsy, which was quickly becoming a dominant form of theater and a leading source for popular music in America. Rice took his act on tour, even going as far as England; and as his popularity grew, his stage name seeped into the culture. Who Was Jim Crow?Jim Crow was a way of life. It was an ideology of racial superiority similar to apartheid and was codified into law.The following discussion is long but this era deserves to be understood for the horrorshow it was.Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that whites were the Chosen people, blacks were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that blacks were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to whites. Pro-segregation politicians gave eloquent speeches on the great danger of integration: the mongrelization of the white race. Newspaper and magazine writers routinely referred to blacks as niggers, coons, and darkies; and worse, their articles reinforced anti-black stereotypes. Even children's games portrayed blacks as inferior beings. All major societal institutions reflected and supported the oppression of blacks.The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or rationalizations: whites were superior to blacks in all important ways, including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior; sexual relations between blacks and whites would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America; treating blacks as equals would encourage interracial sexual unions; any activity which suggested social equality encouraged interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. The following Jim Crow etiquette norms show how inclusive and pervasive these norms were:• A black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a white male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a white woman, because he risked being accused of rape.• Blacks and whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them.• Under no circumstance was a black male to offer to light the cigarette of a white female -- that gesture implied intimacy.• Blacks were not allowed to show public affection toward one another in public, especially kissing, because it offended whites.• Jim Crow etiquette prescribed that blacks were introduced to whites, never whites to blacks. For example: "Mr. Peters (the white person), this is Charlie (the black person), that I spoke to you about."• Whites did not use courtesy titles of respect when referring to blacks, for example, Mr., Mrs., Miss., Sir, or Ma'am. Instead, blacks were called by their first names. Blacks had to use courtesy titles when referring to whites, and were not allowed to call them by their first names.• If a black person rode in a car driven by a white person, the black person sat in the back seat, or the back of a truck.• White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections.Stetson Kennedy, the author of Jim Crow Guide (1990), offered these simple rules that blacks were supposed to observe in conversing with whites:Never assert or even intimate that a white person is lying.Never impute dishonorable intentions to a white person.Never suggest that a white person is from an inferior class.Never lay claim to, or overly demonstrate, superior knowledge or intelligence.Never curse a white person.Never laugh derisively at a white person.Never comment upon the appearance of a white female.Jim Crow etiquette operated in conjunction with Jim Crow laws (black codes). When most people think of Jim Crow they think of laws (not the Jim Crow etiquette) which excluded blacks from public transport and facilities, juries, jobs, and neighborhoods. The passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution had granted blacks the same legal protections as whites. However, after 1877, and the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, southern and border states began restricting the liberties of blacks. Unfortunately for blacks, the Supreme Court helped undermine the Constitutional protections of blacks with the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case, which legitimized Jim Crow laws and the Jim Crow way of life.In 1890, Louisiana passed the "Separate Car Law," which purported to aid passenger comfort by creating "equal but separate" cars for blacks and whites. This was a ruse. No public accommodations, including railway travel, provided blacks with equal facilities. The Louisiana law made it illegal for blacks to sit in coach seats reserved for whites, and whites could not sit in seats reserved for blacks. In 1891, a group of blacks decided to test the Jim Crow law. They had Homer A. Plessy, who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black (therefore, black), sit in the white-only railroad coach. He was arrested. Plessy's lawyer argued that Louisiana did not have the right to label one citizen as white and another black for the purposes of restricting their rights and privileges. In Plessy, the Supreme Court stated that so long as state governments provided legal process and legal freedoms for blacks, equal to those of whites, they could maintain separate institutions to facilitate these rights. The Court, by a 7-2 vote, upheld the Louisiana law, declaring that racial separation did not necessarily mean an abrogation of equality. In practice, Plessy represented the legitimization of two societies: one white, and advantaged; the other, black, disadvantaged and despised.Blacks were denied the right to vote by grandfather clauses (laws that restricted the right to vote to people whose ancestors had voted before the Civil War), poll taxes (fees charged to poor blacks), white primaries (only Democrats could vote, only whites could be Democrats), and literacy tests ("Name all the Vice Presidents and Supreme Court Justices throughout America's history"). Plessy sent this message to southern and border