Racism Then and Now:

Racism is still present in today’s day and age, but it is nothing compared to how bad it was in the early and mid 1900’s. Today racism is mainly seen as racial stereotypes or using discriminating words. Back then racism included discriminating laws, violence, and killing towards the black community. An example of some of the laws discriminating against the black community are the Jim Crow laws. The Jim Crow laws instated Separation of races in public places and deprived the voting rights of the black community. The KKK was present in this time and they were a white supremacy organization founded in 1866 that used terrorist tactics to intimidate former slaves. The KKK killed, bombed, and tortured tons of black people. Because of the insane amount of racism in this time there were many African Americans that needed to stand up to it. Some heroic African Americans include Malcom X, Martin Luther King JR, and Rosa Parks. Malcom x was an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist. Malcom believed that white racists killed his father so he wanted blacks to separate from the whites to achieve full freedom, and he stood up for his rights. Rosa parks was involved in the Montgomery bus boycott which helped to spark a protest that helped achieve more rights for African Americans. On December 1st 1955 Rosa Parks was forced to get out of her seat on the bus to allow a white man to sit down, but she refused. She was then arrested and fined for breaking the law. This incident left the black community in outrage and after that, the black community refused to use public transportation for a whole year. This act of protest caused the city to lose so much money that they had to remove the law that forced black people to stand at the back of the bus or give up their seats to white people. As you can see, in the early and mid 1900’s racism was a very serious problem, and was much worse than it is today. Today racism is still alive, but luckily it is nothing as compared to the KKK or Jim Crow Laws. Society has evolved greatly in the past 100 years and things have gotten much better for the African American community. In conclusion racism in the early to mid 1900’s was much worse and to a much greater extent than it is today.

By Trevor Thirsk