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Color blind or color brave? | Mellody Hobson

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As America moved past outwardly and explicitly racist actions both legally and socially, it became commonplace for the surface-level ideas of a “colorblind” society to come into play. This mindset, while idealistic and hopeful, has oftentimes led to the ignorance of racial bias and more subtle racist actions over time.

This idea of color-blindness and how it often blinds us to racism, and holds us back from fighting it, is directly attacked and discussed in this TED talk, where Mellody Hobson discusses modern racial blindness in America, dissecting how to truly combat racism and bias, people need to speak out and discuss it.

#ColorBrave

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Color blind or color brave? | Mellody Hobson

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With it becoming far less socially acceptable to outwardly voice racist behaviors and attitudes, racism took a far subtler form in society, manifesting itself primarily in the subtle biases people hold, and being demonstrated through “micro-aggressions”, which are small and seemingly harmless behaviors that reinforce and demonstrate racial stereotypes.

Some common “micro-aggressions” and racist actions that are seen in the modern day are:

Intentionally helping or serving a white person over a person of color

Asking people of different ethnicities where they are from, implying they don’t belong here

Being skiddish/worried at the site of a black person, assuming they’re more prone to violence/crime

specific instances of Micro-Aggressions are shown in The Invisible Man, where stereotypes relating to race. After I.M. meets with the brotherhood, a group of communist extremists looking for his help to push forward their cause, he is approached by a drunk man who asks him:

"How about a spiritual, Brother? Or one of those real good ole Negro work songs?"(Ellison 312).

This exchange demonstrates how a simple gesture, like asking someone to sing a spiritual, can often have racist intent or meaning behind it, inferring that all African Americans sing spirituals or work songs.

While the nature and intent of some things considered to be micro aggressions is often debated, they are generally regarded as harmful behaviors that, whether intentionally or not, reinforce racial disparities and stereotypes in society.

A helpful resource to understand the use and impact of micro-aggressions is the linked article by the American Psychological Association, which defines what micro-aggressions are, and how harmful they can be.

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Two colleagues-one Asian-American, the other African-American-board a small plane. A flight attendant tells them they can sit anywhere, so they choose seats near the front of the plane and across the aisle from each another so they can talk.

At the last minute, three white men enter the plane and take the seats in front of them. Just before takeoff, the flight attendant, who is white, asks the two colleagues if they would mind moving to the back of the plane to better balance the plane's load. Both react with anger, sharing the same sense that they are being singled out to symbolically "sit at the back of the bus." When they express these feelings to the attendant, she indignantly denies the charge, saying she was merely trying to ensure the flight's safety and give the two some privacy.

Were the colleagues being overly sensitive, or was the flight attendant being racist?

For Teachers College, Columbia University psychologist Derald Wing Sue, PhD-the Asian-American colleague on the plane, incidentally-the onus falls on the flight attendant. In his view, she was guilty of a "racial microaggression"-one of the "everyday insults, indignities and demeaning messages sent to people of color by well-intentioned white people who are unaware of the hidden messages being sent to them," in Sue's definition.

In other words, she was acting with bias-she just didn't know it, he says.

Sue and his team are developing a theory and classification system to describe and measure the phenomenon to help people of color understand what is going on and perhaps to educate white people as well, Sue says.

"It's a monumental task to get white people to realize that they are delivering microaggressions, because it's scary to them," he contends. "It assails their self-image of being good, moral, decent human beings to realize that maybe at an unconscious level they have biased thoughts, attitudes and feelings that harm people of color."

To better understand the type and range of these incidents, Sue and other researchers are also exploring the concept among specific groups and documenting how a regular dose of these psychological slings and arrows may erode people's mental health, job performance and the quality of social experience.
Aversive racism
The term racial microaggressions was first proposed by psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce, MD, in the 1970s, but psychologists have significantly amplified the concept in recent years.

In his landmark work on stereotype threat, for instance, Stanford University psychology professor Claude Steele, PhD, has shown that African-Americans and women perform worse on academic tests when primed with stereotypes about race or gender. Women who were primed with stereotypes about women's poor math performance do worse on math tests. Blacks' intelligence test scores plunge when they're primed with stereotypes about blacks' inferior intelligence.

