What is some basic information on the Jim Crow legislation?

I'd like to know some basic information on the Jim Crow legislation in the South for an assignment I'm doing on "Black Boy" by Richard Wright.|||In the United States, the Jim Crow laws were made to enforce racial segregation, and included laws that would prevent African Americans from doing things that a white person could do. For instance, Jim Crow laws regulated separate use of water fountains and separate seating sections on public transport. Jim Crow laws varied among communities and states. The term is not applied to all racist laws, but only to those passed post-Reconstruction starting in about 1890, the start of a period of worsening race relations in the United States. Similar laws passed immediately after the civil war were called the Black Codes.





The conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865 led to the policy of Reconstruction, in which the federal government intervened to protect the rights conferred on black Americans by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, as well as (upon their introductions) the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In almost-immediate response Southern legislatures passed Black Codes, which attempted to return freed slaves to bondage in legal fact, rather than official terminology.





This government-controlled Reconstruction ended by 1877. In its aftermath the resurgent white elites, who referred to themselves as Redeemers, reversed many of the civil rights gains that black Americans had made during Reconstruction, passing laws that mandated discrimination by both local governments and by private citizens. These became known as the Jim Crow laws, a reference to the character Jim Crow (popular in antebellum minstrel entertainment) that was a racist stage depiction of a poor and uneducated rural black. Since Jim Crow law is a blanket term for any of this type of legislation following the end of Reconstruction, the exact date of inception for the laws is difficult to isolate; common consensus points to the 1890s and the adoption of segregational railroad legislation in New Orleans as the first genuine "Jim Crow" law. By 1915 every Southern state had effectively destroyed any gains in civil liberties that blacks had enjoyed due to the Reconstructionist effort.





As an example, many state governments prevented blacks from voting by requiring poll taxes and literacy tests, both of which were not enforced on whites due to grandfather clauses. One common "literacy test" was to require the black would-be voter to recite the entire U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence from memory.





The Supreme Court of the United States held in the Civil Rights Cases 109 US 3 (1883) that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give the federal government the power to outlaw private discrimination, then held in Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896) that Jim Crow laws were constitutional as long as they allowed for separate but equal facilities. In the years that followed, the Court made this "separate but equal" requirement a hollow phrase by approving discrimination even in the face of evidence of profound inequalities in practice.





It is estimated that of 181,471 African-American males of voting age in Alabama in 1900, only 3,000 were registered.





In 1902, Reverend Thomas Dixon published the novel The Leopard's Spots, which intentionally fanned racial animosity.





The Supreme Court began to overturn Jim Crow laws on constitutional grounds in the 20th century. The Supreme Court held in Guinn v. United States 238 US 347 (1915) that an Oklahoma law that denied the right to vote to some citizens was unconstitutional. (Nonetheless, the majority of African Americans were unable to vote in most states in the Deep South of the USA until the 1950s or 1960s.) In Buchanan v. Warley 245 US 60 (1917), the Court held that a Kentucky law could not require residential segregation. The court outlawed the white primary in Smith v. Allwright 321 US 649 (1944), and in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 347 US 483 (1954) the Court held that separate facilities were inherently unequal in the area of public schools. These decisions, along with other cases such as McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Board of Regents 339 US 637 (1950), NAACP v. Alabama 357 US 449 (1958), and Boynton v. Virginia 364 US 454 (1960), slowly dismantled the state-sponsored segregation imposed by Jim Crow laws.|||Stephanie,





Starting in the 1890s, about a quarter century after the Civil War, the Southern States began to pass laws making it illegal for blacks and whites to share the same public transport, use the same parks, or even, in some cases, be in the same room together. Some states passed curfews making it illegal for blacks to be outside after 9:00 or 10:00 o'clock. Ultimately nearly every aspect of life was regulated by race. The purpose was to enforce the idea that whites were superior to blacks.





Check out The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. It's about the Great Migration of blacks leaving the South in the early 20th century. The chapter entitled "The Stirrings of Discontent" will give you a very clear picture of the Jim Crow period. There's also a classic book on the subject called The Strange Case of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward. It talks the origins of segregation.|||You are reading some very profound literature! Open your mind to the insensitive treatment of one human population upon another.





Jim Crow Legislation Overview


By Susan Falck, M.A., Research Associate


California State University--Northridge, California


"There is no wonder that we die," an Alabama woman sighed,


"The wonder is that we persist in living."





"The ***** Problem," The Independent, September 18, 1902


More than 400 state laws, constitutional amendments, and city ordinances legalizing segregation and discrimination were passed in the United States between 1865 and 1967. These laws governed nearly every aspect of daily life, from education to public transportation, from health care and housing to the use of public facilities. African-American children got their first taste of racial discrimination when they found themselves barred from attending school with white children, and being sent, instead, to inferior facilities.





Growing up, these children learned that their lives were equally restricted outside the classroom. They were forbidden from sharing a bus seat with a white passenger or to ride in the same compartment of a train. They were denied access to public parks and restaurants, and, in some states, were forced to enter public amusements like the circus through a separate entrance. Black movie theater patrons were seated in the balcony, separated from white customers in what was commonly referred to as "****** heaven." When they went to work, African Americans were forced to use separate entrances and bathrooms and to collect their paychecks at separate windows. Even in death, legislation ensured that the races would remain separate. Several states prohibited hearses from carrying both races, and cemeteries were required to maintain separate graveyards.





While the majority of Jim Crow laws discriminated specifically against African Americans, other minority groups also were frequently targeted. Western states routinely passed discriminatory legislation against Asians and Native Americans, passing 51 Jim Crow laws, 12 percent of the nation's total. Outside the South, California passed more Jim Crow laws (17) than any other state in the country.





Miscegenation statutes, intended to prevent racial interbreeding, led the list of Jim Crow laws enacted. At least 127 laws prohibiting interracial marriage and cohabitation were passed between 1865 and the 1950s nationwide, with 37 percent of the statutes passed outside the South. Western states enacted 33 such laws (27 percent). Both whites and blacks who ignored the law could receive sentences for up to ten years hard labor in the penitentiary in a number of states. Punishment for miscegenation in state statutes was still in force in the 1960s in Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, and North Carolina.





Further testament that racism existed nationwide is evident in education laws. States outside the South enacted 23 percent of the laws that authorized segregated schools. Likewise, seven of the 12 laws that required race to be considered in adoption petitions were passed outside of the South.|||PAPER