Jim Crow

While ostensibly designed to help curb illegal immigration, the impact of Alabama's HB 56 ("Alabama sets new standard," June 10) will instead be to punish and further intimidate illegals who already reside in that state. Much like Jim Crow, the spirit and provisions of this legislation give Alabama legal sanction to restrict minority access to education, employment, public services and the right to due process. It likewise criminalizes the efforts of good citizens to provide assistance to illegal immigrants, while giving police nearly unfettered power to act upon their own personal prejudices.

CardinalEdwin F. O'Brienof Baltimore calls same-sex marriage, signed into law by the Maryland governor on Thursday, a "radical redefinition of marriage. " Of course, many people - most likely a majority - believed 50 years ago that ending racial segregation in the United States constituted a "radical redefinition" of American society. The races were meant to be separate, they said; it wasn't natural for blacks and whites to drink from the same fountains, and they certainly should never be allowed to marry each other.

CardinalEdwin F. O'Brienof Baltimore calls same-sex marriage, signed into law by the Maryland governor on Thursday, a "radical redefinition of marriage. " Of course, many people - most likely a majority - believed 50 years ago that ending racial segregation in the United States constituted a "radical redefinition" of American society. The races were meant to be separate, they said; it wasn't natural for blacks and whites to drink from the same fountains, and they certainly should never be allowed to marry each other.

I have something for you. In June 2010, I wrote in this space about a book, "The New Jim Crow," by Michelle Alexander, which I called a "troubling and profoundly necessary" work. Ms. Alexander promulgated an explosive argument. Namely, that the so-called "War on Drugs" amounts to a war on African-American men and, more to the point, to a racial caste system nearly as restrictive, oppressive and omnipresent as Jim Crow itself. This because, although white Americans are far and away the nation's biggest dealers and users of illegal drugs, African-Americans are far and away the ones most likely to be jailed for drug crimes.

While researching my civil rights book, I gave a brief work-in-progress talk at a woman's club in Baltimore. A member of the audience came up to me afterward to make this observation about the task I was beginning to confront: "You'll never get the ambience of those days." I thought I knew what she meant. Jim Crow discrimination was sustained by a level of passion that might be difficult to convey. And there was the fact that while I had grown up at the end of the Jim Crow era in North Carolina, I had not grown up black.

Nashville, Tennessee -- Almost 40 years ago I came to this city to write an article for Redbook magazine about the brave black parents who tried to ensure that Brown v. Board of Education was enforced. The article was entitled ''We Send Our Children Into Trouble.''One of the saddest fallouts from the failure of Americans to accept and enforce the 1954 decree outlawing segregated schools is the current reluctance of millions of black Americans to risk anything in a struggle for integration.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Astonishingly, and sadly, four decades after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. marched in Birmingham, we must ask again, "Do African-Americans have the unimpeded right to vote in the United States?" In 1963, Dr. King's determined and courageous band faced water hoses and police attack dogs to call attention to the thicket of Jim Crow laws -- including poll taxes and so-called "literacy" tests -- that stood in the way of black Americans' right to have their ballots cast and counted.

WASHINGTON -- Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom have tackled the perennial American heartache in their massive, comprehensive new book, "America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible."From the founding of this republic and the compromises this "peculiar institution" required, on through the horrible Civil War and the civil rights movement, the thread of race has run through our history -- and it is inseparable from the history and destiny of this country.In the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial, the Yankel Rosenbaum murder and the Million Man March, the Thernstrom book is particularly well-timed.

JIM CROW was an old Baltimore slave who made history. Inadvertently. He had the most menial of tasks, sweeping out stables. But the deformed old man had magic in his soul. He was a musical genius, though others would copy him and get the credit for it.It was in 1818 that Thomas Dartmouth Rice, better known as "Daddy" Rice, came to Baltimore with one of the early traveling blackface minstrel shows. There was a constant demand for new songs and routines. Rice, sometimes called PeterKumpa"the crown prince" of minstrels, made many popular and famous.