Meanwhile, social psychologists Jack Dovidio, PhD, of Yale University, and Samuel L. Gaertner, PhD, of the University of Delaware, have demonstrated across several studies that many well-intentioned whites who consciously believe in and profess equality unconsciously act in a racist manner, particularly in ambiguous circumstances. In experimental job interviews, for example, whites tend not to discriminate against black candidates when their qualifications are as strong or as weak as whites'. But when candidates' qualifications are similarly ambiguous, whites tend to favor white over black candidates, the team has found. The team calls this pattern "aversive racism," referring in part to whites' aversion to being seen as prejudiced, given their conscious adherence to egalitarian principles.

Sue adds to these findings by naming, detailing and classifying the actual manifestations of aversive racism. His work illuminates the internal experiences of people affected by microaggressions-a new direction, since past research on prejudice and discrimination has focused on whites' attitudes and behaviors, notes Dovidio.

"The study of microaggressions looks at the impact of these subtle racial expressions from the perspective of the people being victimized, so it adds to our psychological understanding of the whole process of stigmatization and bias," Dovidio says.

Research shows that uncertainty is very distressing to people, Dovidio adds. "It's the uncertainty of microaggressions that can have such a tremendous impact on people of color," including on the job, in academic performance and even in therapy, he and others find.
Creating a vocabulary
Sue first proposed a classification of racial microaggressions in a 2007 article on how they manifest in clinical practice in the American Psychologist (Vol. 2, No. 4). There, he notes three types of current racial transgressions:

Microassaults: Conscious and intentional actions or slurs, such as using racial epithets, displaying swastikas or deliberately serving a white person before a person of color in a restaurant.

Microinsults: Verbal and nonverbal communications that subtly convey rudeness and insensitivity and demean a person's racial heritage or identity. An example is an employee who asks a colleague of color how she got her job, implying she may have landed it through an affirmative action or quota system.

Microinvalidations: Communications that subtly exclude, negate or nullify the thoughts, feelings or experiential reality of a person of color. For instance, white people often ask Asian-Americans where they were born, conveying the message that they are perpetual foreigners in their own land.

Sue focuses on microinsults and microinvalidiations because of their less obvious nature, which puts people of color in a psychological bind, he asserts: While the person may feel insulted, she is not sure exactly why, and the perpetrator doesn't acknowledge that anything has happened because he is not aware he has been offensive.

"The person of color is caught in a Catch-22: If she confronts the perpetrator, the perpetrator will deny it," Sue says.

In turn, that leaves the person of color to question what actually happened. The result is confusion, anger and an overall sapping of energy, he says.
Refining the concept
While Sue's 2007 American Psychologist article mainly laid out his theory and an initial taxonomy of microaggressions, his team is now examining how these subtle communications vary among different populations. In a qualitative study in the June Professional Psychology: Research and Practice (Vol. 39, No. 3), Sue and his colleagues conducted focus groups with 13 African-Americans who discussed their perceptions of, reactions to and interpretations of microaggressions, as well as the emotional toll they take. Participants, age 22 to 32, all lived in the New York metropolitan area and were either graduate students or worked in higher education.

Respondents agreed that these backhanded communications can make them feel as if they don't belong, that they are abnormal or that they are untrustworthy. Some described the terrible feeling of being watched suspiciously in stores as if they were about to steal something, for instance. Some reported anticipating the impact of their race by acting preemptively: One man noted how he deliberately relaxes his body while in close quarters with white women so he doesn't frighten them.

Others cited the pressure to represent their group in a positive way. One woman said she was constantly vigilant about her work performance because she was worried that any slipups would negatively affect every black person who came after her.

A similar study in the January 2007 Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology (Vol. 13, No. 1) found that many Asian-Americans cited the experience of people asking them where they were born or telling them they "spoke good English," which gave them the message that they are "aliens." Others described classroom experiences where teachers or students assumed they were great in math, which led to feelings of being trapped in a stereotype that wasn't necessarily true. Female participants complained that white men interested in dating them assumed they would be subservient sexual partners who would take care of their every need.

