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What Was Jim Crow? Pre-reading Essay Activity
By Rick Vanderwall
Overview
This pre-reading activity will provide students the background on the Jim Crow system they need to better understand the novel, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry , and the historical setting in which it takes place. Students will read the abridged essay, “What Was Jim Crow?” by Dr. David Pilgrim, one part at a time, and complete each corresponding vocabulary activity. They will then orally report to the class on the meaning of the word they have been assigned. When students have completed the reading, the entire class will discuss the essay's content.
Student Objectives
Students will demonstrate the understanding of:
- Demonstrate their understanding of the Jim Crow System and its history.
- Demonstrate their understanding of vocabulary words through the assigned essay.
Skills Attained
Students will be able to:
- Use the dictionary.
- Apply word definitions to derive contextual meaning of vocabulary words in the assigned essay.
Materials Needed
- Copies of the essay, “What Was Jim Crow?” by Dr. David Pilgrim (See below)
- Copies of the three worksheets, below
- Access to dictionaries and the web
The Lesson
Anticipatory Set
Pass out copies of “What Was Jim Crow?” and the three worksheets to students in the class.
Procedures
- Assign students to read (either aloud or individually) part one of the essay and assign one vocabulary word and worksheet to each student.
- Have the class discuss part one when students have completed the assigned reading. Questions for discussion should include: - When and where did the Jim Crow system exist? - What were each of the Jim Crow etiquette norms?
- Have students report to the class on the contextual meaning of their assigned words once they have completed the vocabulary worksheet.
- Assign parts two and three repeating the vocabulary assignments; once they have completed their assignments, have students discuss the: - Concept of “separate but equal”. - Ramifications for African Americans when they couldn't vote.
- Assign part four, again repeating the vocabulary assignment; then have students:
- discuss the role of violence in the maintaining of the Jim Crow System.
- compare the violence of the Jim Crow System with the Holocaust.
Assessment
You can assess students on the worksheets they completed, the paragraph portion of the worksheets, and the oral reports of the contextual definitions of the vocabulary words according to the following rubric. You can also give credit for students' participation in the essay discussions.
Pre-reading Essay Activity Rubric
Grading Areas
Specific Grading Criteria
Percentage of Total Grade
Work Sheet Completion
Finds the word in the context 40%
Selects the best definition
Paragraph
Clearly explains contextual meaning of the word 60%
Uses complete sentences
Provides evidence showing that he or she revised and proofread work
Rick Vanderwall is the Chair of the Language Arts Department at Malcolm Price Laboratory School in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
Connections
For further background on the history of Jim Crow, go to the jimcrowhistory.org web site. [link to home page, jimcrowhistory.org]
- If a black person rode in a car driven by a white person, the black person sat in the back seat or the back of a truck.
- motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections.
PART TWO
Stetson Kennedy, the author of Jim Crow Guide, offered these simple rules that blacks were supposed to observe in conversing with whites:
- Never assert or even intimate that a white person is lying.
- Never impute dishonorable intentions to a white person.
- Never suggest that a white person is from an inferior class.
- Never lay claim to, or overly demonstrate, superior knowledge or intelligence.
- Never curse a white person.
- Never laugh derisively at a white person.
- Never comment upon the appearance of a white female. (1)
Jim Crow etiquette operated together with Jim Crow laws (Black Codes). When most people think of Jim Crow, they think of laws (not the Jim Crow etiquette), which excluded blacks from public transport and facilities, juries, jobs, and neighborhoods. The passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution had granted blacks the same legal protections as whites. However, after 1877, and the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, southern and border states began restricting the liberties of blacks. Unfortunately for blacks, the Supreme Court helped to ignore the Constitutional rights of blacks with the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case, which supported Jim Crow laws and the Jim Crow way of life.
In 1890, Louisiana passed the "Separate Car Law," which claimed to aid passenger comfort by creating "equal but separate" cars for blacks and whites. This was not true. No public accommodations, including railway travel, provided blacks with equal facilities. The Louisiana law made it illegal for blacks to sit in coach seats reserved for whites, and whites could not sit in seats reserved for blacks. In 1891, a group of blacks decided to test the Jim Crow law. They had Homer A. Plessy, who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black (therefore, black), sit in the white- only railroad coach. He was arrested. Plessy's lawyer argued that Louisiana did not have the right to label one citizen as white and another black for the purposes of restricting their rights and privileges. The Supreme Court decided that, so long as state governments provided legal freedoms for blacks, equal to those of whites, they could maintain separate but equal accommodations to facilitate these rights. The Court, by a seven to two vote, upheld the Louisiana law, declaring that racial separation did not necessarily do away with equality.
