These laws that make their way through the Senate, the House of Representatives, and up to the President leave the black man in urban areas where they have no opportunity for economic success. Many black Americans believed that through the installation of America's first black President, Barack Obama, a change was really going to come. Black American's heeded to his campaign slogan of "Yes We Can" and invested all of their time and energy into ensuring that Obama would be instated as the President of the free world. Obama promised the black population change but as the musician Sam Cooke once sang, a "change is gonna come" but when he goes to his brother (the white man); Cooke continues to sing that he "winds up knocking me down, back down on my knees." This one lyric was originally sung by Cooke in 1963 during a time where a change desperately needed to come. But seeing how we are in 2015 is it really appropriate to ask if a change has actually come. As a society, we have made so many improvements in so many different fields, yet the black man is arguably equally if not more oppressed than he was during the civil rights movement. The books The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society by John Irwin and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander look to demystify the contemporary notions many American's have in regards to the systematic oppression of the black man. This paper will serve as a bridge between the two main arguments in the respective books and compare and contrast the lessons found within their text to the ideology of some of the most affluent civil rights leaders in world history. .
In the books The Jail by John Irwin and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander we find an interesting study in which both Irwin and Alexander examine how contemporary America has continuously disadvantaged the black man through systematic injustice. Irwin's book seeks to examine how America has used its jail system as a new, under examined form of social control.
