The Jim Crow Era

Jim Crow Era

A backlash post-reconstruction to the growing rights of Black Americans. This was overall a systematic effort, largely in southern states, to limit the rights and responsibilities. This leads to legislation such as separation, voting limits, and other laws to create this system. Additionally, there is a social understanding and unwritten rules that Black Americans are expected to behave by and abide by.

Jim Crow Laws

Sepration on every aspect of life, specifically physical locations. The laws were very pervasive

Overcoming Jim Crow

Involved a multifaceted fight combining legal challenges by the NAACP, grassroots activism, economic boycotts, and nonviolent protests. Key milestones included Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which dismantled legalized segregation and disenfranchisement.

W.E.B. Du Bois:

Born free, post civil war. He was the first black man to graduate from Harvard and founded the NAACP. He is more of a hands-on political activist. He probed the that different means and strategies will allow different

Race Riots

Lynchings and other organized crime typically occurs when people are on edge and typically in hot summer months. Local police, if involved, are the causing or they continue the mob (maybe even watching)

Also started by rumours

Plessy v Ferguson (1896)

Basics: The U.S. Supreme Court upheld state-mandated racial segregation, establishing the legal doctrine that would govern American race relations for over half a centur

Outcome: The interpretation of the law/ the court ruled “seprate but equal”

Plessy v. Ferguson Dissenting Argument

The U.S. Constitution is "color-blind" and "neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.".

All citizens are equal before the law, and the government cannot permit the "seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law."

Separation based on race is a "badge of servitude" that violates both the 13th and 14th Amendments.

He correctly predicted the decision would lead to further aggressive segregation laws and remain a "blot" on American jurisprudence

Plessy v. Ferguson Majority Opinion

The 14th Amendment was intended to ensure "absolute equality of the two races before the law," but not to abolish distinctions based on color or to enforce social equality.

Laws requiring separation do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race.

If African Americans perceived a "badge of inferiority" from segregation, it was not because of the law itself, but because they chose to "put that construction upon it."

Legislation is "powerless to eradicate racial instincts" or social prejudices.