About halfway through “Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates describes the police murder of Prince Jones. At Jones’ memorial some of the speakers called on the mourners to forgive the officer who committed the murder. Coates says on page 78 that those calls didn’t move him, because “I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth.”
Write an essay evaluate Coates’ statement about Jones’ murder and argue that it was caused by the long history of American racism.
ADDRESS ALL THREE AND ONLY THESE THREE PERIODS:
1. The consolidation of Jim Crow in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
2. The years between the start of World War II and the passage of the 1965 Coting Rights Act.
3. The years since the neo-liberal turn.