John Steinbeck Jim Crow Laws

John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California. He died at the age of 64 on December 20, 1968. Steinbeck is best known for his novels; East of Eden in 1952, The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, and Of Mice and Men in 1937. His mother was a school teacher, and his father a Monterey County Treasurer. Often, Steinbeck himself worked on local farms as a laborer (“John”). He attended Stanford studying both marine biology and English, but after making the decision to pursue writing Steinbeck never completed his degree.In 1940 Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Grapes of Wrath establishing himself as a writer, as well as A Nobel Prize in literature in 1962 (John). In 1965 Steinbeck began writing a weekly column
“Jim Crow” was a popular african-american character in a song-and-dance routine in the 1820s (Jim). Jim Crow laws, passed primarily in cities and states in the South mandated racial segregation in nearly every social circumstance. They imposed laws that, required African Americans to attend different schools, stopped blacks from renting or buying property in specifically white neighborhoods, and did not allow interracial marriages. Jim Crow laws assured that African Americans would not achieve economic equality with whites ,and reversed the social and economic gains that blacks had made in the decade following the Civil War . In part because of these laws, Southern blacks migrated out of rural areas in significant numbers to urban centers, both in the South and in the North (“Jim Crow Laws”).
They could not enter most hotels, restaurants, and resorts, except as servants; they prayed in “Negro pews” in the white churches, and if partaking of the sacrament of the Lord’s supper, they waited until all the whites had been served.(George
Although their graduation rates rose steadily in the United States, minorities still were underrepresented in the country's top professions, and most affluent neighborhoods in the United States remained primarily white (“Jim Crow laws”).
During 1930 to 1933 the U.S. financial system witnessed conditions that were amid the most chaotic and difficult in its history. Waves after waves of bank failures peaked in the collapse of the banking system in early 1933. Exceptionally high rates of bankruptcy hit every class of borrower excluding the Federal government (Bernanke 1).
A lot of the unemployment of the depression can be blamed to workers who moved in and out of employment. This unemployment usually lasted for weeks or months. Still, there were numerous people who were unemployed for a span of years at once. Among this group of people were those with the least amount of applicable skills or the worst mindset. “Others found that having been unemployed for a long period of time made them less attractive to