"These incidents may appear small, banal and trivial, but we're beginning to find they assail the mental health of recipients," Sue says.

Other researchers are showing the harm of racial microaggressions in a variety of arenas, though research in the area is still sparse, Sue acknowledges. For instance, in a 2007 article in American Behavioral Scientist (Vol. 51, No. 4), University of Utah social psychologist William A. Smith, PhD, and colleagues conducted focus groups with 36 black male students on five elite campuses, including Harvard and the University of Michigan.

Participants reported experiencing racial microaggressions in academic, social and public settings. For instance, some participants reported that when they went to their school's computer lab to do schoolwork, white students would call security to make sure they weren't there to cause trouble. When security arrived, they would check the students' IDs, sometimes asking them to provide a second one to prove the first was valid.

In another case, fraternity students who had gathered for practice found themselves surrounded by police vehicles, the result of someone calling in a concern about gang activity, Smith notes.

Meanwhile, in therapy, the more likely black people are to perceive their therapist using racial microaggressions, the weaker the therapeutic bond and the lower their reported satisfaction, finds a 2007 study in the Journal of Counseling Psychology (Vol. 54, No. 1). Sue and other researchers are beginning to study the impact of racial microaggressions on other groups as well, including people of various ethnic groups, people with disabilities, and gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered individuals.
Mountain or mole hill?
Not everyone agrees that microaggressions are as rampant or destructive as Sue says they are. In rebuttal letters to the 2007 American Psychologist article, respondents accuse Sue of blowing the phenomenon out of proportion and advancing an unnecessarily negative agenda.

"Implementing his theory would restrict rather than promote candid interaction between members of different racial groups," maintains Kenneth R. Thomas, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the critics. In the therapy relationship, for example, having to watch every word "potentially discourages therapist genuineness and spontaneity," says Thomas, who is white.

Likewise, aspects of Sue's theory enforce a victim mentality by creating problems where none exist, Thomas asserts. "The theory, in general, characterizes people of color as weak and vulnerable, and reinforces a culture of victimization instead of a culture of opportunity," he says.

Kenneth Sole, PhD, whose consulting firm Sole & Associates Inc., trains employees on team communication, agrees with Sue that microaggressions are pervasive and potentially damaging. Indeed, clients talk about them all of the time, he says. But instead of encouraging their anger, he works with them on ways to frame the incidents so they feel empowered rather than victimized, he notes.

"My own view is that we don't serve ourselves well in the hundreds of ambiguous situations we experience by latching onto the definition of the experience that gives us the greatest pain"-particularly in one-time encounters where one can't take more systemic action, he says.

For instance, if a white person makes a potentially offensive remark to a person of color, the person could choose either to get angry and see the person as a bigot or to perceive the person as ignorant and move on, he says.

For Sue's part, he believes it's important to keep shining a light on the harm these encounters can inflict, no matter how the person of color decides to handle a given encounter.

"My hope is to make the invisible visible," he says. "Microaggressions hold their power because they are invisible, and therefore they don't allow us to see that our actions and attitudes may be discriminatory."
Tori DeAngelis is a writer in Syracuse, N.Y.

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Two colleagues-one Asian-American, the other African-American-board a small plane. A flight attendant tells them they can sit anywhere, so they choose seats near the front of the plane and across the aisle from each another so they can talk. At the last minute, three white men enter the plane and take the seats in front of them.

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With the difference in social standards between now, and the early to mid 1900’s, it’s important to understand how people view racism and racial relations in the U.S.

To get an idea of how people see race in both our school and the U.S. as a whole, we analyzed data from surveying a multitude of students from this and some other classes, asking about people’s impressions on race relations and other topics relating to race.

Some of the eye opening results we observed were that:

%55 of respondents believed there is an issue of some sort involving racial bias or racism in our school (the other responses disagreed)

Roughly 16% of respondents believed the use of the N-word was “generally justified” while 60% believed it was never justified. (the other 24% were written responses of different contexts where it could be acceptable).

