African Americans In The 1930s Essay

Life for Blacks in the South in the 1930s Can you imagine if you were considered as “property” instead of a person, using a lower quality facility than whites, and having certain laws on what you could and couldn’t do according to your skin color? This is what African-Americans had to go through until the late-1960s. These people had certain laws called “Jim Crow Laws” that they had to follow otherwise they would be punished with jail time and/or fines. Some even suffered from lynching. Lynching is murder by mob, often by hanging, but also by burning at the stake or shooting, in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a specific sector of a population. African-Americans were also segregated, forcing them to use lower quality facilities such as schools, restaurants, and public restrooms. Throughout the history of the United States
“From Delaware to California, and from North Dakota to Texas, many states (and cities, too) could impose legal punishments on people for consorting with members of another race” (Jim Crow Laws 1). This made things just as simple as riding on the bus difficult. These laws made contact between whites and African-Americans slim to none. The people who made these laws obviously did not consider African-Americans equal as the constitution states they should. As if these laws weren’t hard enough, lynching was common in these times. “Between 1882 and 1968, 4,743 persons died of lynching, 3,446 of them black men and women” (About Lynching 2). Often times white families would bring their children to watch and it was seen as a “festive atmosphere”. The most common forms of lynching was burning, torture, and dismemberment to prolong the pain and suffering for the said person. Furthermore, mobs would use especially sadistic tactics when African-American were their prime