After the Emancipation Proclamation freed black men from slavery, they weren’t considered to be free until the Jim Crow laws came along and declared it so. Despite this, they were still segregated amongst society in everything: schools, water fountains, homes, bathrooms, and so on. To address the multiple downsides of what has become of segregation, Martin Luther King Jr.’s encouragement for people to protest against this division of race started the civil rights movement.
Today, with the Black Lives Matter movement (following the deaths of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and other members of the black community), continues to portray just how Alexander’s contention that the drug war has created a new racial …show more content…
Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani’s Social Movement: An Introduction, define the actions that have occurred as time progresses to go about making a change today in what people like Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged. “Protests are sites of contestation in which bodies, symbols, identities, practices, and discourses are used to pursue or prevent changes in industrialized power relations” (Porta and Diani, Social Movements: an Introduction). This quote demonstrates the example that whilst mass incarceration is arguably the new Jim Crow, according to Alexander, what all these movements such as the civil rights movement have done is protest against first the law, and now what’s seeming to be just major acts of