Ophie's Ghosts

Ophie’s Ghosts is set in the early 1920s during the Jim Crow era and the start of the Great Migration. These eras serve as a backdrop for the struggles that Ophie and her family experience in their search for freedom, autonomy, and equality. Jim Crow was an era of American history beginning in 1877, following Reconstruction. After the Southern states were forced to ratify the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, much of the region enacted Jim Crow laws to enforce segregation of the Black and white populace. These laws were an attempt to return American society to its former racial divides, which defined the Antebellum period, and as history has proven, “Jim Crow Laws’ purposefully limited African Americans’ ability to engage with the political and public spaces” and “limited African American participation in local and national elections” (“The Jim Crow Era.” American Battlefield Trust). Jim Crow laws operated under the guise of “separate but equal”; the Black and white segments of the populace had separate public facilities and programs, but public services for Black people were consistently underfunded and were inferior in quality to those afforded to white people.

Although “the 14th Amendment guaranteed ‘equal protection’ under the law regardless of race,” this wording was still problematic, as “many lawyers reasoned that if these segregated accommodations were ‘equal’ then they were also constitutional” (“