57% of respondents believed that people of color are not seen as equal in the eyes of the law (with 43% disagreeing with that statement) while 66% of respondents believed that people of color are not seen as equal socially (with 34% disagreeing).

66% percent of respondents agreed with the singular statement that #BlackLivesMatter is a justified and reasonable movement, with the other responses ranging from the movement being mostly justified with some issues, to being entirely unnecessary.

Alongside these statistical results came many personal perspectives and experiences regarding race, with some of the most impactful being personal experiences with racial bias or racist language in our schools. One respondent wrote “you can literally be existing and someone will call you a slur of some sort.”

These responses provide an insight into the mindset many hold about racism in the modern day, with many still recognizing that there are racial biases and inequalities in our society that come from mindset and government structure, rather than specific laws and violent actions.

To see a full list of data, a spreadsheet of results can be found in the work cited page, albeit with the text responses and personal writings removed.

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Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation primarily in the South. From dividing people into colored spaces based on their race, to restricting housing, education, and the ability to vote, these laws reached every aspect of life, consistently making it more difficult for black Americans to live out their lives.

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The corruption of law in terms of racial segregation 

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The corruption of law in terms of racial segregation 

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In the context of law enforcement outside of Jim Crow laws, it was commonplace for African Americans and other people of color to still suffer the consequences of a racist system
African Americans endured:

A lack of protection from persecution, as police departments would commonly turn a blind eye, and ignore crimes committed by white people against African Americans and other people of color

Racial profiling, as people of color were more commonly accused of crimes in comparison to white people, or seen as suspects in crimes despite often having little to no evidence to connect them to the crime.

Inherent bias, as it was common for people of color, particularly African American men, to be wrongly convicted by juries on little to no evidence, purely based upon the assumption they were more likely to commit these crimes due to the color of their skin.

These issues plagued the justice system for many decades even after the abolition of Jim Crow laws, and continued to harm people of color, some say to this day.

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Rodney King Case and the Los Angeles Uprising | UCLA Film & Television Archive

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As Jim Crow laws reinforced the racist structures of government and policing, it led to a culture of policing that often encouraged or at the least ignored violence perpetrated against people of color. This practice was demonstrated throughout the civil rights movement as police officers oftentimes harassed, assaulted, and in some cases killed protesters who stood against racist laws.

This phenomenon of racial violence and police brutality was most clearly demonstrated in 1991, when on March 3rd, Los Angeles police officers stopped motorist Rodney King and arrested him. During the arrest process, they had struck him with their nightsticks over 50 times, nearly killing him.

Over a year later, the officers involved were acquitted of all charges, leading to outrage throughout Los Angeles.

The case of Rodney King demonstrated the continued practice of police brutality towards people of color far after Jim Crow laws were abolished in the United States, and helped show that police officers still often weren't held accountable for poor behavior. To read more about Rodney King, and the violent riots that followed, follow the article linked, published by the UCLA.

#StopPoliceBrutality

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On March 3, 1991, officers from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) stopped motorist Rodney King for a traffic violation. During the arrest proceedings, King was struck over fifty times with nightsticks after initially resisting police orders. A witness to the event, George Holliday, videotaped the arrest, which was later broadcast on local station KTLA and commercial news networks nationwide. Within a week following the incident, a Grand Jury returned indictments against the officers involved in the arrest for the use of excessive force and assault with a deadly weapon.

Over a year after the night of the beating, the LAPD officers indicted in the trial were acquitted of the charges brought against them. As a result of the verdict, many residents of Los Angeles reacted with shock and anger. Some residents took to the streets to protest; others turned to their televisions to watch events unfold. From April 29 through May 15, 1992, television networks devoted extensive resources and airtime to the uprising. The center of much of the resulting activity took place in the South-Central area of Los Angeles, with events spreading rapidly across many parts of the city.

UCLA Film & Television Archive's News and Public Affairs Collection (NAPA) holds extensive television news coverage related to the Rodney King case and the events of the Los Angeles uprising. This material is available for on-site viewing at UCLA by advance arrangement through the Archive Research and Study Center.

Download a sample list of available titles and additional research resources at UCLA in PDF format.

