Black codes and Jim Crow laws were laws passed at various times in the American South to enforce racial segregation and restrict the power of black voters. After the Civil War ended in 1865, some states passed black laws severely limiting the rights of blacks, many of whom had been enslaved. These codes limited the jobs African Americans could hold and their ability to leave a job once hired. Some states also restricted the type of property blacks could own. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 weakened the effect of black codes by requiring all states to maintain equal protections under the 14th Amendment, particularly by allowing black men to vote. (U.S. law barred women of any race from voting in federal elections until 1920.) During Reconstruction, many black men entered politics by voting and holding office. Reconstruction officially ended in 1877, and the southern states subsequently enacted more discriminatory laws. Efforts to enforce white supremacy through laws intensified, and African Americans sought to uphold their rights through legal challenges. However, these efforts led to a disappointing result in 1896, when the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that so-called “separate but equal” facilities — including public transportation and schools — were constitutional.
From then until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination and segregation were legal and enforceable. One of the first reactions against Reconstruction was to disenfranchise African-American men. During the 14th and 15th centuries. When state legislatures prevented them from banning voting outright, they developed a series of indirect measures to disenfranchise black men. The grandfather clause stated that a man could only vote if his ancestor had been an elector before 1867 — but the ancestors of most African-American citizens were enslaved and constitutionally ineligible to vote. Another discriminatory tactic was the literacy test conducted by a white county official. These employees gave black voters legal documents that were extremely difficult to read as a test, while white men were given a simple text. After all, white local officials in many places simply prevented potential voters from registering.
In 1940, the percentage of eligible African-American voters registered in the South was only three percent. As evidence of this decline, the percentage of African-American men of voting age registered to vote during Reconstruction was over 90 percent. African Americans were discriminated against socially, commercially, and legally. Theatres, hotels and restaurants separated them from substandard housing or refused entry. The stores served them last. In 1937, The Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide, was first published. It listed establishments where African-American travelers could expect unbiased service. Segregation in public schools meant that generations of African-American children often received a lower education than whites — with worn or outdated books, underpaid teachers, and fewer facilities and materials. In 1954, the Supreme Court declared discrimination in education unconstitutional in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, but it would take Congress another 10 years to restore full civil rights for minorities, including protection of the right to vote.
Under Jim Crow, all sexual interactions between black men and white women were illegal, illegal, socially repugnant and consistent with the Jim Crow definition of rape. Although only 19.2% of lynching victims between 1882 and 1951 were even charged with rape, lynching was often supported by the widespread belief that lynchings were necessary to protect white women from black rapists. Myrdal (1944) refutes this belief in this way: “There is many reasons to believe that this number (19.2) has been inflated by the fact that a mob accusing rape is immune from further investigation; the broad definition of rape in the South, which includes all sexual relations between black men and white women; and through the psychopathic fears of white women in their contact with black men” (pp. 561-562). Most blacks were lynched for demanding civil rights, violating Jim Crow etiquette or laws, or after racial unrest. The Wilson administration introduced segregation in federal offices, despite numerous protests from African-American leaders and white progressive groups in the North and Midwest. [33] He appointed segregationist Southern politicians because he firmly believed that racial segregation was in the best interests of black and European Americans. [34] At the Great Reunification of 1913 at Gettysburg, Wilson addressed the crowd on July 4, the half-hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln`s statement that “all men are created equal”: But Tourgée wanted someone who was an octagon, a person who had “no more than one-eighth colored blood,” because he believed the winning strategy would be to expose ambiguities in the definition of race. How did the law or a train driver determine a passenger`s race? “It`s a question,” Tourgée told his colleague, that the Supreme Court “can just as well, if only for nothing else, let the court sharpen its mind.” Martinet agreed, and in New Orleans he began talking to sympathetic railroad officials who wanted to overturn the law for their own financial reasons.
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