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The white people of Tennessee enacted laws prohibiting interracial marriages in 1870. Five short years later, Tennessee paved the way of segregation by adopting the Jim Crow laws. Other Southern states would soon implement these laws as well. Jim Crow Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, edited by William H. Chafe, is a series of narratives from men and women, blacks and whites, young people and old. Interviewers asked people to regale the days of the post-Jim Crow laws era. The book itself is divided into six chapters, each focusing on certain issues: bitter truths, heritage and memory, families and communities, lessons well learned, work, and resistance and political struggles. As the title of the chapter clearly indicates, the main idea of Chapter 1 is the “Bitter Truths” blacks face in light of the abolition of the Jim Crow laws. Many of the narratives tell a story of a lynching, the constant oppression and violence suffered at the hands of whites, or any injury experienced at all due to the cruelty and ignorance of white people. Even though they are “free,” African Americans are subject to demeaning coercion and unequal treatment by white Southerners. “Heritage and Memory” is designated as the name for Chapter 2; each narrative contains information both cultural and systematic to preserve the ethos and traditions of African American families. They are stories that have been handed down from generation to generation through oral practices. The aptly named Chapter 3, “Families and Communities,” describes the hardships African Americans went through trying to keep the family together during slavery, finding family members after slavery ended, and the hardships encountered while trying to survive a life separate from the plantation owners.
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