Langston Earl Martin
March 16, 2017
The New Jim Crow HW: Blackmon Quote Examination
A Summer of Trials, 1903
1. "His attorneys initially believed that Judge Jones-like any other white southern judge-would feel compelled by tradition and public pressure to acknowledge the untested status of peonage statute and offer a symbolic punishment to Pace in exchange for a guilty plea." (page 217)
-So basically the attorneys believed that the judge would let him off easily despite the crime he commited. The fact that they so readily accepted that was so likely to walk off with a slap on the wrist shows the polarity between blacks and whites of the time.
2. "Finch reported that involuntary servitude was indeed widespread across the state." (page 218)
-They acknowledge that this is common around the state and they just accept that. No one is bringing up a red flag about the violation of human rights. This wasn't isolated to one area or town it's across the state and maybe even the country.
3. "The federal government had no jurisdiction over the use of forced labor in Tallapoosa County." (page 219)
-They had no jurisdiction despite a clear violation of the 13th amendment. The fact that despite the amendment being ratified nothing has changed is very disheartening.
4. "Pace lured the farmhand by approaching him in a saloon in Dadeville, offering to hire him for $4 per month.... But once the contract had been signed, Green was placed in the lockup on Pace's farm for nearly two years" (Page 219)
-This man was lured with the promise of a well paying job and instead became a slave for 2 years. The fact they are taking African American dreams of success in this country and twisting them into nightmares of returning to enslavement is horrifying. I could happen to anyone.
5. "Grogan was accused of arresting an African American woman named Emma Pearson on a bogus charge of vagrancy and then selling her to Eliza Turner, the brother of Fletch Turner, who managed the family's limestone quarry in Calcis." (page 221)
-This is an example of the black codes, arresting African Americans on bogus charges, imprisoning them, and then selling them into slavery. Again it was so easy to do this.
A River of Anger
1. "Even rabidly anti-black, white supremacist politicians and newspapers such as the Montgomery Advertiser intially reacted with embarassment to the peonage charges that so suddenly burst into the public eye" (page 233)
-I just like that when facts are so clearly shown that they can't talke their way around it. It's just there for everyone to see and every know's what it is no other way of looking at it. It kinda like today, somethings in politics never change.
2. "a frenzied mob in Scottsboro, Alabama, gunned down the town sheriff in front of his family as he refused to turn over a black teenager who had allegedly 'attempted criminal assault' on a nineteen-year-old white girl" (page 234)
-this just showed how rabid people were back then. They gunned down an officer of the law (a white on at that) for an alleged criminal. I was not disproven or proven, but I feel like even if he was innocent his fate would've been the same.
3. "the poisoned atmosphere and accelerating disintegration of the structure of civil society more resembled to blacks a time two centuries earlier" (page 234)
-This line just my mindscape whenever I take this class, it is really disheartening to see all the steps taken to keep me down just because of my skin color.
4. "Before the publication of Darwin's landmark On the Origin of Species in 1859, virtually all Americans viewed the presumed higher and lower racial order of whites, blacks, and native Indian tribes as mandated by God." (page 235)
-People believed that white superiority was a divine mandate. Make's me think back to reading the white mans burden, it's their duty to educate and care for the lesser men or some BS like that.
5. "Popular American culture embraced the western conflicts as proof of white superiority-spawning hundreds of novels and short stories that extolled the extermination of Indian populations as the inexorable march of white progress and eminent domain." (page 236)
-I am extremely aware of this I watched westerns all the time with my grandparents and over the years although I enjoy them I have noticed the demonization of Native American's in them or just stereotyping with the Noble Indian/shaman/warrior.