states: Discrimination against blacks is acceptable.Jim Crow states passed statutes severely regulating social interactions between the races. Jim Crow signs were placed above water fountains, door entrances and exits, and in front of public facilities. There were separate hospitals for blacks and whites, separate prisons, separate public and private schools, separate churches, separate cemeteries, separate public restrooms, and separate public accommodations. In most instances, the black facilities were grossly inferior -- generally, older, less-well-kept. In other cases, there were no black facilities -- no Colored public restroom, no public beach, no place to sit or eat. Plessy gave Jim Crow states a legal way to ignore their constitutional obligations to their black citizens.Jim Crow laws touched every aspect of everyday life. For example, in 1935, Oklahoma prohibited blacks and whites from boating together. Boating implied social equality. In 1905, Georgia established separate parks for blacks and whites. In 1930, Birmingham, Alabama, made it illegal for blacks and whites to play checkers or dominoes together. Here are some of the typical Jim Crow laws, as compiled by the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site Interpretive Staff:• Barbers. No colored barber shall serve as a barber (to) white girls or women (Georgia).• Blind Wards. The board of trustees shall...maintain a separate building...on separate ground for the admission, care, instruction, and support of all blind persons of the colored or black race (Louisiana).• Burial. The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons (Georgia).• Buses.All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races (Alabama).• Child Custody. It shall be unlawful for any parent, relative, or other white person in this State, having the control or custody of any white child, by right of guardianship, natural or acquired, or otherwise, to dispose of, give or surrender such white child permanently into the custody, control, maintenance, or support, of a negro (South Carolina).• Education.The schools for white children and the schools for negro children shall be conducted separately (Florida).• Libraries. The state librarian is directed to fit up and maintain a separate place for the use of the colored people who may come to the library for the purpose of reading books or periodicals (North Carolina).• Mental Hospitals. The Board of Control shall see that proper and distinct apartments are arranged for said patients, so that in no case shall Negroes and white persons be together (Georgia).• Militia. The white and colored militia shall be separately enrolled, and shall never be compelled to serve in the same organization. No organization of colored troops shall be permitted where white troops are available and where whites are permitted to be organized, colored troops shall be under the command of white officers (North Carolina).• Nurses. No person or corporation shall require any White female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which negro men are placed (Alabama).• Prisons. The warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts (Mississippi).• Reform Schools. The children of white and colored races committed to the houses of reform shall be kept entirely separate from each other (Kentucky).• Teaching. Any instructor who shall teach in any school, college or institution where members of the white and colored race are received and enrolled as pupils for instruction shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined... (Oklahoma).• Wine and Beer. All persons licensed to conduct the business of selling beer or wine...shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room at any time (Georgia).The Jim Crow laws and system of etiquette were undergirded by violence, real and threatened. Blacks who violated Jim Crow norms, for example, drinking from the white water fountain or trying to vote, risked their homes, their jobs, even their lives. Whites could physically beat blacks with impunity. Blacks had little legal recourse against these assaults because the Jim Crow criminal justice system was all-white: police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and prison officials. Violence was instrumental for Jim Crow. It was a method of social control. The most extreme forms of Jim Crow violence were lynchings.Lynchings were public, often sadistic, murders carried out by mobs. Between 1882, when the first reliable data were collected, and 1968, when lynchings had become rare, there were 4,730 known lynchings, including 3,440 black men and women. Most of the victims of Lynch Law were hanged or shot, but some were burned at the stake, castrated, beaten with clubs, or dismembered. In the mid-1800s, whites constituted the majority of victims (and perpetrators); however, by the period of Radical Reconstruction, blacks became the most frequent lynching victims. This is an early indication that lynching was used as an intimidation tool to keep blacks, in this case the newly freed people, "in their places." The great majority of lynchings occurred in southern and border states, where the resentment against blacks ran deepest. According to the social economist Gunnar Myrdal (1994): "The southern states account for nine-tenths of the lynchings. More than two thirds of the remaining one-tenth occurred in the six states which immediately border the South".Many whites claimed that although lynchings were distasteful, they were necessary supplements to the criminal justice system because blacks were prone to violent crimes, especially the rapes of white women. Arthur Raper investigated nearly a century of lynchings and concluded that approximately one-third of all the victims were falsely accused.Under Jim Crow any and all sexual interactions between black men and white women was