The Ethics of Living Jim Crow

The main idea of this article is to illustrate to the readers "rules" of which the African Americans were to abide by when in the presence or talking to whites. The author talks in detail about each experience he had dealing with lessons he was taught in everyday life. He starts with being a child and recalling how his friends and him would throw cinder back and fourth at eachother while hiding behind brick pillars and one day white children came along and threw broken bottles and milk cartons, causing injury to the author. When he told his mom about the incident, he got beat and was told never to play "war" again. Another big topic addressed in this article was how to respond to a white man by using Mr. before thier names and in general the way of which white males were being spoken to. He describes how he wanted a job to learn new things and when he asked, he was verbally repremanded and next was threatened and told never to return to work. While at his other jobs he witnessed an older African American women being beaten for not paying her bills and than being picked up by the police for acting drunk. The author also observed white males disrespecting African American women (by smacking their butts etc) and truly being helpless to do anything in the matter. Wright also saw fellow African American workers being fired, chased away and told never to return, and also an African American women who gave birth to a very light skinned child (which implies she had sex with a white man, whether it was rape or consensual wasnt specified) and the white males making jokes about how a white man must have scared her during pregnancy and that is why the child is lighter skinned. Later in his life he moved to Memphis which he portrayed as being a more acceptable place. A fellow employee let him use his library card to check out books, and instead of juggling boxes and trying to take his hat off on the elevator, a white man did it for him. I really liked this article because it was a story that implied in it what we are learning in class. Even years after Lincoln "slave" was still very much used. Maybe not so much as a word, but it was like having slavery without the term. Blacks still were being beaten, killed, and abused. They had to obey whites and speak to them as if they (blacks) were inferior. Also African Americans it seems were not allowed to learn new things, and were never to speak up if a white person did something unethical, like throw broken glass bottles. The authors job at the hotel was just to wait on the prostitutes, which is funny if you think about it because today being a prostitute is in my opinion very inferior as oppose to an African American working in a hotel. At the end of the article Wright talks about how his friend told him once that if it wasnt for the police and hate crimes specifically geared towards African Americans, there would be "nothing but uproar here". I interpret that like saying if African Americans werent killed or beaten for standing up for themselves or speaking back to a white person, there would be a lot that African Americans would say about their treatment and environment of which they pretend to be so happy in as to avoid beatings.