Some Jim Crow Laws

Intermarriage: All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, or between a white person and an member of the Malay race; or between the negro and a member of the Malay race; or between a person of Negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, and a member of the Malay race, are forever prohibited, and shall be void. Maryland

All marriages between ....white persons and Negroes or white persons and Mongolians...are prohibited and declared absolutely void...No person having one-eighth part or more of negro blood shall be permitted to marry any white person, nor shall any white person be permitted to marry any negro or person having one-eighth part or more of negro blood. Missouri

Child Custody. It shall be unlawful for any parent, relative or other white person in this State, having the control or custody of any white child, by right of guardianship, natural or acquired, or otherwise, to dispose of, give or surrender such white child permanently into the custody, control, maintenance, or support, of a negro. South Carolina

Militia. The white and colored militia shall be separately enrolled, and shall never be compelled to serve in the same organization. No organization of colored troops shall be permitted where white troops are available, and while white permitted to be organized, colored troops shall be under the command of white officers. North Carolina

Promotion of Equality. Any person...who shall be guilty of printing, publishing or circulating printed, typewritten or written matter urging or presenting for public acceptance or genera information, arguments or suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and Negroes, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to fine or not exceeding five hundred (500.00) dollars or imprisonment not exceeding six (6) months or both. Mississippi

Africans Also Share a Blame in Slavery!

Americans are not the only ones who should apologize for slavery. I want an apology from the descendants of corrupt African chiefs who swapped our bodies for rum. To Africa the traders brought rum and it corrupted and destroyed us like the Native Americans. We were taken to the colonies, the West Indies, Cuba, and Brazil and used as currency to buy molasses; the molasses in turn was taken to the distilleries of New England and battered for rum, which formed the basis for another slave voyage. We millions of black folk who live in this land were born into Western civilization of a weird and paradoxical birth. The lean, tall blond men of England, Holland, and Denmark, the dark, short, nervous men of France, Spain, and Portugal, men whose blue and gray and brown eyes glinted with the light of the future, denied our human personalities, tore us from our native soil, weighted our legs with chains, stacked us like cord-wood in the foul holes of clipper ships, dragged us across thousands of miles of ocean, and hurled us into another land, strange and hostile, where for a second time we felt the slow, painful process of a new birth amid conditions harsh and raw.
The immemorial stars must have gazed down in amazement at the lowly of England and Europe, who, with hearts full of hope, pushed out to sea to urge rebellion against tyranny and then straightway became engaged in the slave trade, in the buying and selling of our human bodies. And those same stars must have smiled when, following the War of Independence, the Lords of the Land in the South relaxed their rigid slave code ever so little to square their guilty conscience with the lofty ideals of the rights of man for which they had fought and died; but never did they relax their code so much as to jeopardize their claim of ownership of us.

Causes For the Turning Point

A small minority, both north and south, felt outraged at a system of human bondage that nullified all they had so ardently striven to build, and many sensitive men grew violent against all government and went up and down the land propounding the principles of passive resistance and civil disobedience. In an atmosphere of such tension, the whites began to distrust each other. Therefore, when the Bosses of the Buildings suggested that we blacks be deported and colonized, the Lords of the Land rose and threatened to resort to a wholesale breeding of slaves in order not to be deprived of our living bodies. And, on the other hand, when the Lords of the Land, afraid of our growing numbers and increasing rebelliousness, suggested that the entire nation be taxed to raise money to deport us, the Bosses of the Buildings declared that such a course would destroy the capital of the nation, stifle productivity, and crush the poor whites, who were already being smothered in the slave atmosphere. But as we blacks continued to multiply and spread, our population would never exceed that of the whites or grow so great in any one area as to constitute an insurrectionary danger!

Turning Point in Relations

In the latter part of the eighteenth century the conduct of most of the Lords of the Land began to alter toward us. To evade the prevailing Christian injunction that all baptized men are free, and to check our growing record of revolt, they culled from the Bible a thousand quotable verses admonishing us slaves to be true to our masters. Thereupon they felt that they had squared conscience with practice, and they extended Christian salvation to us without granting the boon of freedom. This dual attitude, compounded of a love of gold and God, was the beginning of America's paternalistic code toward her black maid, her black industrial worker, her black stevedore, her black dancer, her black waiter, her black sharecropper; it was a code of casual cruelty, of brutal kindness, of genial despotism, a code which has survived, grown, spread and congealed into a national tradition that dominates, in small or large measure, all black and white relations throughout the nation until this day!