The Fire This Time

In this brief essay, Isabel Wilkerson connects the Jim Crow era with the present civil rights crisis in the United States. She describes what historians typify as a loop of progress and devolution, which has recurred again and again throughout American history. Two high points of progress she identifies are the social and political progress of African Americans after the Civil War and the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. Corrupt, largely white power structures, responding to these advancements, sought to undercut the empowerment of African Americans. 

The Jim Crow Laws, used in Southern states for several decades following the Civil War, enforced the segregation of black and white people. White lawmakers sought to separate the races in all public spaces, including schools, bathrooms, buses, and trains. Discriminatory policies also barred black voters from ballot boxes with requirements like poll taxes. Also during this era, white-on-black violence resulted in frequent hangings of black people, or lynchings. In response, many black Southerners moved to the Northern states in the Great Migration. Wilkerson states, “Denied the ballot, they voted with their bodies” (60). 

Between the Great Migration and the election of Barack Obama, the first black president, America witnessed the civil rights era. This grassroots movement ushered in a sea change for African Americans, ensuring their equality under law with the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. However, this period also saw the subtle creation of a Jim-Crow-like climate in the North, as Wilkerson describes. Black communities were starved of resources, as well as barred from the vote, sowing “the seeds of the disparities we see today” (60).

Originally published in 2015, this essay surveys the contemporary landscape of police brutality against unarmed black Americans like Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Chris Lollie (the Minnesota man she references), and Jonathan Ferrell (the Charlotte, North Carolina, man she references). Seen from a wider perspective, Wilkerson writes, “There was a lynching every four days in the early decades of the twentieth century. It’s been estimated that an African American is now killed by police every two to three days” (61). She urges readers to face the difficult truth of history, as Wendy S. Walters did when studying the African Burying Ground. The truth is that Jim Crow is not a distant memory but a present reality. However, Wilkerson ends with a call to self-love and thoughtful activism to combat this grave predicament and change the nation for the better.