The Jim Crow Era and Brown v. The Board

Today in seminar I learned about two things: Brown v. Board and the Jim Crow Era. It was weird to learn about some of these things, because they seem so inhumane and so outdated. But the truth is that some of these things are still very much present in this country, such as blackface, a rising topic in media and entertainment, and lynchings, something that is still happening today in the midst of the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Lynchings started occurring in the late 1870's and continued to occur for almost a hundred years. It was used as a form of punishment for black people who committed any type of social aggression, ranging from an accusation of a crime to something as small as bumping into a white woman, and the accuses weren't even given due process. Because white people didn't feel as if the law was working, they took the law into their own hands. The people that were responsible for these crimes were never charged or arrested. There was a total of about 4,000 reported lynchings during the Jim Crow Era. While lynching has been de-normalized since this era, lynching is still just as real today as it was during this era. Especially with the Black Lives Matter movement on the rise, lynchings have since made a comeback and it's hitting the black community hard. An article that elaborates more on this topic here. 

Another topic on the rise in the media is blackface. Once called "minstrel", blackface was dark theatrical makeup or face paint in which white people would use to portray, mock, and dehumanize African Americans. One of its earliest appearance can be seen in the 1915 film "The Birth of a Nation". A white man is seen using blackface to portray the African American character in the film. In the scene, a white woman goes as far as to throw herself off a cliff in order to escape being raped by the African American man, thus contributing to the harmful notion that black men pose a threat to white women. 

Lastly, I learned about the famous case Brown v. The Board of Education. Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against The Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas when it denied enrollment to his daughter, Linda Brown. Schools were still segregated, and it's not secret that the "black schools" lacked the resources that the "white schools" has. Brown v. Board overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, the court case that birthed the phrase "separate but equal". While it didn't singlehandedly end segregation, it significantly increased black progress and the fight for equality.