The Struggle with Racism

“I can't breathe" this quote was said by Eric Garner when he was held in a choke hold by the New York Police Department(Christopher Mathias). There has been many racial issues going on in society today such as unnecessary shooting, and accusing someone of a crime they did not commit. Racism has changed very little towards African American men over the years,starting in the 1920s to the justice system and in the 21st century.

In the 1920s and 30s racism played a major role. African Americans were treated very poorly. There was a group call the Klu Klux Klan honestly, they were no help to society in the 1920s and 30s. They hated African Americans, they hated African Americans so much they would kill them or harm them on a daily basis. “The first Klan was launched right after the Civil War in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a social group, but the next year it became a “regulative and protective organization” and began terrorizing former slaves, trying to put them back in their places, trying to make sure they realized they might be free but they were not equal”(David Beasley). As you can see the KKK did not want/like being equal and for that to happen they treated African Americans like they didn’t belong. The Klan started spreading all over the United States. “Klan membership rapidly increased and is believed to have peaked in the mid-1920s at more than a million paid members”(David Beasley). The KKK was mostly in the midwestern states like Illinois, Ohio and Indiana. They even started making a Klan for the women and children. What helped make the KKK so powerful was segregation. “Segregation is the adultery of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality”(Martin Luther King Jr.). African Americans were not equal to white people. Black people could not sit at the same lunch counter, drink at the same water fountain and they couldn’t even go to the same school for a long period of time. “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background or his religion. People learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally for a human heart than its opposite”(Nelson Mandela).

The Justice System was a very powerful action opposed to African Americans and still is today. A common topic today is black imprisonment. “While people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States’ population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned”(Sophia Kerby). Many incidents have happened where an African American man was accused and convicted of committing a crime. Such as raping a white women, robbery and murder. Most of those cases were most likely not true, especially in the