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Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los Angeles

End of Jim Crow

The Murder of Crows: “The Ending of Jim Crow” segment of the Great Wall of Los Angeles depicts crows flying over the San Fernando Valley carrying segregational signage in contrast to the Memphis Sanitation Workers who are carrying the famous “I AM A MAN” signs. The crows are a visual metaphor of the Jim Crow laws which will continue to appear in later segments of the Great Wall to symbolize the fact that segregation and discrimination has never really ended.

The Memphis Sanitation Workers strike of 1968 came about as a response to the death of two garbage collectors who were crushed to death by a malfunctioning sanitation truck on February 1st,1968 and the city’s neglect of its sanitation workers. Following the incident, supported by Jerry Wurf, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), 1,300 sanitation workers went on strike to protest for better safety standards and wages. On February 24, the Community on the Move for Equality (COME) was formed by 150 local ministers under the guidance of Reverend James Lawson. Under Lawson’s leadership the group used nonviolent disobedience to gain attention to the struggle. In a speech, Lawson encouraged the workers saying “[f]or at the heart of racism is the idea that a man is not a man, that a person is not a person…You are human beings. You are men. You deserve dignity.” This idea encapsulates the strike’s famous “I AM A MAN” signage. Lawson asked Martin Luther King Jr. to join the strike. It was during Dr. King’s visit to the Memphis Sanitation Strike that he was assassinated at Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

The Jim Crow laws also existed and maintained segregation in California. In addition to Black Americans, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans and others racialized as non-white were prohibited from accessing public facilities and particular establishments. California had more Jim Crow Laws than most Southern States, many of which specifically targeted Chinese populations. Some of California’s Jim Crow laws are featured in the mural, written beneath the feet of the Sanitation Workers..

In an interview with SPARC, Reverend James Lawson describes the pulling down of segregational signage as an impactful visual of the dismantling of the Jim Crow Laws in the late 50’s and early 60’s. The dismantling of Jim Crow laws on a national scale came about with the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v Board of Education (1954) that declared segregation in schools unconstitutional. The dismantling of these laws was furthered through the 1960s with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Lawson describes the coming down of segregational signage and laws demonstrated a major victory of the Civil Rights Movement.

Writer and Civil Rights activist Michelle Alexander argues in her book The New Jim Crow that Jim Crow laws that have maintained the segregation of racial populations in the U.S. never really ended. Instead, they have taken the shape of mass incarceration that has targeted racial minorities and working class communities for legalized discrimination, political disenfranchisement and redistricting, exclusion from juries etc. There are important limits to this analogy that she points out including the fact that whites are also victims of mass incarceration, where they may not have been subject to Jim Crow Laws from previous decades. Black Americans have also supported ‘get tough’ policies that are part of our current system of mass incarceration.

Sources:
  Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New York: New Press, 2011. Print.
  Lawson, James M., et al. Revolutionary Nonviolence: Organizing for Freedom. University of California Press, 2022.
  “Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike.” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, kinginstitute.stanford.edu/memphis-sanitation-workers-strike. Accessed 25 Oct. 2023.
  Oral History Interview with James Lawson
  Oral History Interview with Reverend Lawson conducted at SPARC

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Protesters gather outside of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta to protest HB 531, which would place tougher restrictions on voting in Georgia, March 1, 2021. The new law has mostly gained attention for its measures to strengthen absentee ballot identification requirements, curtail ballot drop box use and penalize members of the public who offer food and water to voters in line. Months after former Republican President Donald Trump falsely claimed voter fraud in the 2020 elections, Republican backers say Georgia's law is needed to restore confidence in election integrity. Civil rights groups have filed three lawsuits asserting the law illegally restricts voting rights, particularly for minority voters.
Article by Reverend Jim Conn: Lynd Ward, "Wild Pilgrimage" My friend, mentor and colleague, Rev. James Lawson, calls our economic system “plantation capitalism.” Lawson was the nonviolent strategist for Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement and the key figure in the desegregation of Nashville. His reference, of course, pulls forward the image of enslaved field workers in the Old South. The image chafes in my mind. Yes, slavery, but today’s workers are not slaves. They are not the landless peasants or sharecroppers that emancipated slaves were forced to be. They are not the low-level, below-the-standard-wage employees that Southern blacks became when they migrated to the steel cities of the North. They are not second-class citizens isolated into segregated neighborhoods and limited to menial jobs. Except, there is a growing body of evidence showing that this is exactly what a majority of workers of all colors is becoming. Between 1965 and 2011, while the top 10 percent gained an inflation-adjusted annual income increase of $116,000, the other 90 percent received a paltry $59. No wonder 75 percent of families report living paycheck to paycheck, and one in four Americans report using payday loans, pawn shops, auto-title loans and tax-refund loans to make ends meet. It’s why working people depend on check-cashing stores, purchase cars from “buy here/pay here” dealers and get re-treads from rent-a-tire shops. People who depend on such high-interest businesses to make it feel a lot of anxiety. Some 59 percent of Americans who think of themselves as middle class fear falling out of their class. Half of working-age Americans skipped necessary medical care in 2012 because it was too expensive. Even people with health insurance postponed care because of the cost of co-pays. Nearly a quarter of Americans report struggling to put food on the table. Meanwhile, women have moved into the breadwinner position. More than 40 percent of families say the woman is the sole earner. Yet a wage survey indicates that a mother is paid five percent less per child than her female counterpart without children, and women on the whole receive lower wages than their male colleagues. While moms in many states can now take an extended maternity leave without fearing losing their jobs, most do not. These patterns did not result from worker choices, but resulted from employer policies. Now they pile on more. Employers monitor employees in ways only technology could provide. Companies measure the keystrokes of data-entry workers. The phone message “this call may be monitored for quality assurance” is heard everywhere, all the time. Warehouse workers wear head phones that direct them to their next task and tell them how much time they have to finish it. The delivery guy sets a timer, then runs to leave the package and jogs back to his truck. Piece-work quotas are up, and managers even time bathroom breaks. As one worker put it, “I’m worn out. I get home and I can barely stand up.” With the constant threat of downsizing, layoffs and pay cuts – while a long line of the unemployed waits to take any available job – employees find themselves less and less willing to voice complaints or even talk among themselves about grievances. Since 92 percent of private-sector wage workers have no union or worker/peer means of redressing egregious circumstances on the job, people self-censor. They check their civil liberties at the door and take their bitterness home. A job, for most workers, means go to work, keep your head down, close your mouth, work to exhaustion, then go home and try to meet your family’s needs by going into debt. No wonder this generation of young people is not making long-term buying decisions on new cars and houses. They face the anxiety and stress of life-long financial insecurity. I think that is what my friend means by “plantation capitalism.”