Is Black History Month still needed? With characters like Dinesh D'Souza running around, you're danged skippy it is.D'Souza's parents emigrated to the United States from India when he was a teen-ager. He attended Dartmouth College, where he edited the conservative campus newspaper the Dartmouth Review. Then he graduated and now devotes himself to his true calling: writing tendentious books to pester and annoy Negroes.His latest work is "The End of Racism." But believe me, this guy -- and the folks at the American Enterprise Institute, where D'Souza is a fellow -- don't want to end racism as much as recycle it. They don't want a return to Jim Crow, per se. But they might settle for a system of James Crow, Esquire.

While ostensibly designed to help curb illegal immigration, the impact of Alabama's HB 56 ("Alabama sets new standard," June 10) will instead be to punish and further intimidate illegals who already reside in that state. Much like Jim Crow, the spirit and provisions of this legislation give Alabama legal sanction to restrict minority access to education, employment, public services and the right to due process. It likewise criminalizes the efforts of good citizens to provide assistance to illegal immigrants, while giving police nearly unfettered power to act upon their own personal prejudices.

Hollywood never provided a richer picture of the Jim Crow South than Clarence Brown's "Intruder in the Dust," a fresh, inspired adaptation of William Faulkner's 1948 novel. It's not a message movie about racial injustice. It's about the American experience of growing up by crashing through the precepts and prejudices of your town, your state, your region — and your family. It combines a coming-of-age fable and a detective story with an acute dissection of tribal beliefs and herd mentality.

Here's something you won't hear much about in the coming Maryland gubernatorial election: The United States has the world's highest incarceration rate and a de facto racial caste system that discriminates against hundreds of thousands of black men in the way Jim Crow laws once did. You won't hear anything close to that from Martin O'Malley, the Democrat and present governor, nor from Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., the Republican and wannabe-governor-again who,...

If he'd said it of Jews, he would still be apologizing. If he'd said it of blacks, he'd be on BET, begging absolution. If he'd said it of women, the National Organization for Women would have his carcass turning slowly on a spit over an open flame. But he said it of the poor, so he got away with it. "He" is South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, running for governor on the GOP ticket. Speaking of those who receive public assistance, he recently told an audience, "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals.

When Baltimore sculptor James Earl Reid created the city's first memorial to the stunningly gifted jazz singer Billie Holiday in 1985, something was missing. Gone were the panels containing references to the Jim Crow era and the lynching that Holiday so chillingly recounted in the ballad "Strange Fruit." Now Reid has a chance to remedy what he calls censorship by city officials, by adding the bronze panels for today's rededication of the statue on the 50th anniversary of her death. The striking, 8-foot-6-inch-high, 1,200-pound likeness of the Baltimore-born Holiday, wearing a strapless gown, with her trademark gardenias in her hair and her mouth open in song, will now rest on a 20,000-pound base of solid granite, as Reid had intended all along.

POP MUSIC The Roots Check out the annual Johns Hopkins Spring Fair, featuring a beer garden, food vendors, craft stands, interactive literacy events for kids, a carnival and music events. It runs Friday through Sunday on the Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St., and admission is free. As part of the festivities, hip-hop band the Roots performs at 7 p.m. Saturday on the Ralph O'Connor Recreation Center Practice Field. Tickets are $25 for the general public and $10 for Johns Hopkins students with valid student IDs. For more information, including ticketing, go to jhuspringfair.

In a death knell to Jim Crow laws, the Supreme Court on June 21, 1915, struck down an Annapolis grandfather lause that largely prevented African-Americans from participating in municipal elections. That week, the Supreme Court ruled on two related cases involving the city of Annapolis and the state of Oklahoma. Both had cases against them that challenged the constitutionality of certain voting requirements. At stake in Annapolis was a grandfather clause that said that any person whose grandfather was not a registered voter in the state was not eligible to register to vote.

WHEN PLESSY v. Ferguson sprang from the Supreme Court, it met with mild surprise and routine coverage by the white press in Maryland. The following day, there was a brief mention on the front page of The Sun, a short story on page two, but no blaring headlines to mark the legal stamp of approval given Jim Crow laws.An editorial titled "Separate Coaches for Colored Passengers" appeared on page four. It was a masterpiece of myopia which suggested that "[t]he necessity for such a law exists only in the South."