The Great Migration and The New Jim Crow Laws... My processing of "The Warmth of Other Suns"...

 

While I was reading "The Warmth of Other Suns," I kept thinking of how these stories of the Great Migration, the difficulties of those in which we read to attain jobs, the horrible lives they fled the south of, the desperation once in the North to find work and make a wage, the civil rights movement, and the Jim Crow Laws effected the lives in which we are reading about, on page 386 in the story of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, she shares that "Yet the very thing thing that made black life hard in the North, the very nature of northern hostility - unwritten, mercurial, opaque, and eminently deniable- made it hard for King to nail down an obvious right- verses wrong cause to protest." It goes on to describe segregation of the "South side and the West side- restricting jobs they could hold and the mortgages they could get, their children attending segregated and inferior schools, not by edict as in the South but by circumstances in the North, with the results pretty much the same." (Wilkerson, p.386). The stories of the creation of mundane laws to restrict blacks, make me to think as I am reading this book of a book by Michelle Alexander, and the "New Jim Crow" Laws and how incarceration of minorities are the new way of enforcing these "Jim Crow laws." How the unwritten laws of segregation are taking place today. In reading this book makes me think of the untold stories of those who are still experiencing segregation, still experience racism, and are incarcerated because they are black, Latino, or any race other than white, or are living in poverty, homeless, and not of the majority. I think of the stories to be told as this book is doing from the past but of struggles and the lives and journeys of men and women today who continue to suffer similar consequences as their family members.  


Under Jim Crow laws, black Americans were relegated to a subordinate status for decades. Things like literacy tests for voters and laws designed to prevent blacks from serving on juries were commonplace in nearly a dozen Southern states. Michelle Alexander writes that many of the gains of the civil rights movement have been undermined by the mass incarceration of black Americans in the war on drugs. Millions of blacks (and other minorities) are arrested for minor crimes remain marginalized and disfranchised, trapped by a criminal justice system that has forever branded them as felons and denied them basic rights and opportunities that would allow them to become productive, law-abiding citizens (Alexander). Alexander says: "I think it's very easy to brush off the notion that the system operates much like a caste system, if in fact you are not trapped within it. I have spent years representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality and investigating patterns of drug law enforcement in poor communities of color, and attempting to help people who have been released from prison attempting to 're-enter' into a society that never seemed to have much use to them in the first place. And in the course of that work, I had my own awakening about our criminal justice system and this system of mass incarceration. ... My experience and research has led me to the regrettable conclusion that our system of mass incarceration functions more like a caste system than a system of crime prevention or control."

 
"People are swept into the criminal justice system — particularly in poor communities of color — at very early ages ... typically for fairly minor, nonviolent crimes," s "[The young black males are] shuttled into prisons, branded as criminals and felons, and then when they're released, they're relegated to a permanent second-class status, stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement — like the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to be free of legal discrimination and employment, and access to education and public benefits. Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you've been branded a felon" (Alexander in a NPR interview.)

 If we take a look back in history, not too distant from today,  we can see how there have been community organizers, and the use of  power  and privilege have created and continued this segregation epidemics in our country. Looking back on the subject in our methods class in community organizing, I wanted see how community organizing effect the bolstered racial matters through the War on Drugs, Weil says that "the War on Drugs unintentionally bolstered a resurgent conservative agenda with their silence on racial matters and active support for initiatives that created an incarceration crisis of epic proportions in communities of color" (Weil, p. 252).
With community supports such as the police, local activists, mayors, courts systems, public health departments, and the president launching the "War on Drugs" the U.S has spent more than $1 Trillion dollars in 40 years on this war, and we are losing that war. The war on drugs was in my eyes a new way to attack those who are vulnerable, who are minorities in our country. 65% of those arrested have been minorities, most of which have been for violations on parole, and for those who are released now face charges that limit them to the jobs they can get, marking a box on a application of felony charges. If this country looked at the reasons people are turning to drugs as the epidemic then maybe there would be more supporters of Universal Health Care, there could be a decline in self- medicating. If we provided a "Living Wage" to all, then those who are vulnerable would not need to seek other means for income, and thus there would be less drug dealers, less users, and less incarcerations. The U.S is taking steps in legalizing some drugs, in other countries some drug use and possession is not a crime, and those countries have seen a decline in the distribution of drugs. If the U.S looked at drug use as a health condition, open rehabilitation centers more affordable to those who are using, then I wonder where we would be today? We are loosing the "War on Drugs" and need to look at different ways to fight drug use, dependency and distribution.  The use of power and privilege exists all around us, and it the lives of those who were impacted by such laws in which we read about.