For more information about the NAPA collection, please visit our NAPA pageor contact the Archive Research and Study Center at 310-206-5388 or arsc@cinema.ucla.edu.

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Rodney King Case and the Los Angeles Uprising | UCLA Film & Television Archive

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On March 3, 1991, officers from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) stopped motorist Rodney King for a traffic violation. During the arrest proceedings, King was struck over fifty times with nightsticks after initially resisting police orders. A witness to the event, George Holliday, videotaped the arrest, which was later broadcast on local station KTLA and commercial news networks nationwide.

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In connection to police brutality and the violence often perpetrated towards people of color, it was common for people of color to oftentimes react with their own forms of violence.

In the novel Invisible Man, this is demonstrated in the ending, as in reaction to the death of Brother Clifton, as well as the instigation of Ras the Destroyer, an advocate for violent revolution, race riots begin to breakout throughout New York City.

Ellison describes the chaos and violence of these riots by writing "I could see the cops braced as on a target range, feet forward, free arms akimbo, firing with deliberate aim"(Ellison 536).

This anecdote helps to describe the chaos and violence that came with the riots portrayed in the novel, and the similar violence that was a part of other race riots and black supremacist movements, such as the Los Angeles race riots that followed the acquittal of the officers who assaulted Rodney King, or The Black Panthers, a “black supremacy” organization that argued for violent reaction and protest during and after the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s.

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Jim Crow of the North - Full-Length Documentary

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Racial covenants were building deeds that specifically restricted Black Americans from owning properties in “White” neighborhoods. They served as barriers of racial integration for centuries, and contributed to the following:

Segregated Neighborhoods

Racial bias

Lynchings of Black Americans

They were effectively the Jim Crow laws of the North, segregating communities and limiting civil rights for Black Americans.

The attached documentary by Minnesota experience covers these racial covenants, as well as other aspects of Jim Crow laws, and the racially divided culture of the so called “Free North”.

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Jim Crow of the North - Full-Length Documentary

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Racial profiling was the common practice of law enforcement often looking to people of color and assuming they were suspects in a crime, without sufficient reasoning.

This process, paired with many jurors inherent bias against people of color in courtrooms, led to many African Americans being wrongly convicted of crimes they didn't commit, or otherwise inconvenienced by a justice system that looked to persecute them for crimes they had no involvement with.

To learn more specifics about the practices of racial profiling, as well as how it is still present in some aspects of policing to this day, read the linked article published by the American Civil Liberties Union that covers the topic in more detail.

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Racial profiling is a longstanding and deeply troubling national problem despite claims that the United States has entered a "post-racial era." It occurs every day, in cities and towns across the country, when law enforcement and private security target people of color for humiliating and often frightening detentions, interrogations, and searches without evidence of criminal activity and based on perceived race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion. Racial profiling is patently illegal, violating the U.S. Constitution's core promises of equal protection under the law to all and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. Just as importantly, racial profiling is ineffective. It alienates communities from law enforcement, hinders community policing efforts, and causes law enforcement to lose credibility and trust among the people they are sworn to protect and serve.

"National security" has long been used to justify the unconstitutional profiling of, and discrimination against, Muslim, Black, Brown, and other historically marginalized communities. Since September 11, 2001, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian communities have been discriminatorily profiled by federal law enforcement, local police, and border officers. We have also seen federal agencies use race, ethnicity, national origin, and/or religious beliefs to profile and target Asian Americans, particularly Chinese American scientists and academics.

The federal government's encouragement of unprecedented raids on immigrant communities and workplaces by local law enforcement in cooperation with federal agencies has targeted Latine communities in particular. These policies have unjustly expanded the purview of and undermined basic trust in local law enforcement, alienated immigrant communities, and created an atmosphere of fear. Anti-immigrant rhetoric has led to a dramatic increase in hate crimes against and racial profiling of people of color.

The ACLU's work on racial profiling encompasses major initiatives in litigation, public education, and advocacy, including lobbying for passage of data collection and anti-profiling legislation and litigating on behalf of individuals who have been victims of racial profiling by airlines, police, and government agencies.

