Arc Of Justice : A Saga Of Race, Civil Rights, And Murder

The theme of “a failure of justice” for African Americans living in the present-day United States dates

The theme of this paper is, the discrimination in courtrooms. The reason for this theme is because, once you listen to the 3rd stanza of this poem you can tell what it is and how the system is in operation to imprison African Americans, and it will never change. The paper will focus on these few topics, a corrupt law system, bias judges and perjury from peers. As a matter of fact, in the poem “Mystery of Iniquity” the writer Lauryn Hill examines discrimination in courtrooms to illustrate, a corrupt law system, bias judges, and perjury.

Michelle Alexander in her eye-opener novel, The New Jim Crow, makes a dauntless premise that the racial caste system that was supposedly ended in America during the Civil Rights Movement still exists today and is completely redesigned in the sense that colored men are the target of an intentional “War on Drugs.” Alexander claims that the criminal justice system is used as a mean to racially control millions of colored people and the same system is used to demote them to a second-class citizen status. Alexander employs a great deal of rhetoric in her novel to appeal to the reader’s emotions and values, so that she is able to alter the ethos of the readers and ultimately reveal the blindness present in the United States Justice System. Alexander

Alexander’s main premises focuses on the large majority of African American men imprisoned today, as she reflects on the direct result of it that “young black men today may be just as likely to suffer discrimination in employment, housing, public benefits. And jury service as a black man in the Jim Crow era- discrimination that is perfectly legal, because it is based on one’s criminal record.” (Alexander, 181) Alexander points out not only how a significant portion of black men are ending up in prison, but how when released they face discrimination because of their criminal record making them unable to rehabilitate their lives and putting them back into the ghetto. Discrimination is a main factor which puts people of color in the penal system, and a main factor which when getting out keeps them from changing their lifestyle for the better.

Arc of Justice is a story of the hardships of segregation fueled by ignorance in the 1920’s. The beginning introduces the reader into the setting of Detroit reaching its industrial peak. It then chronicles Ossian Sweet, an African American physician. Him and his wife, Gladys, purchased a house in a white neighborhood in hopes of a better future and a successful family. Instead, they quickly received many threats and felt unsteady, the neighbors rejected all African American’s in their society. Raised in the South, Ossian Sweet had seen what prejudice can do to a society. Although he attempted to escape from it, he finds himself staring racism right in the face. For a book published 80 years after the fact, Kevin Boyle does a very impressive

The criminal justice system in America is a system designed to work in three distinct steps. The first being to fairly identify those breaking the law, second, create a process through which to both punish and rehabilitate criminals, and lastly integrate them back into society. The current system typically goes unquestioned, as those in the system seem to be deserving of what ever happens while they are in it, even once they have served their prison sentence. It is only upon deeper inspection that we begin to realize the discrimination and unfair tactics used to introduce certain groups of society into the criminal justice system and proceed to trap them there. This is the issue addressed in Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and it is through arrests, sentencing and further upon release from jail that this oppressive system is created and maintained.

that a “negro child or boy got killed by whistling at a white girl.” All this has an impact on how

In the United States in 1931, during America’s Great Depression, nine African American boys faced what is now known as one of America’s most tragic trails in history. These young boys were accused of raping two white girls while riding a train through Alabama. This accusation brought forth a mob of white people in the town of Scottsboro. The boys spent years on trial for this. The first trial was thought to have been the final convention, little did they know it was only the beginning. A second trial was held for the nine boys that shook the entire nation. After the second trial a third one was held after the judge suspected that the evidence was not properly examined. The nine young boys, known as “The Scottsboro Boys”, spent their lives in and out of a courtroom and in a cell for a crime that today is known to have never taken place.

The discriminating social stratification in 1950’s developed a set of servile behavior on the blacks. They were thought to be inferior to whites, and were treated accordingly. Moreover, different parts of the country had various ranges of sensitivities while dealing with the blacks. For example, in Mississippi things were particularly tense after the Parker lynch case. No black man would dare look into any white man’s eyes in fear of the repercussions. On the bus, a man warned Griffin to watch himself closely until he caught onto Mississippi’s ways. In an extreme case like this, it was vital to learn about their roles and behave accordingly.

In Kevin Boyle’s Arc of Justice: A saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, the author creates a way to describe the discrimination and horrible racial treatment inflicted on the African American community following the civil war and continuing into the 1900’s by following a black doctor’s life and his controversy in equality. The author sets the scene in the booming city of Detroit, a place many blacks ventured to when trying to escape the cruelty Jim Crow Laws forced upon many African Americans. The great migration of blacks fleeing to Detroit in search of a new life brought an increase of over seventy thousand people in just the short span of fifteen years. This sudden unwanted abundance of people, still disliked even in the North, lead to a city full of racial prejudices and unjust discrimination.

Before the Great Black Migration, the anti-black sentiment was already prevalent in the North. “Initially the residential color line was enforced by white-on-black violence,” (Massey 572) and African Americans would be beaten or shot if they entered a white neighborhood because they were viewed as bad people, due to the stereotype of criminal, rapist, and mentally inferior attached. In order to maintain order in cities, legislatures in different states, such as Baltimore City Council in 1910, institutionalized racial segregation by assigning certain areas to African Americans and leaving the rest to the white majority. (Massey 572) Since the enactment of dividing neighborhoods up to separate the African Americans from whites was not an authoritarian decision but the public opinion, we can now see the deep rooted racism is what caused the stable racially segregated urban

The historical context in which this book was written surrounds the events that took place during the Civil Rights Movement. There were several influential legal

“The brutality with which official would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught—as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught—in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world” – Martin Luther King (8, Kasher)

Almost every member of the black community in Maycomb County is admirable in their personalities and innocent in their nature, and this generalisation makes the crimes against the black community all the worse. Tom Robinson, a man discriminated and accused of a crime that he didn’t commit has come forth to the justice system. The color of his skin determines everything from his background too if he’s guilty or not. A black man’s life is unable to prove innocence because of his race. Poverty has affected many people back in the 1960’s but, if a black man or women were to experience this they would be put on the white

William Faulkner uses his short stories to tell a tale of corruption, especially through the acceptance of white culture, and “A Justice” is no different. He writes his protagonist, Doom, as growing increasingly evil at the same time as his Eurocentric growth, irrevocably connecting the two in the mind of the reader. Faulkner then gives materialism both a negative and a European connotation, showing that it leads to narcissism and should be avoided in order to keep a functional, just society. Finally, he does the same with power, showing that Doom’s exploitation of leadership leads to a corrupt, unjust community. In “A Justice,” William Faulkner shows how the adoption of white man’s customs, particularly materialism and abuse of power, leads