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Equal Justice Initiative (EJI)
Beginning in the post-Reconstruction era and continuing through the 1970’s, Jim Crow laws were created throughout the South with the intent to restore the racial hierarchies and strict segregation that had been challenged by the abolition of slavery. Segregation, the repeal of voting rights, the exclusion of black people from juries and positions of power, lynching, wage slavery and the death penalty were among the practices common under Jim Crow.
Jim Crow Quotes in Just Mercy
The Just Mercy quotes below are all either spoken by Jim Crow or refer to Jim Crow. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 3
Quotes
We’re going to keep all you niggers from running around with these white girls. I ought to take you off and hang you like we done that nigger in Mobile.
Related Characters:
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Explanation and Analysis:
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Jim Crow Term Timeline in Just Mercy
The timeline below shows where the term Jim Crow appears in Just Mercy. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: Mockingbird Players
...economy was built through slave labor on cotton plantations before the Civil War. During the Jim Crow era, white landowners relied on underpaid black sharecroppers. Eventually, as the cotton industry declined, the...
(full context)
...South’s history of hatred toward black men involved with white women. During the post-Reconstruction era, Jim Crow laws outlawed interracial relationships. Even after the U.S. nullified such “anti-miscegenation” laws in the 1967...
(full context)
Chapter 16: The Stonecatcher’s Song of Sorrow
...the law re-enslaved black people for petty crimes through “convict leasing.” Next, Stevenson describes how Jim Crow laws perpetuated “racial segregation, racial subordination, and marginalization.” Stevenson describes modern oppression through “innocent mistakes”...
(full context)