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Racial Profiling | American Civil Liberties Union

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The ACLU's work on racial profiling encompasses major initiatives in litigation, public education, and advocacy, including lobbying for passage of data collection and anti-profiling legislation and litigating on behalf of individuals who have been victims of racial profiling.

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Homer Plessy (1863-1925) To learn more about the life of Homer Plessy and his involvement in the Plessy v. Ferguson court case, follow the attached article

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A summary and the origin of Jim Crow laws

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A summary and the origin of Jim Crow laws

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Following the civil war, the 13th and 14th amendments abolished slavery and declared former slaves citizens of the United States, and stated that all citizens would be guaranteed equal protection of the law.
However, African Americans continued to suffer maltreatment. Once Northern troops stopped enforcing these amendments, Jim Crow laws were passed in the South. These laws impacted many aspects of African American life, including but not limited to

Separated public spaces and services for white people and people of color

Extra restrictions and rules related to voting and citizenship

The ability for many private businesses to deny service, or restrict service to POC

These laws continued to impact people of color from the late 1800’s into the early mid 1900’s, with there legality being reinforced by the Supreme Court case, as in 1896 the Supreme Court ruled in the Plessy V. Ferguson that these laws were not a violation of the 14th amendment, under the description of being “Seperate but Equal”.

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Photo by Skywriter (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Plaintiff for a landmark Supreme Court case, Homer A. Plessy was born on March 17, 1863 in New Orleans. He was a light-skinned Creole of Color during the post-reconstruction years. With the aid of the Comité des Citoyens, a black organization in New Orleans, Homer Plessy became the plaintiff in the famous Plessy v. Ferguson case decided by the US Supreme Court in May 1896. The decision established the "separate but equal" policy that made racial segregation constitutional for the next six decades.

In order to challenge the 1890 Louisiana statute requiring separate accommodations for whites and blacks, Homer Plessy and the Comité des Citoyens used Plessy's light skin to their advantage. On June 7, 1892 Plessy bought a first class ticket on the East Louisiana Railway. He took a vacant seat in a coach reserved for white passengers. When Plessy was ordered to leave, he disobeyed. Policemen arrived and threw Plessy off the train and arrested him and threw him into jail. He was charged with violating the Louisiana segregation statute of 1890.

Contending that the law violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, Plessy petitioned a writ of prohibition to the Louisiana state Supreme Court against Judge John H. Ferguson. The state Supreme Court denied Plessy, holding that the law was constitutional, but allowed his writ of error to the US Supreme Court. Lawyers A.W. Tourgée and S.F. Phillips represented Plessy. His argument to the Supreme Court was that as a citizen of the United States, a resident of Louisiana and of mixed descent, with unrecognizable "colored blood," he deserved the rights and privileges secured to white people by the Constitution.

Justice Henry Brown delivered the majority decision of the court, holding that the Louisiana law did not violate the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments because it did not deprive liberties or properties without due process of the laws. Justice John Marshall Harlan issued the lone dissent, stating that the separation of citizens on the basis of race went against the civil freedoms granted in the Constitution and the Civil Rights amendments. Ultimately, the Plessy decision only opened the door for more segregation laws, which were also called the Jim Crow Laws. In 1954, 58 years later, the Brown v. Board of Education decision overruled the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Homer A. Plessy, an insurance agent into his early sixties, died on March 1, 1925 in New Orleans.

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Plaintiff for a landmark Supreme Court case, Homer A. Plessy was born on March 17, 1863 in New Orleans. He was a light-skinned Creole of Color during the post-reconstruction years. With the aid of the Comité des Citoyens, a black organization in New Orleans, Homer ... Read MoreHomer Plessy (1863-1925)

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A specific element of Jim Crow laws, and possibly the most harmful element, was the focus on restricting people of colors ability to partake in government, primarily through voting.

The most common way this was done was through so called “literacy tests”, which took advantage of African Americans recently freed status, arguing they weren’t “grandfathered” the right to vote. These tests were commonly designed to be near-to-impossible to pass, with difficult questions that had little to nothing to do with politics or basic education, and often had subjective answers.

These methods, alongside others like poll taxes and later gerrymandered districts, were and to this day are some what utilized to remove and manipulate POC’s ability to influence government.

