U S History and Racism Essay

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Comparing and Contrasting Racial Conflict in the South and the West

Racial conflict in the South and the West was similar in that the dominant race sought to put pressure on the minority races (whether they were blacks in the South or Hispanics or Asians in the West). The situations were different in the sense that the conflicts included different ethnic and racial groups. Nonetheless, the 19th and 20th centuries were particularly tense times, full of racial conflict in places like Birmingham, Alabama, where Martin Luther King, Jr., was imprisoned and in places like Los Angeles where the Zoot Suit Riots took place. This paper will compare and contrast racial conflict in the South and the West by looking at 1) the King’s arrest in Birmingham and the Civil Rights Movement, 2) the lynching of Hispanics in the West throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and 3) the treatment of Asian-Americans in the West during WWI—and show how racism in America has at root the idea that WASPs are superior to all others.

The WASP mentality—the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant worldview that has shaped much of American history was on great display during the era of slavery in the South. Lincoln freed the slaves prior to the end of the Civil War—but Jim Crow laws meant that racial oppression just took on a new form and face. Blacks were still not getting equal rights or treatment and by the 20th century, they were willing to make a stand to get equality.

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Martin Luther King, Jr., helped lead the charge—and his letter from a Birmingham jail served as a rallying cry for many blacks and non-racist whites who supported an end to segregation.

The fact that the blacks were ultimately able to lead a peaceful resistance using Civil Disobedience to obtain the Civil Rights Act of 1963 shows, however, just how different the racial conflict was from that faced by Hispanics in the West during the 1800s and early 1900s. As Carrigan and Webb showed, 1000s of Hispanics were the victims of vigilante justice in Texas and California during this time, and what’s worse is that the WASP vigilantes were protected by the local law enforcement systems. The Hispanics were not able to engage in the same kind of Civil Disobedience that MLK evinced in the South—mainly because they lacked a charismatic leader. For that reason, Latinos were….....

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