5-3.2 Explain the practice of discrimination and the passage of discriminatory laws in the United States and their impact on the rights of African Americans, including the Jim Crow laws and the ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson.
Discriminatory laws known as Jim Crow laws were passed by all southern state governments. Like the slave codes of the antebellum period and the Black Codes of the early Reconstruction period, these laws were designed to keep the African American majority under control. Their aim was to maintain white supremacy by keeping the races socially separated and the African American in a position of social inferiority. Segregation had been growing in the South since the removal of federal troops at the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Jim Crow laws made separate facilities for African Americans in schools, housing, theaters, on trains and everywhere else mandatory. Not just segregation, but systematic disenfranchisement-with such effective tools as the poll tax, literacy tests and the grandfather clause. Poll tax and voting were still seen to be a prerogative of the states (Supreme Court ruling in 1876), so states utilized this technique beginning in 1889 with a series of state conventions (that ended in 1910 with Oklahoma) that rewrote state constitutions with measures that systematically excluded African Americans from politics. These wrongs were eventfully corrected by the 24th Amendment and Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Although these laws violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Plessy v Ferguson [1896] that separate facilities were legal so long as these facilities were equal. This “separate-but-equal” doctrine validated the Jim Crow laws in the South for the next six decades. However, the “separate” part of the phrase was enforced while the “equal” part was ignored.
Southern governments also passed a series of laws designed to limit the political rights of African Americans as guaranteed by the 15th amendment. State laws established a literacy test for voting that technically did not violate the language of the 15th amendment. All voters were supposed to be able to read selections from the Constitution; a policy first employed by the state of Connecticut in 1855 and followed by Massachusetts to discriminate against Irish-Catholic immigrants. However, this requirement was enforced for African American voters, but not white voters. Literacy tests were first used by Mississippi in 1890 to disenfranchise African Americans.
A poll tax was imposed that was extremely difficult for poor farmers to pay, especially when it was collected months before the harvest. However, the other issue with the poll tax, with its average cost of between $1 and $1.50, was that it was grossly expensive and often cumulative (you had to pay back taxes for all of the years you could have voted and didn’t) Poor white farmers were allowed to vote because of a ‘grandfather’ clause that said if their grandfather could vote, before 1870, regardless of literacy or tax qualification, then so could they.
Of course the grandfathers of African Americans had not been allowed to vote, so neither could they. By the end of the 19th century, few African Americans were able to vote in the South. Although African Americans protested their exclusion from public life, violence, intimidation and lynchings by white terrorists effectively silenced most protests. Although Northern states did not pass such blatantly discriminatory laws, there was still discrimination practiced in their society. African Americans lived in racially segregated neighborhoods and were often the last hired and the first fired from jobs. Although they were able to vote, they had little political power because of their relatively small numbers until the Great Migration.
Discriminatory laws known as Jim Crow laws were passed by all southern state governments. Like the slave codes of the antebellum period and the Black Codes of the early Reconstruction period, these laws were designed to keep the African American majority under control. Their aim was to maintain white supremacy by keeping the races socially separated and the African American in a position of social inferiority. Segregation had been growing in the South since the removal of federal troops at the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Jim Crow laws made separate facilities for African Americans in schools, housing, theaters, on trains and everywhere else mandatory. Not just segregation, but systematic disenfranchisement-with such effective tools as the poll tax, literacy tests and the grandfather clause. Poll tax and voting were still seen to be a prerogative of the states (Supreme Court ruling in 1876), so states utilized this technique beginning in 1889 with a series of state conventions (that ended in 1910 with Oklahoma) that rewrote state constitutions with measures that systematically excluded African Americans from politics. These wrongs were eventfully corrected by the 24th Amendment and Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Although these laws violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Plessy v Ferguson [1896] that separate facilities were legal so long as these facilities were equal. This “separate-but-equal” doctrine validated the Jim Crow laws in the South for the next six decades. However, the “separate” part of the phrase was enforced while the “equal” part was ignored.
Southern governments also passed a series of laws designed to limit the political rights of African Americans as guaranteed by the 15th amendment. State laws established a literacy test for voting that technically did not violate the language of the 15th amendment. All voters were supposed to be able to read selections from the Constitution; a policy first employed by the state of Connecticut in 1855 and followed by Massachusetts to discriminate against Irish-Catholic immigrants. However, this requirement was enforced for African American voters, but not white voters. Literacy tests were first used by Mississippi in 1890 to disenfranchise African Americans.
A poll tax was imposed that was extremely difficult for poor farmers to pay, especially when it was collected months before the harvest. However, the other issue with the poll tax, with its average cost of between $1 and $1.50, was that it was grossly expensive and often cumulative (you had to pay back taxes for all of the years you could have voted and didn’t) Poor white farmers were allowed to vote because of a ‘grandfather’ clause that said if their grandfather could vote, before 1870, regardless of literacy or tax qualification, then so could they.
Of course the grandfathers of African Americans had not been allowed to vote, so neither could they. By the end of the 19th century, few African Americans were able to vote in the South. Although African Americans protested their exclusion from public life, violence, intimidation and lynchings by white terrorists effectively silenced most protests. Although Northern states did not pass such blatantly discriminatory laws, there was still discrimination practiced in their society. African Americans lived in racially segregated neighborhoods and were often the last hired and the first fired from jobs. Although they were able to vote, they had little political power because of their relatively small numbers until the Great Migration.