To learn more about Jim Crow-era laws such as poll taxes and the grandfather clause, follow the included link to a History.com covering the topic in detail.

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Following the ratification in 1870 of the 15th Amendment, which barred states from depriving citizens the right to vote based on race, southern states began enacting measures such as poll taxes, literacy tests, all-white primaries, felony disenfranchisement laws, grandfather clauses, fraud and intimidation to keep African Americans from the polls.

Focused on retaining white supremacy in the electoral process, legislators used loopholes in the 15 th Amendment to implement a range of measures to disenfranchise Black voters without explicitly characterizing them on the basis of race.

After more than a half million Black men joined the voting rolls during Reconstruction in the 1870s, helping to elect nearly 2,000 Black men to public office, Mississippi led the way in using measures to circumvent the 15 th Amendment. Mississippi's Jim Crow-era laws then set a precedent for other southern states to use the same tactics to assault Black enfranchisement for nearly a century until the passage of the Voting Rights of 1965.

1890 Mississippi State Convention

At the 1890 Mississippi State Convention a new constitution was adopted that included a literacy test and poll tax for eligible voters. Under the new literacy requirement, a potential voter had to be able to read any section of the Mississippi Constitution or understand any section when read to him, or give a reasonable interpretation of any section.

"There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter," said James Vardaman in 1890. Vardaman served in the Mississippi Legislature at the time of convention and later became governor of the state. "In Mississippi we have in our constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the Negro. . . . When that device fails, we will resort to something else."

The impact of the legislation was swift. By 1910, registered voters among African Americans dropped to 15 percent in Virginia, and under 2 percent in both Alabama and Mississippi, according to historian, Donald G. Nieman, in his book Promises to Keep: African-Americans and The Constitutional Order, 1776 to the Present.

In the 1898 Williams V. Mississippi ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the state's poll tax, disenfranchisement clauses, grandfather clause and literacy tests on the basis that the new constitution didn't "discriminate between the races and it has been shown that their actual administration wasn't evil: only that evil was possible under them." The Williams ruling eased the implementation of voter-suppression statutes in many other southern states, including Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia and Georgia.

John B. Knox, an Alabama delegate to that state's 1901 convention, revealed the mindset of white legislatures when he stated that, "The convention's goal is to establish white supremacy in the State, within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution."

While many of the voting suppression measures could also impact poor white people, they disproportionately impacted African Americans.

1. Literacy Tests

Anti-literacy laws in many southern states made it illegal to teach enslaved people to read. In 1880, according to the U.S. Bureau of Census, 76 percent of southern African Americans were illiterate, a rate of 55 percent points greater than that for southern white people. In 1900, 50 percent of voting-age Black men could not read, compared to 12 percent of voting-aged white men. These disparities made literacy tests one of the most effective tools at suppressing the African American vote. The voting clerks, who were always white, could also pass or fail a person at their discretion based on race.

Illiterate white people were often excluded from these literacy tests through the use of grandfather clauses, which tied their voting rights to their grandfathers' before the Civil War. Former slaves, who had no voting rights until the 15 th Amendment, could obviously not benefit from this provision. The grandfather clause also applied to poll taxes, which were another measure created by white-dominated southern legislatures to suppress the Black vote.

2. Poll Taxes

While southern legislatures claimed that poll taxes for voting were designed to raise state revenue, to many white political leaders, the main purpose was to suppress the African American vote. "This newspaper believes in white supremacy," said a Tuscaloosa (Alabama) News editorial in 1939, "and it believes that the poll tax is one of the essentials for the preservation of white supremacy."

Eleven states in the South had laws that required citizens to pay a poll tax before they could vote. The taxes, which were $1 to $2 per year, disproportionately impacted Black registered voters. In Georgia, which implemented a cumulative poll tax in 1877 that required all citizens to pay back taxes before being permitted to vote, Black voter turnout went down 50 percent, according to Morgan Kousser in The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910.

3. All-White Primaries

When literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and the many other ways to circumvent the 15 th Amendment didn't work to suppress Black voter turnout, white legislators in several southern states used all-white primaries to all but eliminate Black voters' presence in the electoral process.

