African Americans in McMillen’s Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in t

Plight of the African Americans After Reconstruction in Neil McMillens Book, naughty Journey Black Mississippians in the date of Jim Crow Neil McMillens book, injustice Journey Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow categorically examines the hire of African Americans living in Mississippi during the era of Jim Crow. McMillen, a professor at the University of southeasterlyern Mississippi, describes the obstacles that African Americans dealt with in the fields of education, labor, mob violence, and politics. Supplementing all(prenominal) group with data tables, charts and excerpts from Southern newspapers of the day, McMillen saturates the reader with facts that function to understand the problems face by minacious Mississippians in the days by and by Reconstruction. McMillen begins by canvass the roots of segregation in Mississippi beginning with common equity and later evolving into state sponsored apartheid with the Plessey v. Ferguson decision and the new state constitution of 1890. The indispensability for separation between the races arose out of feelings of negrophobia that overcame the white citizens of the South during the period of Jim Crow. Negrophobia was an consuming fear by white males in the South that if the races were in underweight proximity of each other the savage black men would revilement the heavenly virtues of Southern white women. As a result black boys in Mississippi learned at an early age that so far smiling at a white woman could prove dangerous. Although segregation was vehemently opposed by Black railsers when it was first instituted, by the 1890s leaders such as Booker T. Washington began to accentuate self-help over social equality. The fact that Mississippis institutions were segregated lead to them being inherently unequal, and without a... ...ing the life of African Americans during the Jim Crow era into item categories McMillen made it easier for the reader to understand how the Jim Crow laws gove rned every aspect of Blacks lives. I especially found the section on mob violence interesting. It is horrendous to me how brutal and inhuman some whites could be only eighty years ago. The only criticism I had of Dark Journey was that McMillen did not talk about the strong religious convictions of many Black Mississippians and how they used their faith to help them deal with the trauma of Jim Crow. However in the end by examining the lives of blacks after reconstruction this book has amazed me by showing me how far the South and Mississippi has come in such a relatively bunco period of time. Work CitedNeil R. McMillen. Dark Journey Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim CrowIllini Books edition, 1990