A Quote by Sidney Blumenthal
It was the biggest suppression of voting rights in our country's history since Jim Crow. And the thread of race runs from the beginning to the end of my book.
Related Quotes
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought an end to the ugly Jim Crow period in American history.
I don’t believe it is possible to transcend race in this country. Race is a factor in this society. The legacy of Jim Crow and slavery has not gone away. It is not an accident that African-Americans experience high crime rates, are poor, and have less wealth. It is a direct result of our racial history.
Michelle Alexander's brave and bold new book paints a haunting picture in which dreary felon garb, post-prison joblessness, and loss of voting rights now do the stigmatizing work once done by colored-only water fountains and legally segregated schools. With dazzling candor, Alexander argues that we all pay the cost of the new Jim Crow.
Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.
We started America with the sin of slavery that led right into the post-reconstruction period which was the greatest period of domestic terrorism in our country's history. Then after that, we had Jim Crow emerge and just when the Jim Crow laws were ending came the onslaught of the drug war. Well, the drug war has so perniciously effected, insidiously infected communities of color that in some ways it has come full circle, and we now have more African Americans under criminal supervision than all of the slaves in 1865. This is a profoundly unjust war.
Jim Crow laws stripped blacks of basic rights. Despite landmark civil rights laws, many public schools were still segregated, blacks still faced barriers to voting, and violence by white racists continued. Such open racism is mostly gone in America, but covert racism is alive and well.
What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don't. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color "criminals" and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.
The history of African-American repression in this country rose from government-sanctioned racism. Jim Crow laws were a product of bigoted state and local governments.
People talk about Jim Crow as if it's dead. Jim Crow isn't gone. It's adjusted. Look at the disproportionate sentences meted out to blacks caught up in the criminal justice system. There's a problem when people profit from putting and keeping African Americans in prison. We need to do a better job as a nation understanding the real values the country's built upon in terms of fairness, equality and equal opportunity.
Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.
I wanted to remind myself and others of the old Jim Crow, so that we can remind ourselves that we're still living in the new Jim Crow. I feel it's important to dress in the fashion of the times.
In order to better charge Moscow with human rights violations, the United States had to bend with regard to the more excessive aspects of Jim Crow. It had to yield to the insistent cries on the ground here in this country.
We have a long, ugly history of white supremacy in this country, ranging from Jim Crow laws to keep African Americans down to the 1924 Immigration Act to keep non-Europeans out.
We're bringing the corporate rate down to 20 percent from 35 percent. That's a massive - this will be the biggest tax cut in history. In the history of our country. And that's great. And we need it. Because right now, our country's about the highest taxed or certainly one of the highest taxed in the world. And we can't have that. So we're going to have a country that's toward the lower end.
The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed.
During the Jim Crow era, we know that racially targeted and racially motivated voter suppression was often blatant. Legislators adapted overtly racist policies like literacy tests, and poll taxes in an effort to shape the electorate.
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