illegal, illicit, socially repugnant, and within the Jim Crow definition of rape. Although only 19.2 percent of the lynching victims between 1882 to 1951 were even accused of rape, lynch law was often supported on the popular belief that lynchings were necessary to protect white women from black rapists. Myrdal (1994) refutes this belief in this way: "There is much reason to believe that this figure has been inflated by the fact that a mob which makes the accusation of rape is secure from any further investigation; by the broad Southern definition of rape to include all sexual relations between Negro men and white women; and by the psychopathic fears of white women in their contacts with Negro men". Most blacks were lynched for demanding civil rights, violating Jim Crow etiquette or laws, or in the aftermath of race riots.Lynchings were most common in small and middle-sized towns where blacks often were economic competitors to the local whites. These whites resented any economic and political gains made by blacks. Lynchers were seldomly arrested, and if arrested, rarely convicted. Raper (1933) estimated that "at least one-half of the lynchings are carried out with police officers participating, and that in nine-tenths of the others the officers either condone or wink at the mob action". Lynching served many purposes: it was cheap entertainment; it served as a rallying, uniting point for whites; it functioned as an ego-massage for low-income, low-status whites; it was a method of defending white domination and helped stop or retard the fledgling social equality movement.Lynch mobs directed their hatred against one (sometimes several) victims. The victim was an example of what happened to a black man who tried to vote, or who looked at a white woman, or who tried to get a white man's job. Unfortunately for blacks, sometimes the mob was not satisfied to murder a single or several victims. Instead, in the spirit of pogroms, the mobs went into black communities and destroyed additional lives and property. Their immediate goal was to drive out -- through death or expulsion -- all blacks; the larger goal was to maintain, at all costs, white supremacy. These pogrom-like actions are often referred to as riots; however, Gunnar Myrdal (1944) was right when he described these "riots" as "a terrorization or massacre...a mass lynching". Interestingly, these mass lynchings were primarily urban phenomena, whereas the lynching of single victims was primarily a rural phenomena.James Weldon Johnson, the famous black writer, labeled 1919 as "The Red Summer." It was red from racial tension; it was red from bloodletting. During the summer of 1919, there were race riots in Chicago, Illinois; Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee; Charleston, South Carolina; Omaha, Nebraska; and two dozen other cities. W.E.B. DuBois (1986), the black social scientist and civil rights activist, wrote: "During that year seventy-seven Negroes were lynched, of whom one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, fourteen were publicly burned, eleven of them being burned alive. That year there were race riots large and small in twenty-six American cities including thirty-eight killed in a Chicago riot of August; from twenty-five to fifty in Phillips County, Arkansas; and six killed in Washington".The riots of 1919 were not the first or last "mass lynchings" of blacks, as evidenced by the race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); Atlanta, Georgia (1906); Springfield, Illinois (1908); East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921); and Detroit, Michigan (1943). Joseph Boskin, author of Urban Racial Violence (1976), claimed that the riots of the 1900s had the following traits:In each of the race riots, with few exceptions, it was white people that sparked the incident by attacking black people.In the majority of the riots, some extraordinary social condition prevailed at the time of the riot: prewar social changes, wartime mobility, post-war adjustment, or economic depression.The majority of the riots occurred during the hot summer months.Rumor played an extremely important role in causing many riots. Rumors of some criminal activity by blacks against whites perpetuated the actions of the white mobs.The police force, more than any other institution, was invariably involved as a precipitating cause or perpetuating factor in the riots. In almost every one of the riots, the police sided with the attackers, either by actually participating in, or by failing to quell the attack.In almost every instance, the fighting occurred within the black community.Boskin omitted the following: the mass media, especially newspapers often published inflammatory articles about "black criminals" immediately before the riots; blacks were not only killed, but their homes and businesses were looted, and many who did not flee were left homeless; and, the goal of the white rioters, as was true of white lynchers of single victims, was to instill fear and terror into blacks, thereby buttressing white domination. The Jim Crow hierarchy could not work without violence being used against those on the bottom rung. George Fredrickson (1971), a historian, stated it this way: "Lynching represented...a way of using fear and terror to check 'dangerous' tendencies in a black community considered to be ineffectively regimented or supervised. As such it constituted a confession that the regular institutions of a segregated society provided an inadequate measure of day-to-day control".Many blacks resisted the indignities of Jim Crow, and, far too often, they paid for their bravery with their lives. What was Jim Crow1960 . . . Southern Belles19561956195619561961 Law EnforcementThe Master RaceJim Crow laws - WikipediaJim Crow Laws | American Experience | PBSJim Crow law | History & Factshttps://www.amazon.com/Love-Thef...