Hillary Clinton's Misunderstanding/Misuse of the Term, Jim Crow

By Thornton Crowe

Many have heard the term, Jim Crow, especially from the South. It was an era in American History that is probably darker than the slavery as it was a completely demoralizing period for many Black Americans who suffered from its discrimination and violence.

Politicians like Hillary Clinton love to continually remind voters about this deep dark past, yet it seems she lacks the true history about it. Instead, she uses it to propagate a hatred towards whites and Republicans, threatening minorities that the White Establishment will gyp them out of their right to vote. 

During the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era (1865-1877), many Southerners were none too happy with Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and they demonstrated their adverse reactions through a variety of methods. Reports of violence towards the new free Black people was of legendary proportions - and this was just what was reported. Many victims remained silent in fear of retribution from their tormentors.

Furthermore, violence began to rise from a small radical white supremacy group called the Klu Klux Klan, started by Democrats in order to exact justice against the Republican party for upsetting its economic system which depended a lot on slave labor. Even though blacks were technically free, many worked on cotton plantations until the 1940s. They were made low wages, treated very badly and while they legally did not 'belong' to the plantation owners, they were still treated as such. 

While Jim Crow was never an actual person, the name represents repression within the Black Community, which still provokes a sense of fear even though it's been largely gone in any national sense since the late Sixties. The era was the promotion of separate but equal premise which never was true in reality. Separate bathrooms, restaurants, hotels, water fountains and a host of many other segregated public places were the Jim Crow era's infamy. Even entertainers like Billie Holiday lamented through their music like her song, Strange Fruit, about the lynchings throughout the deep South in this era.  However, one thing that stuck out the most was the ridiculous testing Black Americans endured in order to vote.

The Greensboro Four

When the student movement began in the late Fifties, the older black community tended to rebuke it because they were not interested in reliving the Reconstruction horrors of their ancestors. However, through the work of activists on a grassroots level, the older community came around and began to cultivate the desire to vote. While Brown vs. the Board of Education was passed in 1954, segregation still reigned heavy in most communities - both in the South and the North.

With Johnson's signing into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, there was still very much a de facto segregation - also known in the Boston area as the Great White Flight - where many whites moved to suburbs, leaving the inner cities to be predominantly black. Hence, when Nixon, through the Supreme Court, actually enforced the two abovementioned laws, it became a violent confrontation as busing became an issue throughout the South and North. Most people thinking this is just a Southern situation are sorely mistaken as the North had its own grappling with Civil Rights.

Boston Protests over Busing

Boston had a most horrendous time with busing in the early Seventies; some altercations were physically violent and fraught with upheaval from both white and black communities. Ted Kennedy's home headquarters had rocks thrown through it's plate glass window, buses were overturned or eggs and other items thrown at them as they carried black children to white community schools. Violence and unrest permeated the Boston area (as well as other Northern cities like Detroit) in protest of the new regulations and laws.

Kennedy's brush with Busing Protest in Boston 1974

Now, where does this tie-in with politicians like Hillary Clinton? Well, her protest on Voter ID requirements for one. She portends the regulations requiring voter ID as being a throw back from the Jim Crow days. This is absolutely FALSE. In those days, black voters - whom were largely under educated thanks to Democrats, were asked to take tests which required them to read. As most were illiterate, they inevitably failed; denying them the right to vote. Identification is something completely different and should be a requirement as it proves the person's identity and their ability to cast a vote. Illegal aliens should not be given this privilege as criminals are generally not allowed to vote in elections.

Clinton Denouncing Voter ID Laws

Saul Alinsky - Hillary Clinton's Mentor

In her Alinsky stylings to divide and conquer through race baiting, Clinton solicits votes through threats of violence not much differently than the KKK using burning crosses and lynchings to hush them and make them submit to her desired effect.  Amazingly, she portends that Blacks, Hispanics, Disabled and Women can't seem to find their way to the local DMV in order to procure even a state ID card which is not a driver's license; thus, painting them as uneducated and stupid.

What Clinton fails to realize is, when you go for SSI benefits, you need ID. Yes. Believe it or not, they do ask for a driver license and/or state ID card in order to get benefits in many states. Furthermore, you need ID to cash checks, get cellphones through a traditional carrier and open bank accounts. Many people have ID so it's not a stretch to get such an ID, yet she claims this is discriminating and prohibiting voting in elections. Sound sane?

Ironically, what this also shows is the lack of substance on Clinton's part as her plan lacks any real change for the Black Communities that have suffered so much under the current administration. She is losing in all her firewall demographics and the threat of criminal indictment by the FBI seems to loom in her future like a huge albatross - which she earned due to her own misdeeds.

My fellow readers and Americans, once again, don't fall for the race hating rhetoric of people like Clinton. If she weren't grasping for the edge with her $500 manicured fingernails, she'd still be race-hating and promoting racial division; its just now, the stakes for her grow higher as she's lost Americans' confidence.