Blacks were denied the right to vote by grandfather clauses (laws that restricted the right to vote to people whose ancestors had voted before the Civil War), poll taxes (fees charged to poor blacks), white primaries (only Democrats could vote, only whites could be Democrats), and literacy tests ("Name all the Vice Presidents and Supreme Court Justices throughout America's history"). The Plessy decision sent this message to southern and border states: Discrimination against blacks is acceptable.
- Wine and Beer. All persons licensed to conduct the business of selling beer or wine ... shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room at any time (Georgia). (2)
PART FOUR
The Jim Crow laws and system of etiquette were enforced by violence, real and threatened. Blacks who violated Jim Crow norms by, for example, drinking from the white water fountain or trying to vote, risked their homes, their jobs, even their lives. whites could physically beat blacks with impunity. Blacks had little legal recourse against these assaults because the Jim Crow criminal justice system was all white: police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and prison officials. Violence was instrumental for Jim Crow. It was a method of social control. The most extreme form of Jim Crow violence was lynching.
Lynchings were public murders carried out by mobs. Between 1882, when the first reliable data were collected, and 1968, when lynchings had become rare, there were 4,730 known lynchings, including 3,440 black men and women. Most of the victims of Lynch-Law were hanged or shot, but some were burned at the stake, mutilated, beaten with clubs, or dismembered. Arthur Raper investigated nearly a century of lynchings and concluded that approximately one-third of all the victims were falsely accused. (4)
James Weldon Johnson, the famous black writer, labeled 1919 "The Red Summer." It was red from racial tension; it was red from bloodletting. During the summer of 1919, there were race riots in Chicago, Illinois; Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee; Charleston, South Carolina; Omaha, Nebraska; and two dozen other citizens. W.E.B. Du Bois, the black social scientist and civil rights activist, wrote:
During that year 77 Negroes were lynched, of whom one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, 14 were publicly burned, eleven of them being burned alive. That year there were race riots large and small in 26 American cities including 38 killed in a Chicago riot of August; from 25 to 50 in Phillips County, Arkansas; and six killed in Washington. (8)
The riots of 1919 were not the first or last "mass lynchings" of blacks, as evidenced by the race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); Atlanta, Georgia (1906); Springfield, Illinois (1908); East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921); and Detroit, Michigan (1943). Joseph Boskin, author of Urban Racial Violence , claimed that the riots of the 1900s had the following traits:
- In each of the race riots, with few exceptions, it was white people that sparked the incident by attacking black people.
- In the majority of the riots, some extraordinary social condition prevailed at the time of the riot: prewar social changes, wartime mobility, post-war adjustment, or economic depression.
- The majority of the riots occurred during the hot summer months.
- Rumor played an extremely important role in causing many riots. Rumors of some criminal activity by blacks against whites perpetuated the actions of the white mobs.
- The police force, more than any other institution, was invariably involved as a cause or supporting factor in the riots. In almost every one of the riots, the police sided with the attackers, either by actually participating in, or by failing to quell the attack.
- In almost every instance, the fighting occurred within the black community. (9)
What Was Jim Crow Activity Vocabulary list
PART ONE
- racial segregation
- racism
- inferior
- oppression
- etiquette
- inclusive
- pervasive
- implied
- intimacy
- rape
PARTS TWO AND THREE
- impute
- notorious
- accommodations
- legal freedoms
- separate but equal
- facilitate
- discrimination
- prohibited
- implied
PART FOUR
- lynching
- mutilated
- dismembered
- social scientist
- civil rights activist
- economic depression
- social condition
- prevailed
- quell
- mobility
- perpetuated
- inflammatory
What Was Jim Crow Essay Work Sheet
Name______________________________________
Date ____________________Period____________
Vocabulary word activity
My word for (circle one) -- Part One -- Part Two -- Part Three -- Part Four
is ________________________________
Find the sentence that contains this word in the essay and copy the sentence here.
Write the dictionary definition that best fits the way the word is used above.
Write a short paragraph explaining the meaning of your word in the context of the essay. Explain in complete sentences and provide evidence that you revised and proofread your paragraph by submitting both a rough and final draft.
