Okay, so can we just talk about how there are about four thousand laws included in these Jim Crow Laws that put restrictions on marriage and cohabitation of Caucasian and African American people? I'm not saying the rest of these laws are unjustified and absolutely ridiculous, but I think laws restricting marriage of people of two different racial groups is obscene. I don't want to be all lovey and gooey, but the government should not have the right to say which groups of people may live together and which can't.
Who takes the time to think of these laws anyway? "Restaurants: It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectively separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment." Seriously? So if my solid partition is only 6 feet tall, I am breaking the law? And would black and white people walking through the same door really hurt anyone? Maybe because I do not live in the same time period, I can not see the reasoning behind a lot of these laws, but they honestly just seem crazy, ridiculous, and unnecessary to me.
These laws include everything from child custody to circuses. Separate but equal seems like such a primitive idea to me. It's almost as if they were pretending to give African Americans rights, but did so in a way in which they would still be inferior. These laws are all cleverly designed to keep whites and blacks separated so that progress would not be possible between the two groups.
My journalism teacher, Mr. Motes was actually just talking about Brown v. Board of Education the other day. Brown v. Board of Education resulted in the desegregation of schools, which meant that all of the schools openly welcomed black students, right? Wrong. Mr. Motes lived in Virginia at the time and said that when the decision was made to make the schools equally available to both black and white students, the board of education as well as teachers, walked out and formed their own private schools. They made these schools almost impossible for black students to get into and for a long time, there were no public schools for seven years in Motes' hometown. I think hearing that story gave me an idea of just how unwilling so many people were to have the United States desegregated.
I am almost ashamed when I look back at these laws and how our country was run regarding these issues. The worst part is, this wasn't even that long ago. I feel like this is such a primitive topic and that these disputes and even the Jim Crow Laws should have taken place hundreds of years ago.
"Woah, dude, that's crazy!"
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