Opinion Columnist
Millions of people are in the country through no fault of their own. Many are brought here against their will. Many as children. They are in America but are not citizens of America. Some people want to send them back to where they came from. Others want to make them American.
That was the situation for many Black people in this country in the wake of the Civil War, when they had been freed and slavery outlawed, but they were not truly citizens. Black people were the United States’ original Dreamers. For three years the dilemma lingered until my home state, Louisiana, along with South Carolina, voted to ratify the 14th Amendment on July 9, 1868, 153 years ago this Friday.
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Edward Ball’s great-great-grandfather, Polycarp Constant Lecorgne, was a racist who sought to restore white dominance in Louisiana during and after Reconstruction in the wake of the US Civil War. A Creole from New Orleans whose ancestors hailed from Brittany in western France, Lecorgne was a “hero” of his times because he fought for “whiteness” in the service of the white supremacist cause.
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More than 130 years after Mississippi imposed a poll tax and literacy test to keep Blacks from voting, President Biden others warn that Jim Crow-style disenfranchisement is resurfacing in efforts by Georgia, Texas and other states to restrict voting.
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Who or what was Jim Crow?
Jim Crow was the name given to the system of racial segregation in the US – predominantly in the South but holding influence all over the country – from the period immediately after the American Civil War (the end of the Reconstruction era) to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
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With ‘separate but equal’ as the guiding doctrine, state and local laws restricted black rights. Black people were denied the vote; educational, economic and vocational opportunities; and basic human dignities. Yet Jim Crow was more than that: it was an all-pervasive way of life to keep African-American people as second-class citizens by sanctioning and normalising their oppression in a post-slavery world, and enforcing that with the constant threat of the law, intimidation, violence and death.