U S History and Racism

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. 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 continuously beaten by the LAPD—famously in the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 and the Blood Christmas affair in 1951.
Asian-Americans faired just as poorly in the West during the 1940s when the U.S. government issued Executive Order 9066, which authorize the internment of Japanese Americans in what were essentially concentration camps on the West Coast. So while Germany was being lambasted in the U.S. media for putting what the National Socialists called “political prisoners” in concentration camps, the U.S. government was actually doing the exact same thing on American soil, with really very little reason to justify the abuse of the rights of American citizens. It was racially motivated—just like the WASPs had demonstrated during the laying of the railroads in the century prior when they had taken advantage of Chinese labor under brutal conditions while simultaneously denying them equality under the law.
In conclusion, blacks, Hispanics and Asians have all been treated poorly in American history. Racial conflict in the South and in the West was a staple under WASP rule throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. African-Americans, however, challenged the system and fought back—albeit peacefully—to finally gain equal rights for all. And that’s a lot more than the Latinos and Japanese Americans were able to do.
Works Cited
Carrigan, William D., and Clive Webb. “The lynching of persons of Mexican origin or
descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928.” Journal of Social History 37.2 (2003): 411-438.