In Texas, for example, the legislature gave the Democratic Party the authority to set its own rules. The party determined that it was for white voters only, excluding African Americans from its elections and effectively making local electoral politics dominated by one party that upheld Jim Crow laws.

After a white election official blocked a Black man, Lonnie E. Smith, the right to vote in the 1940 Texas Democratic primary, the NAACP's Thurgood Marshall and William H. Hastie challenged the case all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Smith V. Allwright that the Texas white primary system was unconstitutional.

"The right to vote in a primary for the nomination of candidates without discrimination by the State...is a right secured by the Constitution," said the court in its 8-1 decision.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965

Signed into law 95 years after the 15 th Amendment was ratified into the Constitution, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed most discriminatory voting practices in southern states such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses that had been designed by southern legislatures to suppress the African American vote.

Almost as swift as the resistance to Black voter participation had been nearly a century earlier, so had the response to this landmark legislation. Within a year, only four of the 13 southern states had fewer than 50 percent of African American registered voters.

Shelby County v. Holder

In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court walked back part of the Voting Rights Act when it ruled in a 5-4 vote that constraints placed on certain states and federal review of states' voting procedures were outdated. In the wake of the Shelby County v. Holder decision, several states have enacted laws limiting voter access, including ID requirements, limits on early voting, mail-in voting and more.

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How Jim Crow‑Era Laws Suppressed the African American Vote for Generations | HISTORY

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In the wake of the 15th Amendment and Reconstruction, several southern states enacted laws that limited Black Americans' access to voting.

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“Uncle Tom” is a derogatory slur for a black person who is subservient to white people. It was derived from Harriet Stowe’s infamous novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, in which a slave is portrayed as noble and kind yet gets brutally killed.

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Photo Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

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Black culture and the Harlem Renaissance 

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Black culture and the Harlem Renaissance 

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In many forms, people of color reacted to Jim Crow laws and the racist culture of the United States. While some reacted through protest, and some threatened violence, others turned to expressing themselves through the arts, seen in The Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance was a blossoming of African American culture and the arts in:

Music, through the growing influence of spirituals and Jazz

Art and Portraiture starring Black Americans

Literature, with Black authors, writers, and poets becoming far more recognized and writing powerful works regarding the African American experience.

This flourishing movement came about in the early to mid 1920’s, seen most commonly in the urban north, in districts and neighborhoods that were predominantly made up of African Americans, such as the Harlem district of New York City.

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An example of Harlem Renaissance artwork, created by Jacob Lawrence Photo Credit: Granger Historical Picture Archive

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#BlackCulture

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The specific concept of being “Separate but Equal” was the building block of many Jim Crow laws and restrictions, effecting aspects of society such as:

Education, with African American students being forced into entirely segregated and separated schools all the way from elementary, to collegiate levels.

Public transportation, as oftentimes people of color were forced to sit in separate busses or train cars, or at the back of busses and train cars while whites were allowed to sit in front.

Restaurants and private businesses, as many business owners wouldn’t allow people of color to engage in the same practices as white people, oftentimes not being allowed to eat indoors alongside white people.

The concepts of segregation in education is demonstrated particularly well in The Invisible Man, where Ralph Ellison describes the main character, I.M., and in the early chapters, his experiences at an all-African American university. When describing the statue of the university’s founder, a symbol for the university as a whole, Ellison writes

“I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place”(Ellison 36).

This describes how these institutions were often used less to enrich and help people of color, and instead were utilized to keep them down, often offering a lower quality education than white schools and universities.

These practices of segregation continued under legal protection up until 1954, where the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education that the practice of “Separate but Equal” segregation was unconstitutional in the context of education. This decision set the groundwork for the eventual integration process, as segregation and the concept of being “Separate but Equal” was seen as the thinly veiled disguise for racist separation that it was.

To learn more about the specific functions of segregation, particularly in education, as well as the events of the Brown v. Board of Education court case, look into the book Desegregating Schools: Brown v. Board of Education, by John Torres.

#SeparateAndUnequal

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