I watched "The House in Which I Live" in my criminology class, if you have the time and interest I highly suggest watching it, we can see how this "war"  discriminates towards minorities and those in poverty. There needs to be community organizing to put and end to this war, and focus on the true problem, poverty, racism, mental health, and injustices.  If the United States is supposed to be the richest, and best country to live in, then why can we not offer Universal Health Care, why can we not put an end to poverty, why can we not organize as a strong enough community to face the facts, that there needs to be changes in the way this country is run. I believe that we need to bring awareness to all, so that we can teach our children what they need to know, so we can provide them with the skills to recognize injustices and how to come together for change. If we teach our children how to develop paradigms of truth and understanding, and looking at things through others perspectives then maybe we can achieve these important changes that are so badly needed for the future of our children, for the growth and success of our Nation. Reading "The Warmth of Other Suns" has really made me take a step back and think about the lives we have read about and how the changes over the years, and how they may have not truly changed, from segregation to desegregation, and the changes in Civil Rights movements led by Martin Luther King, how far have we really come? Some may say a long way, but as we continue to read and hear stories of the experiences who face these realities each day, it is apparent that we have not come far enough.
 
 Wilkerson says that "[The Great Migration] had such an effect on almost every aspect of our lives — from the music that we listen to to the politics of our country to the ways the cities even look and feel, even today," says Isabel Wilkerson. "The suburbanization and the ghettos that were created as a result of the limits of where [African-Americans] could live in the North [still exist today.] And ... the South was forced to change, in part because they were losing such a large part of their workforce through the Great Migration."
 The Great Migration undoubtedly changed America and the lives of many for African-Americans. The Great Migration "enabled educated Blacks to obtain jobs, establishing a measure of classy mobility, the migrants encountered significant forms of discrimination in the North. Because so many people had migrated in so short a period of time, the Black migrants were often resented by the White working class in the North, who feared that their ability to negotiate rates of pay, or even to secure employment at all, was threatened by the influx of new labor competition. In many cities, working classes tried to defend what they saw as "their" own territories"(BlackHistory.com). 
Wilkinson says on page 535 that " Many black parents who left the South got the one thing they wanted just by leaving. Their children would have a chance to grow up free of Jim Crow and to be their fuller selves. The Great Migration, "if nothing else, an affirmation of the power of an individual decision, however powerless the individual might appear on the surface. "Millions of African-American southerners have altered the course of their own, and all of America's history" (Wilkerson, p. 538).  We continue to see history change, and some day I hope to see a world that is not segregated, not run by power and greed, where everybody has a fair chance at a life worth living, where people can get paid for the work they do and not live pay check to pay check. A world where children can go to school not in fear, and that all people are created and treated equally. One can only hope, and I hope that if I do not see that in my life time that my children gave the chance to see it. 

I have linked many of the photo's to the NPR interviews as well as video clips of the movie. If you have time please listen to them they are so great to hear. And if you have time to watch the video I promise you will learn so much. (I wanted to say you would not be disappointed, but then though you might be- but not in the movie but in the legal-system in which we operate.) Also check a great YouTube video on The Great Migration-the pictures speak for themselves, but the song gives words the the photo's- something we hope to do with our project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVCuH6ClZWM.

Resources: 
The Warmth of Other Suns The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. Isabel Wilkerson. (2010)

Community Practice. Marie Weil

Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of
colorblindness. New York: The New Press.

Butler P. (2010) The People: One Hundred Years of Race and Crime.The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/16/145175694/legal-scholar-jim-crow-still-exists-in-america

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9D-O0F3ZN8w

http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/great-migration

http://blackhistory.com/content/64166/the-great-migration 

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=129827444&m=129831730